African American Alliance On Homeownership Turns 25, Honors The Skanner Cofounder Bernie Foster

Twenty-five years ago, a nonprofit was formed to address the low home ownership rates within Portland’s Black community. The African American Alliance on Homeownership can now boast helping more than 1,000 Black households through the home-buying process.

”I think I’m most proud of still being so relevant to the community that we serve,” founding member and executive director Cheryl Roberts told The Skanner. 

Roberts recalls how the efforts of The Skanner cofounder and owner Bernie Foster led to an organization that now offers one-on-one counseling for prospective home buyers, home buyer education, foreclosure prevention services, estate planning, assistance with down payments and more. The organization’s mission is to help families “to obtain, retain, maintain and sustain their homes.”

“Bernie was writing about the state of Black homeownership in Portland, and we found out that we (had the lowest rates) in the nation,” Roberts said. “He convened a meeting with some community leaders and business people and neighborhood stakeholders, and said we’ve got a problem. He proposed hosting some homeownership fairs to give people access to information and funding or whatever was available. And back then, nothing was available — nothing like what we have today. Then we thought, well, it still wasn’t enough.

“We had an opportunity to apply for a grant at what is now the Portland Housing Bureau. We applied for the grant and got it, it kept spurring homeownership fairs. At the time, Bernie went to the county and Fannie Mae and other housing folks, and said ‘You need to support this, you need to be a sponsor.’”

The fairs were running strong, and continue to this day – the most recent was held last weekend. But Foster saw the need for year-round services – a vision he shared with Roberts during a run-in at the market. 

“When Bernie saw me in the store, he says, ‘We need to do more for our people. There’s a grant out, let’s write it,’” Roberts recalled.

“And we started programming…Our first program was a homebuyer coaching project, and then it led to us becoming a (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)-approved housing counseling agency.”

Pictured are some of the homeowners who have benefitted from AAAH including Lannette Luster, Chautauqua Cabine, Eva Miles, Calvin Harris, Franteece Jackson, Imani Burris, and Jewell Martin.
In 1999, as Foster dug into the data on Black homeownership in the city, the numbers were especially stark on a neighborhood level: In Albina, Black families owned 36% fewer homes in the Albina neighborhood than they had 10 years before. The 2021 census showed a 25% homeownership gap for Black Portland residents, with only 40% owning rather than renting.

It is an issue that the state legislature has focused on since 2018 through the Joint Interim Task Force on Addressing Racial Disparities in Home Ownership. As experts point out, fair housing policies enacted a half-century ago gave Black Americans better access to the housing market, but didn’t counteract systemic oppression that had led to lower wages and ingrained, discriminatory lending practices. When someone becomes the first in their family to own a home, they do not have the same generational wealth or experience navigating the real estate market as someone who comes from a long line of homeowners. 

Roberts counts herself in the second category.

“I come from a long line of generational homeowners,” Roberts said. “I’m from Illinois and I can still go home to the same property I grew up on. It stayed in the family. My father believed in homeownership, so I didn’t know anything else but that.”

Roberts said when she arrived in Portland, she was surprised by the number of people who had been renting the same property for 20 or 30 years. 

“A lot of folks got a little complacent because they were able to stay on the same property renting from the same landlord,” she said. 

Now, the AAAH works to prepare future homebuyers for the realities of buying and maintaining a home, making sure clients have a full sense of additional costs like property taxes and maintenance. And the organization is there to support homeowners who are at risk of missing mortgage payments or who are already at risk of foreclosure. A home retention and repairs program, run in partnership with the Portland Housing Bureau, provides some homeowners with free repair services.

Indeed, times have changed. When the organization was formed 25 years ago, there was no “affordability gap” between the market rate and what clients could reasonably afford to pay for a house. Now, Roberts told The Skanner, her organization helps clients contend with an average affordability gap of about $180,000 – a number that is just shy of the median home price in the Portland metro area the year AAAHO was formed. 

”It’s scary,” Roberts said. “We get creative. We’re able to couple fundings together, and we work with realtors to negotiate with sellers to do things like waive closing costs. Each transaction just takes a lot of creativity to help make that possible. The one thing is that we don’t want our homeowners to carry a greater burden than they can handle, so we always make sure they’re below that threshold so they won’t see trouble in the near future.”

She added, “We’ve had to find more resources for homebuyers, that’s all. We have to double our efforts.”

During last weekend’s housing fair, AAAH thanked Foster for his work, honoring the years he spent sounding the alarm about the homeownership gap – and how he built a coalition to do something about it. 

“I think Bernie was definitely the inspiration behind the organization,” Roberts said. “He believed in me, and what I started out doing. Now that we have several programs we’re able to offer our. homeowners and home buyers, it’s kind of a wraparound service now. To hear him say ‘I love it!’ (about the program) really made my heart melt.”

For more information, visit aaah.org/programs.