The Lompoc City Council didn’t meet before the Sun went to press, but on the docket for that July 21 night was a discussion to kick $42,500 toward the Lompoc Homebuyer Assistance Program from the Santa Barbara Affordable Housing Trust.
The money is a fraction of the larger sums involved in the program. Ultimately, the goal is to help people get low-cost secondary loans so that they can afford to break into Lompoc’s housing market, where a home costs an average of about a quarter of a million dollars.
Jennifer McGovern, executive director of the Santa Barbara Affordable Housing Trust, emphasized that the program is still being planned. The $42,500, she said, is focused on “consulting to create the program and get it moving forward toward implementation.”
Right now, in other words, Lompoc’s trying to figure out how best to get those loans to people and how many people they can get those loans to. The city needs to figure out a program that’s acceptable to both mortgage lenders and the city. And they have to do all of that while interest rates and home prices fluctuate. That, McGovern said, makes a program such as this technical, dense, and slow to implement.
Ultimately, however, it could help several low-income families get homes in Lompoc starting in 2016, with a full rollout by December, based on the tentative timeline put out by the city.
How many families, exactly? That depends on how the program is ultimately structured.
It could be 10 or 15 loans; it could be 20 or 30, according to McGovern.
Lompoc Community Development Program Manager Christie Alarcon couldn’t be reached for this story.
This article appears in Jul 23-30, 2015.
