by Ezra Berkley Nepon
BUYING
In 2001 I bought a house in Philadelphia in partnership with a close friend. We called our new relationship “homownersexual” because we were queers in a committed partnership with each other that had nothing to do with marriage or monogamy. We bought a three story, five bedroom house that was in good shape for $25,000, with a personal loan from her grandparents and an agreement to pay it back at a relatively low interest rate (7%). We collected a total of $625 month from the combined rent of the housemates (including ourselves), which paid the mortgage and bills plus a little for home repair savings.
We and our various housemates were white flamboyantly-gendered queers moving into a neighborhood that was 99% working poor African-American. Prior to this move, I had been living for a number of years in the Baltimore Avenue neighborhood of West Philly, where gentrification is a major issue, but where the neighborhood had also long been home to a mixed race and class community. Though the neighborhood (now called Cedar Park) that I had lived in was majority African-American, there were also a number of African and Asian immigrant communities, multiple white communities (in this case I mean sub-cultural communities), and the income/class breakdown of the neighborhood changed dramatically from block to block. In that context, it was easier to feel part of a community with lots of different people, even if that was rationalizing.
In the house we bought and moved into in the Parkside neighborhood, it was immediately clear that we were outsiders. We bought the house because we knew the only white people in the neighborhood, a couple with a great reputation among their neighbors which helped people feel more comfortable with us, but we still had a lot of answering to do. At the time, we wrestled with concerns that we were invading a Black community, and how we could be good, thoughtful neighbors as a sort of harm reduction. Though we eventually built real (if not deep) trust with many of our neighbors, we often felt open hostility from people in the broader neighborhood and we could understand that it was coming in response to the real threat of impending displacement that our presence suggested.
I’m thankful for the relationships I built on that block, but if I had it to do over again, I would not move there. Years later, I have more experience and language for understanding the gentrification process, and how it relates to larger processes of colonization, but I don’t necessarily have clearer answers to how we could have done it more right. The ongoing feeling that I was invading a Black community never went away. And it wasn’t just about race, it was also clearly about class. We were from a range of class backgrounds, but as a household we didn’t fit the class makeup of our neighborhood any more than we fit it racially.
We had anti-capitalist intentions, but we were hazy on the strategy. We made a commitment to each other that we wouldn’t sell the house for a profit, and definitely never to a developer. We didn’t really imagine selling the house, though, so we never put anything in writing, and that made things difficult when we faced the reality of actually selling the house in a capitalist system. We planned to live there for a long time, to take an old house and restore it with the labor of ourselves and our friends, with recycled and trashpicked materials. We wanted to create a home that felt safe and comfortable for our queer community to take refuge in. We didn’t want to pay rent to a shady landlord. We wanted our broken friends to have a place to heal without needing to work a job to pay rent. We dreamed about the projects we would start once the house was paid off, like solar panels and roof decks for gardens. I think we did succeed in creating the feeling of both a cozy home and a place of refuge for ourselves and many other people, and we did some exciting restoration and painted the house a ton of bright colors and paid our friends to work on the house when projects were beyond our own skills. All of the people who lived in the house also worked on house-fixing projects, and there was an explicit agreement that both working on the house and paying rent were investments in the house, that the worth of the house belonged to all who invested in it, and that if the house was never sold that investment would be a more philosophical one, a gift of community-building for the future people who would live in the house. We were completely transparent about how we paid the mortgage and bills, and any financial decisions were made collectively. There was a power-imbalance in the reality that two of us technically owned the house (though we were open to adding others to the deed), and that power did matter, but as much as possible we tried to be honest and open in any negotiations around money and power in the house. I think we were successful, and other housemates reflected that it was meaningful to know that they were not just paying rent in our house, and to feel that it was actually a collectively-owned home.
