By Marc Fisher
Tuesday, November 21, 2006; B01
Charlene Tibbs has had her boxes packed for weeks. She still doesn't know exactly when she'll get into her new home, but she knows it will happen before Christmas. And after four years of waiting -- after a lifetime, really -- that's good enough.
Deborah Talley has paid rent for 40 years, and all that time, "I wanted to go back to living in a house -- that's how I was brought up," she says. In a few weeks, she and her husband, Marvin, will move from their rental in Southwest to a place of their own.
Thirty first-time homeowners, most of them middle-aged or older, are about to move into Madeline Gardens, a just-completed "gut rehab" condo project on Holbrook Terrace NE in Trinidad, a couple of blocks east of Gallaudet University. These are people with credit that would ordinarily win them little but sneers from bankers -- District residents whose low-paying jobs had rendered them bystanders or worse in the real estate boom that has swept the city.
That's all in the past: This Thanksgiving will last far more than one day for the new faces on Holbrook Terrace.
These are patient people who have weathered some rough patches, including problems with the title on the property. But with money from Manna, a nonprofit developer of affordable housing, and from the District government -- and with elbow grease from kids learning the construction business at the YouthBuild Public Charter School -- the new owners are about to move into condos costing far less than they would on the open market.
The new residents of Holbrook Terrace, a row of brick buildings that a few years ago were boarded-up hideouts for drug addicts, will have monthly payments of about $900 to $1,000. "That's much less than anything else they could find in the city, but they are still really stretching themselves," says Frank Demarais, vice president of Manna Mortgage, the developer's nonprofit loan subsidiary.
They are being helped by a D.C. government program that cancels property taxes for the first five years they own their homes and by deferred-payment loans from the District and low interest rates from Manna Mortgage.
Through all the years of waiting, several of the new owners came by every week to check on the construction. They heard stories from old-timers about how the street was once overrun by drug dealers, but they also met other newcomers who are turning the neighborhood around, people with jobs and a real stake in their homes.
"We have new neighbors interested in being proud of the place they live in," says Imogene Love, one of the new Madeline Gardens owners and a kindergarten teacher at a D.C. charter school. "Finally, I won't have to wait for the landlord to come fix the oven. This is mine, and if it's yours, you want to keep it up yourself."
The home buyers persevered because Manna remained involved in their lives from the moment they signed up until the open house held the other day to show off the new apartments.
Manna walked the new owners through every step: The agency screened and trained them, putting them through an 18-month Homebuyers Club program where they learned how to keep their finances, homes and lives in good order.
"They taught us this amazing lesson about savings," says Sandy Romero, who will move with her husband and two sons from a rental on quickly gentrifying 14th Street NW. "I never knew any of this, so I had very bad credit. I think I was sick that day in school."
The other owners, gathered to celebrate their new homes, laugh. "No," says Marvin Binion, "they don't teach that in school."
No, they don't. But Demarais spent endless hours with each of the families, painstakingly working through their tangled finances. The new owners speak of Demarais as if he were the first person who had ever taught them the mechanics of life in this economy.
Manna Mortgage is out to beat back the predatory lenders that plague inner-city neighborhoods. Manna combines intensive financial education with low fees and 30-year fixed rates -- a rarity in the lives of people whose lack of income usually pushes them to lenders who charge fees of more than $7,000 to borrow at interest rates that soar after just a few months.
"It took me two years, but I'm debt-free," says Romero, who works at Children's Hospital. She has no regrets about leaving her home of 14 years, a building in Shaw that's being renovated into loft apartments selling for more than $600,000. Romero says she was so determined to wait for her new home in Madeline Gardens that a couple of years ago, she turned down $3,000 from a developer who wanted her to leave her apartment so it could be renovated for someone of far greater means.
She's thrilled to be moving to Trinidad.
"This is our Walt Disney dream come true," Romero says. "My boys will each have their own room. And I'm very excited not to have to share a bathroom with just men. The toilet seat will be down."
E-mail:marcfisher@washpost.com
