Housing Reparations: Taking Ownership PDX

Charles Brown:
Before we get into this episode, I just wanted to share with you all that I have a new book, Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. It’s available at Islandpress.com Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Please do me a favor and buy the book.

Randal Wyatt:
Did the ancestors choose me to do this? Because I have no housing background. I have none… How did I land this opportunity to really, truly impact my community and activate allies? And everybody’s winning in this. Not even like racist people can even talk much shit about this because I’m not even hurting them. I’m not taking away anything from anybody. When I think about what my ancestors had to go through, this is light work compared to what they had to do.

Charles Brown:
What happens when government agencies impose thousands of dollars in fines on Black homeowners for deferred maintenance, pushing them towards displacement? What if instead of watching this cycle continue, a community created its own solution? In 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, Portland, Oregon, native Randal Wyatt had an idea. As people asked him how they could be better allies to the Black community, he saw an opportunity to address a critical but overlooked driver of gentrification: home maintenance. Taking Ownership PDX was born. Providing free repairs and renovations for Black homeowners, particularly elderly residents at risk of displacement. My name is Charles T. Brown, and this is Arrested Mobility.

In cities across America, gentrification has become a familiar story. Property values rise, demographics shift, and longtime residents, often Black homeowners, find themselves pushed out of the neighborhood they built. This displacement isn’t just about housing, it’s about the systematic uprooting of communities, cultural fabric, and generational wealth. Portland, Oregon, is a city with a complex racial history. While it’s known for its progressive politics, Portland remains the whitest major city in America, with just about 5.8% of its population identifying as Black. Many of the city’s historically Black neighborhoods have experienced intense gentrification over the past two decades.

Randal Wyatt:
I’m Randal Wyatt, Portland native, born and raised here. I committed myself to community activism at a very young age right out of high school. A lot of that I attribute to becoming a young father. I became a father of twins at 19, and that’s when I realized, I’m going to need to invest in my community to make it a better place for them, but also for myself, and for everybody else because I care a lot about community. And basically because I have created a name for myself as an activist and as an artist here, a lot of people ask me how that could be stronger allies for the community. And I said, “If you come from a privileged background that has had hundreds and hundreds of years head start economically, share your resources with the marginalized communities.”

And then through my studies at Portland State University learned a lot about gentrification and how it works, how displacement works, and some of those factors. And one of those factors is deferred maintenance and seasonal maintenance being a huge contributor to displacement. So that’s when I came up with the model of activating allies and raising money to repair and renovate Black owned homes for free, and also provide financial assistance to Black owned small businesses to keep them in the neighborhoods they built their clientele in. And preserve our Black community, because I’m a Northeast, Portland native and I have been directly impacted by gentrification myself. I lived in the numbers, which is far east a number of my adult life because I couldn’t afford to live in the community I grew up in.

I founded Taking Ownership in 2020 just after George Floyd was murdered. We are a community-based nonprofit that provides reparations in the form of free repairs and renovations for Black owned homes and financial assistance for Black owned small businesses. And we do that through our three programs. We have a home improvement program that addresses deferred maintenance. That’s where most of the funding goes to. We spend anywhere from five to $25,000 addressing crucial repairs on homes or doing some renovations. The main goal is basically to preserve the home, maintain it, improve it, so build wealth. And that’s a big part of this, is building generational wealth, keeping the city off their back because a big factor of displacement is that disproportionately the Bureau of Development Services, actually they’re called Portland Permitting and Development, put liens and fines on Black and Brown owned homes in gentrifying areas, because affluent people are moving into those communities and complaining about the maintenance and aesthetics of their Black and brown neighbors who we all know there’s a wealth gap, pretty expensive to keep up with the homes. So that’s where we come in and keep the homes maintained and do some of the big repairs.

