In late January, the Washington State Department of Commerce announced investments of $17.95 million in 17 projects aiming to create affordable homeownership opportunities for low-income households, including an infusion of $500,000 for Neighborworks of Grays Harbor County’s down payment assistance program.

Neighborworks of Grays Harbor County is part of Neighborworks America, a nationwide network of 250 offices that dates back to 1968 and received a congressional charter in 1978 during the Carter administration.

Neighborworks of Grays Harbor County, which was founded as Aberdeen Neighborhood Services in 1986, is trying to bridge the gap for prospective homeowners when it comes to the resources needed to make perhaps the biggest purchase of a lifetime.

Eric Bjella, who has been Neighborworks of Grays Harbor County’s executive director since 2022, is uniquely qualified to help people learn the ins and outs of buying a home due to his 36 years of experience in banking.

“I was a mortgage banker for a while,” Bjella said. “I did a lot of various types of lending, mortgage lending, consumer lending, commercial lending for the first half of my career and then I went into the marketing side of bank services and that’s where I ended my career in banking.”

Affordable housing is a hot button topic in Grays Harbor County, and the state of Washington at-large. Although the lack of inventory is a contributing factor, Bjella says the barriers to homeownership start with the prospective buyer.

“We have to attack things on several fronts. One, of course, is the individual who’s applying and their resources, so it does boil down to money and does a person have the wherewithal to make a monthly payment, just like in any credit situation,” Bjella said. “The barriers are lack of funds or the lack of income. They’re just at the lower income levels, which don’t fit into the normal mortgage boxes that we have to check. Then there’s the credit side, many folks on the lower income scale have credit issues. We work to heal that as well. We have a housing counselor. So even if someone isn’t ready to buy a home right now, we try to put them on the right path and let them know what they need to do.”

Anyone who has ever tried to purchase a house knows that the process can be difficult to navigate. From the terminology, interest rates, down payment requirements, credit scores to mortgage insurance and the closing costs, buying a house can be confusing at best. Neighborworks provides essential education that enables potential homebuyers to make informed decisions. Bjella says it starts with personal finances.

“The education side of things, not in just buying a home but in personal financial education or personal finances in general, it seems it isn’t just our area, but all across the country, it’s not being taught in school. So many of us have been taught in school how to have a budget and how to buy a car and how to run a checkbook and all of those basic things that don’t necessarily get covered in the current curriculum,” Bjella said. “We put people through a housing counseling course and we have an online course for them that’s specifically around buying a home. It does touch on budgeting and what happens after you buy a home and all the other expenses that fall into home ownership. People sometimes forget about some of those things.”

When a person or family is in the market for buying a home, affordable inventory in Grays Harbor County has become a challenge. According to a recent examination of the Zillow Home Value Index, Hoquiam and Aberdeen’s home values are skyrocketing. Currently the average home value in Aberdeen according to Zillow is $281,000, and Hoquiam’s is nearly $250,000. And visibly, the only areas in Grays Harbor County actively engaging in new home construction of any volume are Ocean Shores and Seabrook.

“What is out there in that affordable price range? (In) Ocean Shores there are over 250 homes on the market at this time. When you drop the price range down to $300,000 or less, there were 27,” Bjella said. “The people that come to me looking to buy a house can usually afford something in the $200,000 to $250,000 range, and unfortunately those homes are just not here or a home that is in that price range needs so much work that it’s not livable. We need to fit the family to the home. Even though a family is desperate to get into something, a two-bedroom home for a family of five kids just doesn’t work. One of the first things I speak to when I talk to new home buyers is patience. You’ve got to take the emotion out of this. Have the patience to find the right home that fits.”

One of the largest barriers to purchasing a home can be coming up with the down payment. Many mortgage lenders require 20% down. According to Bjella, Neighborworks can help but stressed that the buyers his organization assist are borrowing that money. He also mentioned that the requirements are looser with this round of grant money.

“The money just doesn’t go out the door and disappear. It goes out in the form of a loan and then when the loan is paid back, it will go back into the pool of money that we use to loan out,” Bjella said. “(With) the old grant, we could only lend that out to people who were at less than 80% of the area median income, which means they had to make less than about $57,000 a year. With this new money, we can loan that out to people who make up to 100% of the area median income, which runs about $90,000 a year, so a family can make up to $90,000 a year and still qualify to get down payment assistance for up to $50,000. What we’re trying to do is to help people get over that hurdle so they don’t have to buy private mortgage insurance, so that they can keep their monthly payment low enough to be in that 33% range of their gross monthly income. You shouldn’t be paying more than a third of your income for housing.”

According to Bjella, Neighborworks’ down payment assistance is a loan on top of a mortgage, which, he says, prospective buyers should work with a local lender to secure.

“On the down payment assistance piece, that portion goes as a second behind the first loan and the first loan could be (from) your own lender, your local lender, it could be Neighborworks,” Bjella said. “I strongly urge people to work with their local lenders, someone here on the ground in Aberdeen. There may be a lot of things out there on the Internet that are available, but I have found in my experience that when things go wrong or the loan gets sold or something happens, suddenly no one’s to be found. You can’t contact anyone. I just want to steer people away from that.”

Neighborworks not only helps people buy homes, but also facilitates critical health and safety repairs for low-income homeowners.

“A new program that we do have, which I’m excited about, we got a small grant from the Aberdeen Community Foundation, $20,000 of seed money toward a home repair program,” Bjella said. “It’s for people who need to have health and safety types of things done to their home (roof, electrical, plumbing, etc.). These are not big loans, less than $15,000 and they’re at a favorable interest rate.”

Bjella says he sees Neighborworks of Grays Harbor County, which works closely with Grays Harbor Housing Authority, Coastal Community Action Program, and other housing organizations, as a valuable asset to the community.

“Education resources are really one of our main strong points,” Bjella said. “I would love to see us do more development when the opportunity arises, and I’d like to lend more money out to the community as we get money in to lend.”