For the last 15 years, Richard H. Godfrey Jr. has served as the executive director of Rhode Island Housing, a quasi-public state agency that offers home loans and counseling for homebuyers and others. He spoke recently with Providence Business News about the state of housing in Rhode Island.
PBN: Has the community-development KeepSpace Initiative been your biggest program this year?
GODFREY: I would say it’s been the biggest development initiative. … We’re working in four communities – Westerly, Olneyville, Pawtucket-Central Falls and Cranston. Those projects are probably two to three years from construction. … But over the past year we’ve certainly done a lot in terms of responding to the housing crisis. We probably spent more time on that over the last nine months … simply because of the immediacy of the issues.
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PBN: Tell me a little bit about those issues and what Rhode Island Housing’s role has been.
GODFREY: Rhode Island Housing is trying to deal with this on three fronts.
First of all, it’s responding to the immediate needs of people that are losing their homes. For the first time, last November we opened a new help center where we provide direct services for people who are facing foreclosure or who have been foreclosed. And we’ve seen about 2,000 people come through that help center. … We have been able to help more than half of them save their homes through renegotiations with the lenders. … Second, we want to make sure that there is still lending available for people looking to buy homes. … Rhode Island Housing is making loans to first-time homebuyers and we now have been given powers by Congress to refinance loans as well.
We’ve also announced our Buy Smart program because there were so many folks that were taken advantage of – either intentionally or negligently – and we want to make sure that as people move forward they buy homes that they can afford and that they can live with for a while. … We are a very steady lender – we still have rates at about 6 percent and we buy them down even lower for our lowest-income buyers.
PBN: Has your customer volume dropped at all in the past year?
GODFREY: It has dropped from 2006 and 2007 levels.
PBN: Which would have been inflated?
GODFREY: Exactly. But we are in line to have one of our best years, other than ’06 and ’07, in the past decade. We’ll probably beat 2003, 2004 and 2005, so we’re still making lots of loans.
PBN: Tell me a little bit about Rhode Island Housing’s relationship to the state budget.
GODFREY: Things are only getting worse in terms of the state. The state initially was going to take $26 million from us as of June 30 of this year. They realized that we didn’t have that cash available, so they allowed us to defer it until June 30, 2009. So we’re delivering $14 million this year and $12 million over the next year.
The state, though, is in such a cash shortage that they’ve asked us to accelerate those payments if we can. So as soon as we accumulate any excess cash, we will hand it over to the state. … The state also just received $19.6 million from the federal government for neighborhood stabilization and we’re working with the state to administer that money and making sure it has the maximum impact.
PBN: How will the loss of that $26 million affect your programming?
GODFREY: It is like someone has come into your house and taken all of your savings and any excess in your checking account. It basically makes you cut down on everything. You can’t give up, so therefore you cut back where you can, try to accumulate a little cash and get ahead again. It’s going to be very hard over the next 12 months because whenever we get a little more we send it over to the state.
However, the people of Rhode Island need us more than ever. So we are planning to re-capitalize ourselves over the next four to five years. Rather than trying to cut everything back and re-capitalize it in one year we will do it over the next four or five years. So we are cutting back programs and staffing and expenses about 10 percent overall and we hope to get the money back and be in full swing in four or five years.
PBN: What legislation would you like to see in the next General Assembly session and was there any legislation that didn’t get passed last session?
GODFREY: One of the bills we really pushed for last year was better protection for tenants when their properties are foreclosed. They truly are innocent victims. They pay their rent right along, but if the landlord doesn’t pay the mortgage and that house is foreclosed they can be evicted with a three-day notice. We think it’s very reasonable to expect 90-days notice. It’s very hard for anyone to relocate their life in three days. •
INTERVIEW
Richard H. Godfrey Jr.
POSITION: Executive director, Rhode Island Housing
BACKGROUND: Worked for New Jersey Housing for eight years; ran the N.J. Treasurer’s Office; practiced law privately, working on public-finance issues in the New York metro for five years; started his current job 15 years ago.
EDUCATION: B.A. in architecture and urban planning, 1973, Princeton University; J.D., 1980, Seton Hall University School of Law; coursework at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School.
FIRST JOB: At age 16, Godfrey worked on a farm, harvesting hay, delivering calves, mending fences and cleaning up manure.
RESIDENCE:
Barrington
Age: 57
