PORTLAND, ORE. -- When Annie Moss decided to sell their second home in 2020, making the most money possible from the sale was not a top priority. It wasn’t even a priority at all.
“I wanted to sell it to a Black family,” said Moss, who is white. “And I didn’t care if I wasn’t maximizing my profit in doing that.”
And that’s exactly what they did.The buyer was Randal Wyatt, a single father of two who grew up in a nearby neighborhood.
“I was skeptical the whole time up until the day we closed,” Wyatt said of the sale. “I was like, ‘This is gonna fall through. This isn’t gonna happen. This is too good to be true.’”
Wyatt bought the house for what was left on Moss’ mortgage: $230,000. At the time, real estate company Zillow estimated the fair market value of the home to be about $644,000.
That means Wyatt walked away with more than $400,000 in home equity. It was the most financial wealth he had ever accumulated in his life.
“I have assets now,” he said. “I have the ability to buy another home in the future.”
Moss, who originally bought the house to live in in 2013 for $406,000, lost out on what could have been more than $200,000 in profit. But the sale was never about making money. For Moss, this unique real estate transaction was about redistributing generational wealth via home ownership.
“Owning a home was part of my privilege and has really been a big factor in my life,” said Moss. “I wanted to do something that was based in that value and in all of the beauty that homeownership had brought into my life.”
The transaction between Moss and Wyatt inspired a more organized wealth redistribution effort in Portland. A group of volunteers who call themselves PDX Housing Solidarity Project helps connect people with ample resources to Black and Indigenous homebuyers in Portland. Amid a statewide housing crisis, the group sees their work as both mutual aid and as a form of reparations.
PDX Housing Solidarity Project has three goals: educate people about racial disparities in homeownership, build the practice of wealth redistribution and support Black and Indigenous homeownership in Portland. The group launched in 2022 with a listserv and began to grow its community.
Including the original sale between Moss and Wyatt, the project has helped seven Black or Indigenous families buy homes in Portland. Two more home sales are nearing completion. Not all the transactions the group helped facilitate mirror that of Moss and Wyatt’s direct home sale. Some homebuyers needed assistance navigating meetings with realtors and mortgage brokers. Others received cash gifts or a no-interest loan to cover things like a down payment.
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