PDX HSP 3: Where do wealth redistributors come from?

Trick question; they can come from anywhere. But character is key

This is the third in a series of four stories about the PDX HSP, a volunteer-run organization that collects and distributes housing reparations for local Black and Indigenous people.

For maximum effect first read Parts 1 and 2.

The issue of gentrification first arrived at my attention in 1988, while I interned at The Boston Globe. The band Living Colour played “Open Letter to a Landlord” at a summer nightclub show in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I may not have known one fact about urban renewal like the Emmanuel Hospital debacle, but I felt like the only person in the spot fluent enough to truly understand the song.

After that, the Village Voice gentrification articles in the Fresno State library’s periodicals section began to attract my eye. By the time the Orange County white flight rave-up “Colorblind” hit the next year? Gentrification was a back-burner American issue that I couldn’t leave alone.

Unlike Taking ownership’s Randal Wyatt though, I never meaningfully connected gentrification to reparations.

It was in middle school that Allison Brinkhorst began to realize she needed to possess and see through a lens of justice—not just that of charity— to live as a fulfilled person.

The PDX Housing Solidarity Project co-founder—today’s podcast guest for paid subscribers—had something close to an idyllic upbringing in suburban St. Louis Missouri. The Brinkhorsts were financially comfortable, eminently respectable, with roots generations deep into the community. The United Church of Christ, especially, helped form the girl’s sense of ethics. She happily filled her downtime by doing good works.

To be charitable, as a child, had been enough.

Then, around when gay marriage became a hot-button conversation, Brinkhorst learned at a church meeting that her chapter “was not open and affirming to LGBTQ people.”

“People were saying really hurtful things about why they didn’t support gay marriage,” she recalls. “I didn’t identify as queer at the time, but I had a lot of LGBTQ friends and felt really hurt by that.”

By the time that young Allison was looking at colleges, finding one with a tradition in social justice became top criteria. She studied sociology and women’s studies with the goal of understanding “the societal forces that create privilege, oppression, and injustice in our world” and pursued a graduate degree in non-profit management from the University of Oregon after boning up on all of the above at Iowa’s Grinnell College.

Allison Brinkhorst—development operations manager of Ecotrust by day—blushes when I tell her that getting good people like Dayrel Poindexter into the homeownership experience is the work she was born to do. Brinkhorst is a pure behind-the scenes player. And she is someone who sees great possibilities among the 35-and-unders like her, informed by the queer Northwester’s evolved sense of family. Community reinvestment means infinitely more to her generation than money for money’s sake.

“We want to do something different with our wealth and privilege than what our financial advisor is going to tell us to do.”

While I was out pondering whether performatively woke white people are the equivalent of the guy who goes on too long about feminism, Brinkhorst and Lily Copenagle and their cohort of woke realtors and at least a few anti-capitalists were going about the work of getting Dayrel Poindexter and his four children into a stabilized situation.

In a world where Poindexter’s POC friends were sometimes turning down raises in order to not have their rent raised—under the auspices of Section 8 housing—here his loan profile was getting made spiffy and attractive in the eyes of banks and lenders. Last year Poindexter mentioned his Native American heritage and found himself in line for a loan. Without HSP, that funding would never have found him.

The house that navigator Copenagle had found while giving her dog a night walk was inhabitable—all of the broken stuff was repairable—but damaged enough that it couldn’t be financed. Getting approved to buy a mortgage for the home was not possible. But someone with cash could buy it, because they wouldn’t need financing. A bank would never have to be involved. 

Copenagle and her husband had two kinds of retirement funds. One was a savings account, which they can only withdraw from with penalties. The other was investments tied up in real estate–plain old cash they could access without being punished. When Dayrel laid eyes on the prospective crib he saw in it what Lily did and let her buy the place and his family moved in. 

He now lives two blocks from Lily, a far cry from the outskirts of Atlanta. With Lily and her husband he is working on the repairs.

Thursday: PDX HSP 4: Putting a finger on fulfillment in the world of housing reparations. 

Also: This is my version of journalism busking. Yearning to tip your reporter? @Donnell-Alexander on Venmo is where you can exercise that option. Gracias!

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Be Your Own Redistributor

The tips you’ll find in this space through Thursday are all tried and true, courtesy of the PDX Housing Solidarity Project. The names have been changed because this is the way I am.

● Transfer a transferable loan with a low interest rate.

Example: Peggy Sue was ready to sell her home, which she had purchased with a VA loan. She sold the house to a homebuyer through PDX Housing Solidarity Project off-market, so the homebuyers didn't have to compete against cash and above-asking-price offers, as typically happens in NE Portland. She was also able to transfer her loan to them, which had an interest rate of just 3.5%, less than half of market interest rates at the time. The move made the house far more affordable. What’s more, Peggy Sue gave them a bit of extra time to finish the purchase.

Today’s podcast guest is Allison Brinkhorst, co-founder of the Portland Housing Solidarity Project.