We have our community impact program, which addresses seasonal maintenance. So we have over 600 volunteers signed up in our database, and they come out. We do about five to seven homes a month and we’ll just clean up their yards, do anything that doesn’t require a license of bonded general contractor or vendor. So we’ll have them do whatever we can. Declutter the homes, do prep work for our contractors. Then we have our small business financial assistance program, which we do in collaboration with DevNW, which is an IDA program, which is an Individual Development Account.

I use the term reparations because we are basically repairing what has been done to our community through historical practices and policies. Because there is intentional historical and even concurrent factors and policies and practices that were put in place that have created this disparity. There’s a deferred maintenance disparity. When you look at homes that need repairs, Black and Brown homes are up there. They’re high because of the annual income. It costs a lot of money to keep up with a home. And then also who are our Black homeowners? Most of them are elders. You know what I’m saying? Most of them can’t keep up with their homes because of physical stuff, but also fixed incomes. But reparations is about repairing. Unfortunately, it takes a Black led organization to do this. It should be our city or the government doing this, but I use reparations because we’re repairing something that was intentional. They put us in this position. They wouldn’t give loans for repairing the homes back in the day. They redlined into certain areas. They’re trying to hit them with liens and fines basically, so that way they become financially vulnerable, and that way predatory developers and real estate professionals can offer under market prices to buy their homes, take them, and then do urban renewal or build condos or whatever.

We just got an investment from the 1803 fund, which is a $2.5 million investment over five years. And the 1803 fund is a foundation that is backed by Phil Knight’s contribution of almost 500 million. Because of that money now, I was able to hire four staff at the beginning of the year. So my day-to-day has changed quite a bit, now it’s a lot of delegating work that I was doing. But on the day-to-day, now I have a general contractor as our project manager who’s overseeing all of the home improvement projects right now. He’s coordinating and making sure that the people that we work with are doing quality work, that our homeowners are happy with the work, that the budgets look right, that we’re not getting screwed over by anybody. So he’s doing a lot of that coordinating and reporting back to me and making sure that we’re doing things right. We work with some pre apprenticeship programs. One in particular is Portland Youth Builders. They’re a workforce training program, a pre apprenticeship program, so we get free labor from their students and their students get hours towards their certifications in whatever trades they’re going towards. So it’s a win-win.

We write a lot of grants, lots of grant researching, and in writing them. I had just hired a director of development, so I’m getting him up to speed on what kind of narratives to use when writing grants and how to report and just the whole ins and outs of fundraising. We do events, we do presentations, so we’ve been working really hard on getting our presentation to a point where it’s smooth, it’s informative about historical factors, about the current factors, about our impact. Our big push right now is getting data. So right now we’re building systems that will collect the data that we need, because that’s gold right now. There’s not a lot of data about Black homeowners and the maintenance they need and any of that, and that’s by design. They don’t want to tell on themselves. Because you get that data, why things are the way they are, then you start unearthing some of the factors that cause that. And so, we’re trying to go after that data and get that data so we have concrete numbers.

The challenges that we have faced in the past that has been recently addressed with our investment, it’s definitely funding. The need is astronomic. So that’s why we want to do assessments on all of these homes to get an actual concrete cost of what it’s going to do to help, at least the homeowners we have on our list, so we can actually start asking for that big money. But the challenge was funding and that everything was running through me for the most part. I did have some contractors that helped, but I was getting burnt out, man. It’s just too many moving pieces for one person to be overseeing everything in all that. It’s just a big task for one person, so getting employees has been just a huge relief. And then, the cost of construction materials going up so much. I think it went up quite a bit in the start of the pandemic. And so, yeah, those have been the biggest challenges.

And then, with the lack of having employees, being able to communicate with all of our homeowners because like I said, there’s a huge need and it takes a long time to raise the money and get the work done. It takes time to complete this work. And sometimes they’re like, “Hey, I’ve been on your list for two years, what’s going on?” And so that could be tough, a challenge to be able to explain to them like, “Hey, we’re doing the best we can to get through this list as efficiently as possible.” We had a woman that accidentally burned her kitchen down. It made the whole house uninhabitable. So we came in and we fixed it up and renovated it. And it’s better than it was before, I’ll tell you that, much better. We really hooked it up. It is definitely one of our most expensive repairs. And then we brought in volunteers to clean out all the soot and do some of the decluttering, and just now she’s able to live back in the home.

