We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Mercedes Fuentes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Mercedes, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a customer success story with us?
Our daily work at Elevation Community Land Trust (ECLT) involves working with potential buyers who often face historic and systemic challenges to achieve their homeownership dreams in the current home market. The support ECLT staff provides to families has resulted in many buyers being able to successfully purchase affordable and more energy-efficient homes in Colorado. Every applicant must apply to our program and meet our program requirements. For some applicants, this home-buying process may be overwhelming, however ECLT offers several resources and technical support for those who need assistance with the application process to get on the path to homeownership.
To begin the road to homeownership, applicants attend an orientation with ECLT. This gives them a good foundation of how the community land trust model works and helps people understand the differences between CLT homeownership and market rate, and the requirements of the home-buying process.
ECLT staff members assist families by allowing qualified participants to purchase their first home at a drastically reduced price, which is possible through the CLT structure where ECLT retains the ownership of the land, and the buyer purchases the home, making the purchase price much more affordable. ECLT is a shared-equity model, meaning every homeowner participates in the market appreciation during their tenure of homeownership and is able to take 25% of that market appreciation when they decide to sell the home. The other 75% stays in the land, allowing the same home to be affordable for the next generation of homeowners. The ECLT team and I are dedicated to providing homeownership opportunities for working-class individuals and families, with a variety of sizes, types, price points, and locations of homes.
Since 2019, we have assisted 202 families who have become owners of Elevation Community Land Trust homes. Many of our homeowners have been able to purchase a home and stabilize their financials by paying less on their mortgage payment than they were paying in rent.
Among those families is a single mother with a young son who, for several years, was renting. She struggled to keep her life afloat by making around $42,000 a year in Denver. When her rent increased, her son kept moving from school to school, which impacted his emotions and academic achievement. She wanted to offer her son a safe and stable place to live, but this was nearly impossible in the current market conditions as a single, working mother. We like to say “Homeownership is Possible”- and that was the case as this woman learned about the homeownership program through a friend and started the Elevation CLT online application with great enthusiasm. My goal is to ensure that our clients receive the personalized assistance and attention they need to make their homeownership dream come true. I want to continue increasing the number of affordable homeownership opportunities to families and strengthen our impact across Colorado.
Mercedes, before we move on to more questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
As the first person in my family to immigrate to the United States, I have many stories to tell, but the most important and unique story of my life started when I immigrated from Chiapas, Mexico in 1999 to Denver, along with my husband and my 5-year-old daughter. I did not know any English then, but I enrolled in a class to learn the basics. Due to my lack of credit score, I was not able to rent out a place right away. We were practically homeless and then began living with a friend. During that time, I started taking advantage of programs such as the IDA (Individual Development Account), homeownership class, computer skills and financial literacy classes offered by a local nonprofit. Through these programs, I accomplished several goals, including building my credit score. Once this was established, I rent a tax -credit affordable housing apartment. for low-income families. I started participating in all activities and classes this nonprofit had available. After a few months of being enrolled in the program, I was offered a part-time job teaching computer classes to the residents of the same housing complex.
I bought my first home in 2002, one year after I started working full-time as the community technology coordinator.
I have been acknowledged nationally for my efforts, most notably as a nominee for the White House Champions of Change in Housing and locally as the Key Counselor Award with the Colorado Foreclosure Hotline. I also received the Civil Rights Award in 2016, and Esperanza National Housing Counseling honored me with the Hands and Feet Award in 2018. In November of 2022, I was appointed by Colorado Attorney General, Phil Weiser as a council member to the Office of Financial Empowerment.
My diverse background experience has allowed me to witness and understand the struggles of families, their obstacles, and their needs. In fact, I obtained a degree in social work to actively promote change, social development, and the well-being of people. I addressed social deficiencies as needed, whether in the family, community or social environment in which they live. Focusing on affordable housing is no exception, especially when knowing that affordable housing is a social inequity issue. It is a violation to one’s right to adequate and decent housing. I believe that every person deserves an affordable place to live. For this reason, I am happy to be part of Elevation Community Land Trust (ECLT), a great organization that contributes to creating positive change by offering affordable homeownership and wealth-building opportunities to working-class families in our communities.
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
I remember in 2019 when I began working with ECLT, we had a lot of goals to reach with a very small staff of four, and I was completing my degree in social work. We had to do a lot of outreach to sell our first home. We worked day and night, seven days a week, from a temporary office in downtown Denver. I traveled by car and train to meet with partners and attend events around the Metro area, to develop relationships and inform them about our organization. It was hard to explain to interested community members, how our community land trust model worked and could benefit them. It took a lot of trust-building and courage to obtain buy-in from them, as no one had seen a CLT operate as innovatively as we do. When I was a housing counselor, I had knowledge of resources in many areas and mastered my position; I also knew that joining the team of Elevation CLT would involve getting out of my comfort zone, learning about the Community Land Trust model, and would involve a lot of work. I feel very satisfied that with ECLT I have a direct role and impact by helping families achieve homeownership. By August of 2019, we had remodeled a great home and educated the community about our organization and in December 2019, we sold our first affordable home in Aurora under the CLT model.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I have been resilient to different circumstances in my life, but the hardest part is when I lost two loved ones six months apart from one another.
While our organization was growing, I needed to keep the focus on our goals; three months after we sold our first home, COVID-19 appeared. We immediately had to make some changes in how we operated the organization, including changing our application process to online and working from home. Even though these represented challenges, the team got together to accomplish those changes. During this time, not only was I dealing with adapting to those new changes, but I was also dealing with my mother, who was very ill in Mexico. Traveling to another country with fear and a lack of airline flights was complicated by then. While dealing with my mother’s health problems, one of my lovely sisters suddenly died of COVID-19 then my youngest daughter was hospitalized for a blood disorder here in Denver. I feel desperate not to see her and be with her. My daughter recovered, but I managed everything with the great support of my family and teammates. Regardless of all these life adversities, I kept focused on work and the marketing efforts to accomplish our work goal to find out that not everyone supported our mission to make homeownership more accessible for Colorado families. Despite our efforts to engage with communities and assist interested applicants, encountered some uncertainty about the community land trust model, a proven tool for creating and preserving accessible, inclusive communities for generations. We had to make believers out of non-believers by expressing the need to close the wealth gap in communities of color through homeownership. I communicated with partners by showing them how working-class families suffered from the lack of funding for a program like ours and, in return, how lifting these families up, elevated the community as a whole. We had to prove that our innovative approach to our mission, contributed to social impact for people who haven’t historically had the same access to wealth building as other populations.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.elevationclt.org/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mercedes-fuentes-76258041/
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