Couple grooms homebuyers, for city's good

Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Jarrett Renshaw

CHRISTOPHER Garlin and Regina Mincey met roughly 25 years ago aboard the local bus on Ocean Avenue in the Bergen-Lafayette section of Jersey City.

While still attending St. Peter's and Snyder high schools, respectively, they were both on their way to after-school jobs, an early sign of their motivation.

Today, they are married and, after successful careers in the real estate and community development industry, they started their own business called RCG Companies.

The Montclair-based company provides mortgage lending, develops affordable housing and serves as a real estate consultant on construction projects. And they do all this without forgetting where they came from.

Growing up in Jersey City, they saw a working-class community where weekly paychecks were sufficient to juggle mortgage payments, family costs and a few thrills along the way.

But a generation later, much has changed. Many middle-class jobs have left the city, replaced by high-end positions in the financial and service sectors. The shift has sent real estate prices soaring beyond many city residents' financial means.

"We both remember when Jersey City was a strong, working-class community with good bones and good housing stock filled with people who took care of their homes," Garlin told me last week as we walked in his old neighborhood.

Garlin and Mincey operate by one motto: Owning your own home is the single best way to building wealth. In order to help people get there, the pair are devoted to building affordable housing in urban communities, a business model that can be successful if everybody buys in.

"Cities and states need to help subsidize these projects to make them financially feasible, but there is a large pool of money out there, and it works," Garlin said. "We cannot have communities where people can't afford to live and work in the same place."

On the mortgage lending part of their business, they try to demystify the process while providing some common sense wisdom.

"There's times we spend hours with people who want to take out a mortgage, but we have to tell them they are not ready," Mincey said. "We tell them to pay down their bills, get their credit together and wait a year."

Financial security is not only important to the individual, it's important to the community as well.

"If people don't get a strong footing, based on solid, proven advice, then they can't take care of their homes, and you have the blight that ruins neighborhoods, and we can prevent that," Garlin said.

It's a breath of fresh air to see a company that is as concerned about holding true to core values of decency as it is about making a profit.