Nehemiah Corporation of America
Nehemiah Corporation of America is a non-profit organization based in Sacramento, California specializing in homeownership, affordable housing and community development. It started in 1994 as a small organization, but grew to prominence later in the 1990s after it developed a program that allowed home buyers to make down payments on their purchases using funds that were derived from the home sellers. This program, the Nehemiah Program, became popular and was widely emulated, giving birth to what came to be known as the seller-funded down-payment assistance industry. The industry attracted criticism from U.S. federal agencies (particularly the Government Accountability Office and the Internal Revenue Service) and was ultimately shut down in 2008 by a change in federal law.
Abraham Lincoln Neiman
Abraham Lincoln "Al" Neiman (July 4, 1875 — October 21, 1970) was raised in a Jewish orphanage in Cleveland, Ohio. He met his first wife Carrie Marcus Neiman in Dallas, Texas, while they were working at A. Harris & Company. They married in 1905 and then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, with Carrie's brother Herbert Marcus and sister in law Minnie Lichtenstein Marcus to do sales promotion work. The Coca-Cola Company is known as their most notable client although at the time they weren't too enthusiastic about its future. Therefore, they relinquished rights to sales territories in the nascent soft drink concern for $25,000 which the Neiman and Marcus families used to open Neiman Marcus in Dallas in 1907.