SELLING
About five years later, the house was paid off but the relationships of the group living in the house had dramatically changed. Our lives were shifting in ways that didn’t make group living/homeownership a functional option. After lots of heartbreak about letting go of the sense of family we had felt in the house, those of us still living there decided to sell it. We looked into land-trusting the house but didn’t pursue it. For me, that was partly because land trusts permanently end the financial asset of owning a home and I wanted the option of putting the house up for bail or selling it to raise funds in the case of an emergency. We bought this house right after the traumatizing Philadelphia RNC protests, where many of my loved ones and political community were kept in jail with bails set as high as $1 million, and in the aftermath where legal expenses cost tens of thousands for some individuals who were targeted by the Philly police for their political organizing, charged with layers of felonies and facing massive repression. A week after buying the house, I used it as collateral to bail a friend out of jail. I wanted to keep that option open as an ongoing resource.
We envisioned our perfect situation for selling the house: African-Americans engaged in anti-gentrification work, and with enough income that the sale price wasn’t likely to lead to bank foreclosure. These criteria were largely about hoping that the house wouldn’t be flipped or lost to developers through our sale. We made a clear commitment to each other that we would not sell the house through word of mouth in our white subculture. This was especially challenging because our white neighbors, who had told us about the house in the first place, had a friend that they wanted to buy our house. He was pre-approved for $100,000 loan and ready to buy, so turning him down risked offending him and our neighbors. The house ended up sitting empty for a few months while we negotiated with the eventual buyers, and this further frustrated our neighbors and their friend.
We put out word about our house to people on our block and through an organization of African-American anti-gentrification activists in a nearby neighborhood, and that’s how we found buyers.
There were lots of other external pressures confusing me about how to sell the house in an ethical but not white-guilt-stupid way. All my neighbors and family were telling me that we were making a mistake by selling the house right before impending gentrification (related to a new fancy technology charter school in the neighborhood), and by selling for too little money. Also, as we were deciding to sell the house, there was a drive-by shooting murder on our block that I witnessed in broad daylight along with about 20 other neighbors. I worried that my people would think we were white-flighting to a safer neighborhood. In the end, the housing bubble burst just after we sold, and I realized that a number of other neighbors were moving or planning to move off the block after that violence, too. To be honest, it turned out that most of our neighbors didn’t care that much if or why we moved.
We tried to be as careful as possible about where we put money in this process. We didn’t work with a realtor, and we used a lawyer recommended by the network that we connected with to spread word about the house. We didn’t originally get the house appraised. Instead, I looked at online house sale records from city hall for my block and came up with $60,000 as a number that seemed like a good deal but in line with recent sale prices. The buyers counter-offered to buy the home for $45k, and we really struggled with confusion about what was fair. We had recently discovered that the oil tank was leaking a huge problem that we had told the buyers about but did not plan to fix before the sale (they might want to switch to gas heat, which can be a subsidized process). We also perceived that selling too low could negatively impact other neighbors’ property values. So, we got the house appraised and even with knowledge of the leak, the appraisal came in at $65k,. My co-owner and I agreed that $60k was a fair price, said it was a final offer, and the buyers agreed to the purchase.
The three of us who had been the final housemate group decided to donate $10,000 of that sale price to a number of housing justice/anti-gentrification groups in West Philadelphia and to split the rest of the money between the 7 people who had lived in the house for six months or more, pro-rated by number of months paying rent. This way, we each got back about 75% of the money we had paid in rent. We had never made an explicit agreement about what it meant that the house was collectively owned so this money was a surprise to many of the former housemates. I wrote a letter to each person who was getting money with an explanation of how we sold the house and how the money was divided so that the process would be as transparent as possible.
We made donations anonymously through donor-advised grants through Bread and Roses Community Fund, after meeting with an anti-gentrification activist who gave helpful advice about where she thought these grants would be most useful, and what amounts made sense. We chose to give anonymously because the buyers were members of some of these groups and it felt like an awkward dynamic. The community fund put out an announcement about the grants that came from the sale of a house and received a large number of donations in response!
Questions for Potential Homeowners
Since initially publishing this article, I’ve often thought about how the super-low cost of our home $25,000 was key to our ability to be creative, flexible, even experimental in our process of buying, living in, and selling the house. Though gentrification has continued to evolve in the almost-decade since I wrote this article, I know Philly’s housing market is still much more affordable than many other cities where my friends are trying to buy homes. So, of course the specifics of this story won’t easily apply to all situations, but the experience did raise a number of financial and ethical issues that I encourage people to consider when buying or selling a house:
- Where is your money going? Are there ways to fund movements/people involved in movements for social justice with those big chunks of money that go to lawyers, realtors, contractors, moving companies?
