Now director of the housing counseling program at Partners in Community Building (and board secretary for Chicago Community Land Trust), Navarro was about to close up the Spanish Coalition offices late one Friday night in December when she saw that a man had just walked into the office, sat down at a table and buried his head in his hands.
Navarro asked if he were there to see someone, and he replied that he was there to turn in his keys. The man mistakenly thought he had walked into the local office of his home lender, which had collectors hounding him for more than six months of back payments that he couldn't meet after losing his job.
Knowing that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development had programs to help people in hardship, Navarro called the HUD local office and negotiated a reprieve for the man, who left very happily a couple hours later.
So happy, in fact, that when Navarro finally did lock her office's doors at about 10 p.m., "I looked down the street, and I saw him skipping," she recalls. "There was this grown man, skipping down the street. I knew [community development] was where I needed to be, and I've been there ever since."
Betty Cade and her husband, Albert, can relate to that story today. They've been skipping, at least emotionally, since the Spanish Coalition went to bat on their behalf in negotiating complete loan forgiveness from their bank. About 10 years into a 30-year mortgage, Cade, 72, and her husband were paying a 10.5 percent interest rate and, on fixed incomes, falling steadily behind in their payments.
When the Cades tried to negotiate on their own, the bank had offered a three-month trial home modification that hadn't lowered the interest rate substantially. "I didn't understand why we had to pay that," Betty Cade says. "Our income was never going to change. I just thank God it worked out the way it did."
With the Spanish Coalition helping them out, they appeared for a Dec. 1 court date having received a foreclosure notice--but the bank's attorney surprised them by offering full forgiveness of the remaining 20 years on the loan, nearly $90,000.
"If she hadn't gotten it resolved, she could have lost her property," says Tabitha Rodriguez, housing counselor for the Spanish Coalition, who says full forgiveness of a loan is "very, very rare," and the bank did not offer a reason why it had done so.
Gabriela Roman, current executive director of the Spanish Coalition, says lenders more commonly give principal reductions. "Rarely do they forgive the entire loan," she says, speculating that the bank saw two seniors on a fixed income, with Social Security going almost entirely toward their mortgage. "Maybe they had that Christmas spirit in them already."
Betty Cade didn't sound like she needed a reason: "I am grateful, and I give the honor to God," she says.
