Conclusion Part 3


If CURA researchers did indeed read the study, they should have been aware that relying simply on home loan programs was not representative of all NRP housing activity. Appendix A provides a significant list of more than 130 contracts for NRP housing programs that were specifically targeted to communities of color, low-income communities, and special need communities (addiction, living with HIV/AIDS, seniors and disabilities as examples).

It should be noted that there is a significant gap in data for the years between the NHS data used in our analysis, and the CEE data used exclusively by CURA. And there were other vendors servicing NRP home loan programs during the 1990s and 2000s. Is there any reason to believe that neighborhood NRP housing programs in the 1990s might look more like the NHS data than the CEE data from the last few years of NRP?

In the early 1990s, there were many vendors who were managing neighborhood NRP home loan and grant programs besides just CEE and NHS, including Greater Metropolitan Housing Corporation (GMHC), Southside Neighborhood Housing Services, Project for Pride in Living, Powderhorn Residents Group, and others.

More important than a wide variety of lenders was the fact that many of them during the 1990 and early 2000s had field offices which were easily accessible to the community.

Many of these vendors actually lost money on their NRP home loan programs. Because they perceived the NRP home loan funds as a major resource that would go a long way towards helping accomplish their mission, they actually subsidized neighborhood NRP programs with foundation money and fundraisers. Their funders most certainly did not fund these vendors to provide loans to white, affluent homeowners.

Much of this landscape started changing in the mid 2000s, as funders started turning their attention to other issues. As a result, vendors began closing their field offices (reducing accessibility) and discontinuing their NRP contracts. By the early 2010s, only two major players remained, CEE and GMHC, and by 2014 GMHC had decided to drop out of the loan business entirely, leaving CEE the only vendor.

As a result, there is little reason to believe that CURA’s analysis, based on a limited data set from CEE after 2013, is representative of the vast majority of NRP loans carried out in earlier years.

It should be noted that a review of the CEE data shows that CURA failed to double check numbers, and there are errors in their data as a result. As an example, fully 31 of CEE demographic survey respondents self-reported their ethnicity as Hispanic. However, these individuals also checked "White" as their race, or left the race checkbox unmarked. CURA counted these respondents as White, or did not count them at all. We corrected these numbers in Chart 10.

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