- Who are you asking for input or advice about this process? Are there ways that you can connect with activists in your neighborhood or city, so that the choices you make are informed by more than your own perspective? Is anyone challenging you?
- Who understands and shares your political commitments? Lots of people will tell you that you are making mistakes if you diverge from the path of wealth-accumulation and resource-hoarding. Even if you feel sure of your position, it really helps to have supportive allies.
- Can you buy or sell through word of mouth rather than paying a realtor, and that way keep the sale price lower and the process less commercial?
- How do you choose your lawyer for the final sale paperwork? Do you need a lawyer?
- How will your sale price impact the home-owners and renters in your neighborhood?
- Are you making a profit? What happens to that money? How much money did you put into the house? How much do you “need” or “deserve” to keep? Can you direct any percentage of that money into movements for housing justice or other liberation movements? Current tax laws make it unlikely that you’ll be paying taxes on income from the sale of a house. If taxes really worked as a form of wealth distribution (which of course they don’t), how much would you be willing to pay?
- If you do keep some money from the sale of your home (as I did), where does that money live? Do you earn interest? Under what circumstances would you be willing to spend it or give it away?
Thanks for writing this. I think about buying a place all the time because it seems silly to give what money I have to a landlord. On the flipside, there is so much power and responsibility that comes with home ownership. Living NYC makes issues of gentrification especially complicated. If I ever have the money to buy a home in NYC, I will now at least have a resource for how to do it responsibly.
Hey Erica glad you are excited about this piece, thanks for commenting! Since moving to nyc I’ve wondered about how the steps we took selling our house in philly could transfer in such an expensive market… since we were able to buy our house for such a low price, it was still (relatively) affordable even after the property value more than doubled!
I’d be really interested to hear if anyone has stories about buying/selling in cities other than philly with an econ justice analysis.
I’m so glad I read this article to know there are folks out there aware of how their race and class makes gentrification such a difficult and touchy issue to discuss let alone deal with firsthand. I really admire all the steps you and your housemates took to make sure the selling of your house was completely fair and ‘de-gentrified’ if that’s a word. I’m from Ohio and moved to NYC a year ago after graduating college in Kentucky. Never in my life did I imagine seeing gentrification with my own eyes would be as difficult than when I moved to Harlem. To see it and then to know that it’ll be a long time before I can achieve one of my biggest goals in owning a home as a young, black, female NYC-transplant–is downright upsetting sometimes. But this post just gave me hope!
this was awesome to read, since i am just starting to look into buying my first house and i want to have lots of people living in it with me. (although i’m doing it in cambridge, ma, which means that the worries about gentrification aren’t so much on my shoulders. cambridge will continue to gentrify and re-gentrify with or without my help).
you mentioned that you collected $675 a month in rent total, and i have a couple practical questions about that:
1. were utilities and such separate and divided equally, or were they included in that number?
2. if there was an empty room for a month, did everyone’s rent go up? when someone extra was on the couch, did everyone’s rent go down?
3. could you articulate why you chose to include the houseowners in those payments? since you had already paid a chunk of change up front to purchase the house, i was surprised that you paid a portion of the mortgage as well.
the questions you pose at the bottom of the post are really excellent. i’ve yet to figure out my answers, but thank you again for this!
Thanks for sharing this. It’s great to hear about other models for real estate deals. I recently bought a condo with the help of my family, and am uncomfortable with the gentrification going on in my town — I certainly acknowledge my contribution to that process, but I also feel that the process had initiated long before I made the decision to buy. I am still not sure where my feelings lie on this issue. In any case, I loved reading about your alternative model for homeownership. You’ve posed some really good questions to think about, that I will keep in mind!
Hey, I came here through Feministing. This is a really interesting post. Buying a house with a group of people would be my dream, but here in the San Francisco area, where most houses are over a million dollars, I don’t know how I could ever afford that. (And I love the term “homeownersexual”!)
