PDX HSP 4: What’s the secret to the solidarity sauce?

It might be love, but I am having issues with love

This is the fourth in a series of four stories about the Portland Housing Solidarity Project, a volunteer-run organization that collects and distributes housing reparations for local Black and Indigenous people.

For maximum effect, first read Parts 1, 2 & 3.

Lily Copenagle has new Albina neighbors in the Poindexter family, but the itch to redistribute wealth hasn’t gone away. There’s a moment in her podcast interview—below, for paid subscribers—where Copenagle enthusiastically lands on an idea for leveraging rich white allies’ assets to get wealth and equity to Indigenous and Black communities. It’s like she’s reached intellectual bliss in exploring “small acts of personal reparation” and their possibilities.

Perhaps wealth redistribution is the new yoga.

“This stuff that I ‘have’ wasn’t mine to begin with,” she continues, “and I’ve been generating equity and interest and stuff on this stuff for generations, and those parts of it really ought to have been in the hands of other people. Please, take these things, redistribute them in some sort of equitable way.”

Lily laughed once more, because the idea is at once naive and tantalizingly close.

“That’s the special sauce—or magic of this,” Copenagle says, “a bunch of people saying, Okay, we’ve got this collection of resources and challenges, right? But how can my resources and challenges be turned into a thing that can be redistributed or leveraged or somehow turned into the access to capital and wealth generation that Blacks and indigenous folks should have had, forever. And there are so many answers to that!”

Take the situation of Sharma, a local redistributor who recently decided to sell her home, which she had bought with a Veteran’s Administration loan. Sharma sold the house to a Black Portlander through the Housing Solidarity Project off-market, so the homebuyers didn't have to go up against cash and above-asking-price offers. (Above-asking-price offers are the norm in Northeast Portland.) She was also able to transfer her loan, which had an interest rate of only 3.5 percent—less than half of market interest rates at the time—to them. This made the house far more affordable. Plus, she gave them a bit of needed extra time to complete the purchase.

Or Chirona Silverstein, who sold their house a few years after they bought it. Silverstein redistributed 10 percent of the profit—$20,000 based purely on rising home values—to a Black homebuyer’s down payment fund.

I wrote this in the rain. And on my phone while on the bus, but also on the train.

Woe-is-me is not my jam; I wear my poverty like a crown, as a badge that declares: America will squander a resource as remarkable as this in the exercising of white supremacy. My whole five-thirds-of-a-man superiority trip.

That’s why, in spite of my boundless support of what the PDX HSP is doing, I struggled with the idea of taking declared reparations. If you know me you might indeed come to feel sorry for me, but do I need these people to feel bad for me on sight?

Maybe?

My friend and colleague Zeloszelos Marchandt and I had been snarking about Portland’s distinct way of lavishing niceness upon us Blacks when I guiltily lamented to Z, a trans man, that my mother never had the luxury of dissecting and critiquing the quality of wypipo niceness.

He suggested that I missed the point.

“I think I'm fine with [the niceness] but I think it's still kinda born of fear. Sometimes I can tell it's a legit brotherhood thing and that's cool. I was extra complaining because I've never had so many people wonder what I'm doing with my money. Either I'm supposed to be broke or I'm supposed to be loaded like Kobe. This is what makes me wonder about the niceness.”

On the same wintery evening that Allison Brinkhorst paid my tab I threw out my ambivalence to Dayrel Poindexter. Like, maybe every Black and Indigenous person in the US should get reparations, except me.

“I’d feel like, I got some help when I’m out here trying to defeat white supremacy on my own,” goes my explanation.

“And how long we been tryin’ that?” Poindexter shot back my way. “How long are we going to let pride get in the way of success?”

With reasoning like that my martyrdom isn’t long for this world.

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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1 Be Your Own Redistributor

The tips you’ll find in this space are all tried and true, courtesy of the PDX Housing Solidarity Project.

• Direct minimum required distributions of an IRA to a nonprofit with a down payment assistance fund. 

Example: PDX Housing Solidarity Project partners with Native American Youth and (NAYA) Family Center’s Homeownership Program to increase homeownership opportunities for Portland’s urban Native community and close the homeownership gap for Native communities. Consider a donation to NAYA to support this work.