The NRI program stands for Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative and it was a program in partnership
with Gate City Bank that started almost 20 years ago.
It's a lower interest loan program through Gate City Bank and the City of Fargo is like
the customer service intake process.
So we help homeowners start that application process and then pass it on to Gate City Bank
and they'll take care of the rest of the interaction with the homeowner.
We bought the house in 2017.
I grew up in North Fargo and so we kind of wanted to get back up here.
Since being here we've really found that North Fargo is just a very different community and
community means something different up here.
Now that I know that I feel like that really kind of hits home with why he wanted to be
up here.
We realized that our walls were coming in and we knew we kind of had a problem.
So we had some experts come in and look at the house and we noticed that our walls were
caving in down in the basement and we had water issues as well.
We got a few prices and everything else and figured out that obviously we can't afford
this out of our own pocket.
So we heard about the revitalization loan and so we kind of looked into it and figured
this is exactly what we're looking for to pay for our loan.
There was a few sleepless nights when we found out that the walls were caving in and stuff
like that but honestly the process was pretty seamless so the stress came off pretty fast.
I think that was a huge part for me feeling like we'd be safe in the home.
I know we had a lot of conversations about that.
I was like our walls are caving in this is not good.
You know with having two kids and two younger kids you want to have a house that's safe
for your family and I think without the loan we really would have been scrambling for some
kind of option to make sure that we could keep our family and our kids safe.
Without the loan there's no way we would have been able to afford fixing the basement up.
The process was just so unbelievably easy for us and just knowing that there's opportunities
to have some of these older homes especially for us in the North Fargo area.
It's great to know that we're continuing to put work into these houses because they do
have good bones to them and I think there's a lot of good stories and a lot of good community
up here and so to continue that I think we need programs like this to support the work
going into these maybe a little bit older homes.
I grew up in North Fargo, love it up here and I think some of the older home stuff kind
of deter people from coming and living up here and this is great that older homes are
getting some love because I mean it's history up here so it's one of the reasons that we
love being up here.