This sounded great on first read – but on the second? There was something here that made me … itch in my brain. Like would you ever say…
(flip edit)
it was immediately clear that we were outsiders and probably invaders. We bought the house because we knew the only (change to Black) people in the neighborhood,…(cut)… if I had it to do over again, I would not move there – the ongoing feeling of being an invader in Philly’s (change to White) community never went away.
(end edit)
Just… there is something wrong there.
Hi Lauren,
I think it is true that the same statement would be very different if the identities of the people moving in and the racial geography of the neighborhood were switched as they were in your edit. The reason it changes the meaning so much is that racialization does not occur equally and without a power dynamic. The process of gentrification, and the racial dynamic of white people moving into black neighborhoods and the displacement that results isn’t the same thing that happens when black people move into white neighborhoods. In general, racial dynamics don’t go both ways. One group has the benefit of enormous historical and contemporary structural power and privilege and the other group has a history of enslavement and a contemporary reality of pervasive oppression and marginalization. United for a Fair Economy has a really great training curriculum about the Racial Wealth Divide on their website (see the Enough links page) that gives some really good context about homeownership across race and the histories of government policies that created this massive wealth divide and continue to maintain it. It may be a useful resource for thinking about why the context of white supremacy creates racist dynamics in gentrification that only operate in one direction. It’s also just a cool tool to look through.
hello again and thanks so much for the comments!
miss concrete jungle (love that name!), I think de-gentrified is a brilliant word and that was definitely the intention behind our choices. glad it gives you hope! it’s even hard to rent here in nyc, let alone buy, but I’m inspired by what I’ve seen of groups like picture the homeless that are pointing out the hypocrisies in the system. the process of gentrification is so bold here… it makes sense that you’re upset by it!
Lee- great questions!
1. after our first year in the house collecting bills split between housemates, we changed to budgeting our monthly total “rent” to include enough $$ for bills to make it a consistent one monthly payment. that relieved a lot of annoying process! I really recommend it. also, bills were way higher in winter, but we paid more throughout the year so we’d have $ in the house bank account to pay them by the time it got cold. I think we based bill amounts on prior years plus our guess at inflation.
2. We had a lot of longterm guests and if I remember some of them gave $$ but that would have just been extra. at some point we decided to keep it at 3 instead of 4 housemates and agreed to split the costs 3 ways, but if one room was empty for a month between roomates I think we would have just lost the income. It would have been harder to negotiate if the costs were higher, but I think we managed to work it out without much complication because we budgeted in money for savings for the house.
3. well, the thing is that we hadn’t really paid a chunk of change up front, we had borrowed the money from family members – so it made sense that we would be equals in paying it back.
thanks for reading and asking these great questions!
oh one more thing to Lee – we paid $675 to the “mortgage” (really personal loan) but I think we collectively paid in about $900-$1000 a month, $250-$300 each.
Hi Lauren, thanks for writing and asking about what if the race dynamic was flipped, and thanks Dean for commenting, too, with a bigger picture response. I thought about that so often, because many of my neighbors made a point to tell me that they don’t discriminate against white people as part of meeting me. It really brought it home how many white neighborhoods (historically and currently!) would see people of color as invading, and given that reality how emotionally generous my neighbors were being to welcome us explicitly.
and there was something really specific about being white women in a black neighborhood – we could have used the racist police as a weapon against our neighbors, and everyone knew it.
thanks for commenting and asking about it.
I thank everyone for the very kind and imformative replies.
I wasn’t implying you were wrong in any way – just thinking about how the text somehow doesn’t read backwards and – just what is the implication of that in terms of power? In terms of the right to live where you want and someone else and their desire to live how they want?
Like – if someone who can’t mess up your life ( because of power/priv/etc) moves into your neighborhood is that the same as if someone with less impact moves in? What is joining and what is ‘invading’? (Which you used here so…?) Where do we see the shift between doing good and just feeling good and – there is just a lot here that like I said makes my brain itch.
This article is incredibly uplifting, it provides so much valuable insight for buying a home. I’m a long ways away from owning a home, honestly, I’ve never really considered it as a possibility.
