Akua Danqua’s daughters are bursting with excitement to move into the home Manna, Inc., is preparing to sell her. Every day 4-year-old Dionna and 5-year-old Chanyelle ask, “So are we moving to the new house yet?”
The girls love to help their mother pick out a color for the new door and decide what kind of shutters Manna will add to their prospective home. Danqua says they are already asking to host sleepovers and are planning to paint the walls of their room.
Manna is an affordable housing provider that has been operating in the District for over 30 years. After managing a transitional housing program for needy families, Manna’s founder, Rev. Jim Dickerson, began to believe that most people could base their economic stability on owning a home.
“[Our homes] become a way of ending generational poverty,” Bill Winston, Manna’s chief performance officer, said. “Once a family owns a home, they can use it to pay for retirement or a college education.”
Manna is unique. It buys houses and condominiums to renovate and sell as affordable housing. They’ve done this with more than 1,000 homes to date.
On Jan. 19, 2015, Manna hosted two property cleanup efforts for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Day of Service. One of the sites was the house Danqua and her daughters hope to make their own.
University of the District of Columbia students Tamra McCoy and Brianna Brown, along with eight other volunteers, used their day off from school to clean windows, pick up garbage and sweep.
“This is our day on, not our day off,” McCoy said.
Garbage cleanup is a necessary part of renovation, Winston said. Like many foreclosed houses, the house had been vacant for several years, he explained.
The second cleanup centered on a group of 24 two-bedroom, two-bathroom condominiums in another neighborhood. Manna buys and sells more condominiums than houses because that allows the organization to put more people in homes for less money, according to Winston.
Danqua first attempted to buy a condo from Manna 2 years ago, but decided to wait in order to work on her credit score and save more money. Now, Danqua counts herself lucky to be purchasing a house.
Manna’s website encourages professionals selling to “low to moderate income” buyers to help them find loan programs that have very low or no credit score requirements. But poor credit can still block people from buying a home.
Cisco Hutson says that he was not qualified to buy a residence from Manna because his credit score was too low. Hutson works at a grocery store and rents an apartment now, after leaving a job that provided housing. He says that he’s looking to buy a house, not a condominium, because he grew up in houses.
“I want a backyard or a porch. At a house you can make improvements,” Hutson said.
Hutson feels that cities like Washington are focused only on money and numbers, not on community.
“They’ve taken a lot of neighborhoods away,” Hutson said. “With a house you see the people next to you, you have the chance to be a neighbor.”
The number of affordable rental and homeownership options in D.C. has been decreasing since 2000, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s “Nowhere to Go” report, published in 2010. “The number of D.C. homes valued at $250,000 or less fell from 58,000 to 15,000 between 2000 and 2007,” the report stated.
Manna boasts a much lower foreclosure rate than average in the District, according to Winston. He attributes much of their success to programs they run such as home buyer education, one-on-one credit counseling and mortgage counseling.
“I will never own this apartment,” Danqua—a single mother who works as a remittance analyst and is student at Trinity Washington University—reflected about her current rental unit.
Danqua realized that by going through Manna, she could actually afford to buy. The DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s report found rents have outpaced the incomes of most D.C. households. Danqua wanted to invest in a home rather than continue to pay increasing rent for a place she would never own.
“It’s for my family, to make sure that they have a stable place to go,” Danqua said. “If I pay the mortgage off, they’ll always have a place to live without having to pay mortgage or rent if they decided to continue to live here.”
To qualify for assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a home buyer must have an annual income that is between 50 percent and 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). The AMI that HUD uses for D.C. residents is based on incomes across the greater Washington metropolitan area, which includes some of the wealthiest suburbs in the country. In contrast, the D.C. State Median Income is based on incomes only within the District. The median income in the District is 23 percent lower than the AMI.
The basis on which median income is calculated affects who qualifies for affordable housing, explains Elizabeth Falcon, campaign organizer for the Coalition for Nonprofit Housing and Economic Development. For example, in 2013, the AMI for a family of four was $107,301, but the D.C. State Median Income for a family of four was $82,400. If the D.C. number were used, a family of four would need an income of just $41,200 to qualify for assistance from HUD (see table) .
Two years ago, D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie proposed the Truth in Affordability Act of 2013 to deal with the difference between D.C. State Median Income and the AMI. The bill was enacted on Dec. 8, 2014; however, it requires only that the D.C. State Median Income be published annually by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. Affordable housing providers, like Manna, are not required to recalculate their income brackets using D.C. State Median Income.
Marcus A. Williams, director of communications and community outreach for the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD), told Street Sense that Mayor Muriel Bowser voted in favor of the the Truth in Affordability Act of 2013 and that the department will comply with the median income tracking requirement. Williams wrote that “the Department is actively working to guarantee housing opportunities are in place for all who wish to call the nation’s capital their home” but did not describe any current or proposed measures to reach that goal.
The inside of Danqua’s future home is completely bare right now. A lot of work is still planned. The kitchen, for instance, is being moved from the left side to the right so that it is not separate from the living room.
This will take some time, but Danqua is fine with that. She’s not ready to move quite yet. Manna gave the family a timeline, and Danqua thinks the home will be ready to move into by late March or early April.
“Everything in this house is still all over the place, and financially I want to continue to save money,” Danqua said.
Though low-income areas in the city are lumped with more affluent areas such as Fairfax or Arlington counties to determine affordable housing accessibility, families like the Danquas are qualifying for affordable housing and benefiting from programs like Manna, Inc.
And it seems like theirs will be a success story. Akua Danqua has made a down payment on the home so her two daughters can continue to plan sleepovers in “the new house.”
