In August 2020, after quarantining for five months during the pandemic in an apartment complex where a haze of relentless neighborhood secondhand smoke sifted into my lungs and triggered a months-long asthma attack, I decided to find out if I could buy a house of my own. I was a single mother of two and had been renting since my divorce 13 years earlier, although my ex-husband was able to purchase an expensive house. After many desperate years of low-income jobs that allowed me to work school hours to avoid child care costs, my kids were finally old enough for me to work at a steady full-time job that paid well below the amount of money needed to live comfortably, but well enough to pay my bills.
Back during the lean times, I often had to choose which bills to pay and which ones to let accrue late fees. My children always ate, with the help of SNAP, but I often went to food pantries so I too could eat — or I went without. Before the ink was dry on our divorce decree, my van died, yet I was still home half the week with my 3-year-old and we had no savings because I didn’t make enough money to save any. Pushing down my embarrassment and anxiety in order to care for my babies, I called my grandmother to ask if she could cosign a loan for a car payment. She was not well off, but she did have good credit, and was able to use it to help me out of a crisis. Grandma told me, “You’re the only one of my grandchildren who has never asked me for any help,” and by the end of the day she had cosigned a loan for me, and I had a new used car so I could continue to get to work.
I honored my grandmother’s trust in me and paid that loan first every month, before I bought groceries for my children, or gas for my car, and by 2020 I had paid that loan off in full. I was not well off, but that loan enabled me to build my credit up into the 700s, and now to my delight my local credit union told me I had been preapproved for a mortgage. My daughter and I found a lovely condo and began the process of closing on our new home. My mortgage consultant at the credit union walked me through the mountain of financial documents needed, and all went well until it came time to pay the down payment. I had saved my April tax return of $4,500, but they wanted a deposit of almost $10,000 and that was an insurmountable amount.
My dear friends Kirsten and Jon offered to gift me the money I needed to cover the down payment, and that is where I ran headlong into a wall of systemic racism. My lender informed me that it was “policy” that borrowers could only use gift funds from family members. Since they were only friends, the credit union would not accept that money as a gift. Had we been related by blood, this gift would have been accepted without question. However, as a Black woman descended from generations of enslaved people who were deliberately prevented from building generational wealth through racist governmental policies, I did not have a single family member who had $5,500 in surplus savings lying around waiting to be gifted away. No one else even owned a house — even my grandmother, who by now was living in an assisted care facility.
In despair, I implored my mortgage consultant, “How can I ever climb up if your credit union uses racist policies to gatekeep homeownership?” Luckily, I live in Massachusetts where white people are sometimes willing to hear uncomfortable truths about systemic inequity, and he asked me to tell him more. I explained to him the long history in America of hoarding wealth and power under property ownership, and how Black Americans have been deliberately prevented from accessing stepping stones to homeownership that white Americans can access — programs created by white people for white people, and designed to create a permanent barrier to equity.
I talked about redlining, and how the home in Enfield, Connecticut in which I grew up was designated as “permitted for Black people,” and how my parents were not even shown houses in redlined “white’s only” neighborhoods in Longmeadow, and how that impacted future opportunities for me and my children. I told him about how both of my grandfathers were World War II veterans who fought for their country, and were eligible for the GI bill which helped veterans with college education and home loans, but as Black men were systemically barred from accessing these due to deliberately-discriminatory bank practices designed to keep Black people from equal progress. And how that contributed to my current inability to turn to family for financial support.
I pointed out the truth: that without a mortgage, I would likely be unable to generate another $5,000 to help my children pay a down payment for their own houses in the future, and that this local credit union was choosing to continue racist policies just because they always existed, and that they could choose to change if they wanted to.
To my surprise, his bosses listened to my history lesson and agreed with me. After I submitted a letter explaining our friendship, the lender approved their gift. On Dec. 22, 2020 my children and I walked into my new home. I sent the credit union a thank you letter, and the CEO sent me a letter back thanking me for my feedback and letting me know that he shared my story with their entire agency. I hope that because of my story, others who would have been barred from progress by inequitable and oppressive systems of racism and classism, are now given pathways to homeownership.
A depressing number of Americans believe that poverty is a moral failing and believe the false propaganda that everyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps if they really wanted to. They sneer at those who need help, and presume that everyone’s pathway looks the same. But what if you don’t have any boots? What if the country in which you were born issued boots to everyone else, but actively prevented you from buying boots? What if the stores that sold the boots were “whites only” and you were never allowed in?
If the bootstraps aren’t attached to boots that everyone can access, then the moral failing isn’t with those without boots — it’s with those who hoard them.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton.