QUESTION: How do you select the families?

About once a year we solicit applications for Habitat housing. Announcements are made in the local newspapers and on radio stations that carry public service announcements. We also notify a number of churches and other organizations that support us, and post signs in our Habitat Home Store.

The application packets—in both English and Spanish—are available at the Habitat Home Store in Lenoir City and at the Good Samaritan Centers in both Lenoir City and Loudon. They have complete instructions, including a list of required background documents to prove residency, as well as to help us evaluate whether the applicants meet our criteria and have potential to become successful homeowners.

Applicants are invited to complete the application form and to bring all required documents to a personal interview, which is a preliminary screening to see if the applicant meets basic criteria. The date, time, and location for the interviews are given in the instructions.

If the applicant passes the preliminary screening, our Family Selection Committee begins the in depth screening process, which usually takes three to four months.

First, maybe we need to state for the record that we willingly comply with the letter and spirit of U.S. laws and policy for fair housing. This means we treat all applicants the same, regardless of their race, national origin, religious faith, physical capability, marital status, and any number of other factors that can be used to categorize people.

As part of the screening process, we make sure all our applicants are legal residents of Loudon County for at least one year. Even if an applicant is a legal resident of a neighboring county, they’re not eligible for a Habitat home in Loudon County.

As part of the screening process, each applicant—regardless of race, ethnicity or national origin—is required to produce identification in the form of a Tennessee driver’s license, a voter registration card, or an updated visa.

A variety of documents help us establish residency and also help us evaluate financial responsibility and personal reliability. Applicants must submit copies of two years’ Federal tax returns and produce Social Security cards for each member of the family. We do verify the Social Security numbers.

We also require copies of pay stubs and other proof of steady income (such as Social Security, disability, or child support) that helps us evaluate the applicant’s ability to make house payments both now and over the 25-year term of the zero-interest mortgage. Almost all of our applicants are currently employed full time, and we do contact their employer for verification.

We review bank statements and utility bills, and we do a credit check on each family. While a bad credit score doesn’t necessarily eliminate the applicant from consideration, it does give us an idea of their financial history and their ability to manage family finances.

Our Family Selection Committee, headed by our affiliate vice president Jeanne Darnell, reviews and discusses each case individually. Teams of two people visit each applicant family in their current home to get to know them better and to take a look at their current “inadequate housing.”

After three to four months of screening and evaluations, our Family Selection Committee will recommends to our Board of Directors which of the applicant families to accept into our program. We then invite these families to partner with us and begin working their way to homeownership.