Our Mission
To support the housing counseling community in fostering stable, prosperous homes and sustainable and equitable communities.
We Believe
We believe housing counselors are first responders for addressing residents goals to achieve home purchase and to avoid eviction or foreclosure.
All residents, no matter their backgrounds, have a right to safe, affordable, and stable housing that allows them an opportunity to thrive regardless of where they live.
Homeownership is a pathway to wealth creation that can be passed down to future generations.
Stakeholders such as local government and banks need to take proactive steps to help households acquire and keep their home, this includes providing access to mortgage financing, the availability of down payment assistance and to fund housing counseling services.
Ken Bigos
Donna Henry
Abraham Pardo
Rick Sauer
Will Gonzalez
Michael Froehlich
Our History
In 2021, in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Housing Counseling Action Committee was formed by leaders of the Philadelphia housing counseling community. With the vaccine starting to be made available to the public, we anticipated the ending of the national moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures. At the same time, the City of Philadelphia, passed the Neighborhood Preservation Initiative, to fund robust housing programs which included the City of Philadelphia’s down payment assistance program, the Philly First Home Grant. These compounding factors would demand housing counselors to be on the front lines to serve more households in their quest to purchase their home, avoid foreclosure or eviction.
Since its formation, HCAC has worked with the City of Philadelphia to create uniform standards on evaluating our delivery of services, held meetings with members of City Council to advocate for additional funding to hire more staff and increase the salaries of housing counselors and has worked with local banks on ways to improve their lending performance to Black and Latino households.
History Of Housing Counseling
The HUD Housing Counseling program was authorized by the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, “to provide counseling and advice to tenants and homeowners, both current and prospective, to assist them in improving their housing conditions, meeting their financial needs, and fulfilling the responsibilities of tenancy or homeownership.”
In Philadelphia, housing counseling focused only on helping people buy their own home until the mid-2000’s when increases in the number of homes being foreclosed on became a crisis. Counselors pivoted to begin helping prevent foreclosure. The Philadelphia Foreclosure Diversion Court was created to require that lenders had to have a representative face the homeowner, who was represented by their housing counselor in front of a judge. This system exposed unfair lending practices, such as interest rates as high as 16%.
Today, housing counselors help homebuyers, homeowners, renters and those looking to understand their finances and/or improve their credit scores.
