Organization
History
The El Paso Affordable Housing was formed in 2001 by 8 El Paso
credit unions; GECU, First Light FCU, West Texas CU, El Paso
Area Teachers FCU, One Source FCU, El Paso Employees FCU,
Mountain Star FCU, and Golden Key FCU as a credit union
initiative to improve the economic, social well being, and
the quality of life, of members in the community through
financial literacy, savings and providing access to low cost
capital. EPAH services include: financial
education, housing counseling, credit counseling,
foreclosure prevention assistance, pre- and
post-homeownership education, and information on predatory
lender practices, and through its sister organization, El
Paso Credit Union Affordable Housing, LLC, provides
accessible low-cost program mortgage loans, in partnership
with the Housing Authority, HUD, El Paso Empowerment Zone,
the City of El Paso, and others. EPAH works closely with
other credit unions to develop low cost financial products that will
provide low to moderate income families with options to high-cost or
predatory loans and wire remittances and are accessible to
financially underserved markets.
The Community:
The community the EPAH targets is a
population of approximately 800,000. El Paso County has some
of the lowest household incomes in the nation, yet it has
the highest percentage of sub-prime or high interest home
loans. It is also the fifth poorest county in the nation,
where only 4% of families have an annual income of more than
$100,000 and only 18% of families earn more than $35,000 a
year. The average household income is approximately $29,500.
Twenty four percent of families and 36% of children live in
poverty. Families in El Paso face income, language, cultural
or informational barriers in accessing financial education,
housing, traditional credit and other low-cost financial
services. 
El Paso County has one of the lowest per
household income in the country, yet it has one of the
highest activities in sub-prime home loans in the country.
It has 23 conventional financial institutions including
credit unions and banks, yet they are outnumbered 7 to 1 by
fringe lenders. The County has 51 registered payday lenders
many with multiple locations and many others that are not
registered with the state, along with 107 licensed signature
lenders, many with multiple locations, and an unknown amount
of title loan lenders. All these high cost, easily accessed,
fringe lenders greatly increase the High Cost of being poor,
and erode the ability of low to moderate income families to
create wealth and purchase a home.
The EPAH target market is approximately
90% Latino and is the very low to moderate income families
within the County of El Paso, Texas, which includes the City
of El Paso , City of Socorro , Horizon City , City of
Anthony , Fabens, Tornillo, San Elizario and outlying
Colonias. These are unincorporated settlements that lack
basic water and sewer systems, paved roads, safe and
sanitary housing. Texas has the largest number of colonias
and the greatest colonia population, which is predominantly
Hispanic. Of the proximately 1,500 colonias in the U.S side
of the border, 97 percent are in Texas (Sharp, 1998). Our
community is home to approximately 140,000 people living in
78 colonias (Profiles of Colonias, THDCA 1998). Most
families living in the colonias do not have easy access to
any financial institutions or traditional financial
services, or access to low cost capital for home loans or
consumer loans. 
Through extensive grass-roots outreach,
comprehensive culturally sensitive financial education, and
development of non-traditional financial services and
products for access to capital, the EPAH will assist these
un-served and underserved community members to avoid
predatory high cost lenders, and to access mainstream
financial products and obtain a home.
In fact, many of the qualifying standards
of the generally accepted underwriting criteria promulgated
by the GSE 's preclude loans to Colonia residents. In order
to serve this population, innovative, “out of the box,”
criteria must be used to overcome these exclusionary guidelines.
