By Walter Elliott
Photo By Lisa Durden
NEWARK – When an estimated 120 people – from residents to public officials – came to celebrate the opening of three more newly built townhouses at 187 Fairmount Ave. May 18, they were more than being housewarming guests.
They, indeed, came to witness the ribbon cutting of 187 Fairmount as the latest three-story house to go up on Fairmount between S. 13th Street and South Orange Avenue. The ribbon-cutting marks the finish line of Fairmount Homes Project Phase II, where the Urban League of Essex County and its public and private partners have brought eight more housing addresses on Fairmount Avenue and Camden Street.
The latest eight homes are building on another 10, part of FHP Phase I, that are also on the same block. The newer buildings, sometimes categorized or derided as “Bayonne Boxes,” integrate with similar newer buildings, traditional long-standing 2.5 or three-story houses, a three-story brick apartment building and the rare vacant lot among the 47 residences on that block of Fairmount.
They were celebrating opening housing as if they were planting trees under ULEC’s “Building Pathways to Homeownership” “Pathways,” by offering local residents home ownership, intends to plant intergenerational wealth building here.
Although the local Urban League was in that Monday’s sunshine, other private and public partners were there for their time in the sun.
No less than New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Jacquelyn A. Suarez, Mayor Ras Baraka, West Ward Councilman Dupree Kelly represented the public side of BPH’s joint effort. National Community Investment Fund President & CEO Saurabh Narain came from Chicago to provide his perspective here.
Private participation included Heavy Construction LLC, of Newark plus Wells Fargo, Industrial Bank and TD Bank, among a range of financial institutions.
PBH and its concept comes back to before the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic: Provide home ownership of quality housing for Newark residents at a price they can afford – and provide services to help them develop a community stake and intergenerational wealth.
ULEC President and CEO Vivian Cox Fraser and her team, after promoting the PBH concept to partners and assembling a “financial stack” first acquired vacant lots and vacant or abandoned houses in a part of the West Ward’s Fairmount Heights section from the City of Newark.
The next step was creating a vetting process for prospective homeowners. Residents filled out forms, were interviewed and placed in a home lottery – which is where new homeowner Anventa Flowers came to the ceremony’s microphone.
Flowers was a neighborhood resident who was forced to live with a relative in Paterson when her own place got burned out. She told of commuting between Paterson and her work in Newark – and drives to an accountant in upstate New York and her bank in Central New Jersey.
Flowers stayed with the process and received her prospective ownership after 60 other applicants came and left. The process took a lot of patience; she is moving in the week of May 18.
The physical result is a three-story, three family house of 2,500-square-feet with a drive in garage and a back lot. The homeowner lives on the first floor and can rent out either the second or top floor. Home construction follows LEED environmental efficiency standards.
The PBH Phase II homes are being rented out on a range of monthly rent of around $1,286. The Urban League, who holds the mortgages, is offering the houses in the roughly $100,000 range in a city where some new market rate housing goes for $300,000-plus.
Adding a home ownership stake to affordable housing is a counter to longtime residents being squeezed out of their neighborhood and city by market rate “gentrification.”
Homeowners are pledged to reside for seven years so that financial growth can take root.
Cox, Baraka, Suarez, and Narain look forward to scaling the BHP model for other affordable housing neighborhoods across the state and country.
Cox told “Local Talk” that a prospective BHP Phase III is being located along South 11th and 12th streets, to Fairmount Cemetery’s east.
