Business View Magazine June 2023

110 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 6 as low-income – 50% or less of the median income for the area. And that does describe us.” A great example of the alternative way in which this institution approaches banking is found in its new Mortgage lending vehicle, The FAIR Mortgage (Finance Addressing Inequality and Racism) which has been completely redesigned from the ground up, line by line, to look at what is possible when it comes to lending money for home ownership. “We spent a great deal of time doing research,” says Jerome Emanuel, Community Development Director for Alternatives, and one of the leads in developing this new mortgage product. “a great deal of time trying to understand the “why” behind what we were doing. One thing we realized is that throughout history there has been this practice of redlining, making it impossible for families in certain demographics to buy a house and build generational wealth. Some of those practices have become so much a part of the way money has been lent that we felt we had to go through the rules line by line to discover what might be possible. It turns out we do have some flexibility. So, for example, we have decided not to look at credit scores, but to base decisions on where people are at in the last six months of their lives.” This program is available to people who have low-income and are looking to buy a house, or for those who are first-time, first-generation homebuyers. The rationale for this is to focus on building generational wealth and not exclude those who might not qualify as “low-income”. “There has been movement even in some of the major banks, especially post George Floyd, towards a more relational model – and changing the way we view our clients,” explains Emanuel, “but we knew it was not enough, and we wanted to create something that was sort of revolutionary for the time that we are in right now. We have high rates of incarceration, for example, and if it were up to traditional jobs there would be even higher rates of recidivism, but we see folks becoming entrepreneurs to overcome that, and we needed to create a vehicle that would allow us to reach out to these small business owners and offer them the opportunity to purchase a home.” “Then another highlight is that we did a ton of research, especially post-COVID on what it means if people lost their jobs due to shutdowns during the pandemic. If you require two years of steady employment to qualify for a loan – that is truly limiting a lot of people from applying.”