From Nearly Homeless To New Homeowners

Alexandria Group Trains Immigrants to Make the Jump

The real estate agent's sign is still planted in the lawn outside the gray, two-story duplex on Riverview Terrace where the window boxes brim with summer flowers and the paint looks fresh.

Mario Urbina, 23, and his wife, Reina Bermudez, 29, moved in last week, hauling their few possessions -- mostly toys for their year-old daughter, Jasmine -- from a one-bedroom apartment in Arlandria to this house near the Huntington Metro station in the Alexandria section of Fairfax County.

It was a moment of triumph for Urbina, a bricklayer who emigrated from El Salvador in 2003. The following year, his new bride joined him in Alexandria. Together, the two of them had just enough money to rent a single room in a crowded house. They were barely making ends meet when Bermudez became seriously ill and stopped working as a babysitter. Urbina stayed home to care for his wife, and their meager income plummeted.

Though they weren't living on the streets, they were effectively homeless, at least in the eyes of Community Lodgings Inc., an Alexandria-based nonprofit group that provides, among other programs, affordable and transitional housing to help lift families from financial chaos to self-sufficiency.

In the past year, the program has helped two of its participating families graduate from transitional housing, which is owned by Community Lodgings and provided to tenants with a large rent subsidy, to owning their own homes.

Bermudez and Urbina were one of those couples. They showed up at the group's community learning center on Notabene Street in Arlandria last year seeking help. They needed housing -- they were renting a bedroom in a group house for $500 a month -- and they wanted to learn computer skills. Perhaps their most difficult hurdle was that neither spoke English.

Officials with Community Lodgings said they were perfect candidates for the organization's transitional program: They were older than 18, had been bouncing from one unstable, crowded living arrangement to another and were in the process of getting their naturalization papers. And Urbina was employed.

"And they had goals," said Meka Jones, the caseworker at Community Lodgings who shepherded the couple through the program. "They wanted to learn how to save money, and they wanted to buy a house. And that's what they did."

The couple took night classes administered by Community Lodgings, learning basic computer skills and, in Urbina's case, becoming proficient in English. (Although for this story he preferred to be interviewed through an interpreter.)

In a year, they managed to save $2,500, enough to consider home-buying classes at the Hispanic Committee of Virginia.

It took the couple a while to find the right house. Most were too expensive. In a few cases, the financing changed before they sat down to close the deal. But last month they found what they had been looking for -- a two-bedroom, two-bathroom house with a finished basement for Bermudez to one day set up a day-care operation, and a spacious back yard for Jasmine.

"I'm so proud of them!" gushed Jones as she took her first tour of the $379,500 house last week. Urbina's brother co-signed the loan and, according to Jones, will help pay the monthly mortgage of $2,800.