There was one homeowner where he was just in such a bind with his roof was in such a bad condition, but he didn’t have the money. He was in a toss-up between if he paid for the roof, he wouldn’t be able to pay his mortgage and he could possibly have lost his house. So we came in, did all the work, and he was able to hang on to his home. There’s been a couple situations like that where people are… They have to decide between making a critical repair and paying their mortgage. It’s too bad to see that. And another huge one was, through our community impact program we’ve been partnering with Portland Permitting and Development, and one of the homes over in Albina neighborhood was getting hit with liens or fines that were accruing. And it crewed up to $90,000. We got to work with the city and they said, “Look, if you can come out and just throw a tarp on the roof board up a few things, do this, we’ll erase all that whole fine, the whole 90 K.” So we did that, and the whole 90 K was wiped away.

I think it can inspire others because it just shows that, one, that your ideas, you can share your ideas and they can literally come into fruition. You can just share them on social media. You can ask for support. I think creating a mutual aid or a group economics model can go a long ways. And then one of the big things I like to always say is, you don’t got to be an expert to make impact. I am not an expert on housing. I’m not an expert on construction. I’m not even an expert on running a nonprofit. I just put one foot in front of the other. I’ve been just getting help from the community, so this has been community driven. I’ve just been the face and I talk about it and I understand the model and the organization the most, but this doesn’t happen without community and without the people behind me that have the expertise. If it wasn’t for my buddy Zach, who is a general contractor, I wouldn’t know what the hell I’m doing. If it wasn’t for some of these other organizations I work with that have been in housing for 30 years, I wouldn’t be able to develop this model more. Because the model’s always evolving as I gain more information.

So that’s the thing, is you can make impact… But we’ve been making impact from the start. So you can make impact and then make more impact and evolve the model. And it doesn’t have to be perfect from the jump. I always live by the philosophy of it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission. So to get out there and do it. I would definitely want to get more hands on deck, because I think that’s just the need to build capacity to scale this up, is to just get more people in here and to be able to take care of those people because this is a lot of work. And I want to be able to pay people livable wages and give them the benefits and all that they deserve. We are wanting to work with more pre-apprenticeship programs because that’s the future of construction. And we want our people not only their homes to be preserved, but we want our people also doing the work to preserve it.

We’re getting big into renewable energy because climate change impacts marginalized communities the most, as we saw when we got them 116 degree days. So we’re getting a little bit into work. We’re doing a lot of collaborating, building coalitions and collectives because, more than ever, we need to be working together and pulling our services together. We don’t need to be reinventing the wheel. We need to be utilizing people that are already doing a good job at this work. So there’s a lot of that. And like I said, data, the big thing is just getting the data to create the narratives, to get the funding and to showcase the root cause of all this stuff. And then hopefully we can start creating the solutions to eliminate the root cause of this disparity in these issues in our community.

Charles Brown:
Stability begins at home. The work of Taking Ownership PDX illuminates how housing justice is fundamental to mobility justice. When Black homeowners can maintain their properties without fear of predatory fines or displacement, the entire community ecosystem strengthens. Children can stay in the same schools, elders can age in place, and generational wealth has a chance to take root. I want to thank Randal Wyatt for sharing his time and wisdom with us. If you’d like to learn more about Taking Ownership PDX, you can visit the show notes page for this episode at ArrestedMobility.com. We’ll have all the links there. If you don’t already follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, head over and tap the follow button. This podcast is totally self-funded, so please check out our Patreon, that’s the best way to contribute, join our community and get access to all new exclusive content, including a free signed copy of my new book. Thank you so much for your support. This podcast is a production of Equitable Cities with support from Puddle Creative.