PUEBLO OF ACOMA, N.M. ? One of the things mortgage lenders look for in applicants is residence stability. People who move around a lot are not considered as good a risk for a loan as people who stay in the same place.
That’s what makes it ironic that residents of the longest continuously occupied site in the country have been totally unable to get mortgages on the land where they’ve lived for a millennium and more, until now.
The pueblo’s Housing Authority executive director Raymond J. Concho Jr. is confident that the first mortgages ever on the pueblo ? inhabited, traditions say, since 600 AD ? are just around the corner.
That’s because of a grant of $125,000 from PMI Mortgage Insurance Co. of San Francisco, designed to help start up the private mortgage market on the pueblo.
Concho said he thinks that in just three or four months, mortgage finance will come to this pueblo an hour west of Albuquerque, possibly through Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.
The funds will be used to build two scattered site homes for families deemed ready to obtain mortgages. Once they qualify, the mortgage bank will buy the properties from the pueblo thus replenishing a ‘revolving loan’ fund that will finance another two homes and another two mortgages.
Concho said a pipeline of about 24 qualified families has been developed. The Housing Authority has been in existence since 1996. Prior to that the pueblo was part of an umbrella organization of pueblos. Concho said it took a good three years to get tribal ordinances passed ? governing such areas as eviction and foreclosure ? that would give lenders confidence to make mortgages.
He said the biggest challenge was the land assignment issue. The tribe will assign a lease to the tribal member, and the bank will obtain a leasehold interest. The prospect of members losing their leases has been a major issue.
Housing finance is kind of a foreign concept to pueblo members, Concho said, requiring some effort to educate people on what it is and what it requires. The director suggested that extended family members could take over a lease if the original lessee gets into financial trouble.
Of the 4,500 enrolled members of the tribe, 3,300 live on the pueblo, Concho said. The Housing Authority plans to conduct a needs assessment in the next couple of months, but one done five years ago indicated a need for 800 housing units over 20 years.
In addition, a lot of families would come back and live on the pueblo if decent homes were available, he said.
Famed for its ‘Sky City’ site, Acoma has seen unemployment numbers drop from 35 and 45 percent to 15 and 25 percent since opening its casino. Most members do not live in the ‘Sky City’ site that generates a good bit of tourist traffic, but in locations more than 10 miles away.
Concho said they live in federally subsidized units, self-built adobe or sandstone homes or mobile homes.
The housing authority is building a 61-unit subdivision on the pueblo. These three-, four- and five-bedroom homes are either government Mutual Help units or rental housing. It is its first major housing development, though five or six others were financed under the previous umbrella housing authority.
Concho said the pueblo is also looking at participating in the HUD 184 guaranteed mortgage, in which the government guarantees all lender outlays.
PMI, which financed the Acoma revolving loan fund and a $250,000 one for the Navajo Partnership for Housing just across the New Mexico border in Arizona, does not make mortgages but insures them if the borrower puts down less than 20 percent of the home price.