But your experience is very inspiring, as I don’t feel like I’ll be trapped into a narrow-minded option: dealing with realtors, contractors, lawyers. Obviously, I would ask for advice, and I’m sure this wasn’t a walk in the park for you. But I admire the time you took to do the research, and going with your gut feeling.
Thank you for sharing this information. I’m glad that I’ve found your blog.
Thanks for this cool piece. I’m part of a collective that owns a house in Toronto and we wrestle with lots of this stuff too – in particular how to then organize in our neighbourhood without contributing to gentrification.
I’m sending this to my collective..
wow! this article is amazing!!! as are the responses.
it is really cool to see our process layed out like this. we really did put a lot of thought into it and spent endless hours around the kitchen table talking about what we were doing and how do we do it right? but looking back and learning from it we can really see all of our loopholes – what we didn’t see and what we chose not to.
i recently bought a house here in minneapolis (closed end of august). i did it entirely on other people’s credit, opportunized on the foreclosure crisis here in mpls, and now have 2 big loans to pay off.
i definately did things very different this time in regards to gentrification. i chose to stay in the neighborhood i have been living in since i moved back to town which is about 50/50 rent/owned, mixed income but not poverty, and ethnically diverse. i wanted to stay in an area that 1)i am already connected to and don’t feel like i am transplanting just to “own”, and 2) my lifestyle/class/access to priviledge does not tip the scales and undermine the economic eco-system (for lack of a better way to put it) that already exists here.
that said, we all know that people are losing their homes every day in this city and country, be it their own or the one they rent that gets foreclosed on. and it’s this very thing that makes it possible for someone else to buy. that is, the people who are getting foreclosed on probably would *be able to keep their homes* if the situation for them was how *it is right now* for the next person. so royally fucked up!!!!!
and put on top of that my decision to want to be the sole person at the bottom line, yet live collectively. what the fuck? an interesting example of that for me is:
i decided to roll into rent $25/month per person to go towards two different Native American organizations in town – my idea of “back rent”. what feels strange about something like that is, i am not deciding this with other people, i’m deciding it for them. i am very transparent with my money, where it came/comes from and where it’s going. and even though i have no intention to sell and absolutely don’t think in terms of equity, you and i both know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and shit happens. but so (for example) when a housemate is all psyched up to do a project that i don’t consider to be a priority but definitely “improves” the house in some way, should they be compensated because they are – technically, in the capitalist society we live in – padding my coffers, even though i don’t want it padded?
these are just some of my quandries, day in and day out.
any ideas insights or criticism is greatly appreciated!
Volyina ( and Emily ),
I am glad to be a part of this blog effort. I am of course proud of how you folks conducted your homownersexualshipness. I had a small part in helping in the Baltimore Ave. house and later in the house that was purchased, doing some maintenance items and repairs.
In answer to your questions about “should they be compensated because they are – technically, in the capitalist society we live in – padding my coffers, even though i don’t want it padded?”, my answer would be no, they should not be, unless you want to do so. We all need to be able to learn to accept graciously, and often it can be a turn off to be paid for what you wish to volunteer to do. It makes no more sense to me to consider paying people for their generosity that it apparently made to you all to expect to be paid for your generosity to the larger community you donated to. Guilt is often behind the need to pay (or gifting back) for other’s gifts to you. Don’t go there.
Do what you feel comfortable doing, and if you feel a need to pass something back, pass it up or down the line. Don’t feel that you have to reciprocate directly. That is what I feel you accomplished with the house in Philly. Don’t lose the message. Accept graciously, and act generously. Emily taught me that!
Miss Nepon,
This reeks of reverse racism and foolish anti-capitalism/socialism. Do you really think that by refusing to sell to whitey (even though you yourself were white and bought in the neighborhood) that you were stemming off any growth in the neighborhood? Did you think that just because a family is black, they would not have the intellect to turn around a sell to a developer for a profit? Turning down a hundred thousand dollar offer and practically giving the house away to a black family actually would guarantee that, as I see it. I think that your presumption that a black family would not sell for a profit and to a developer if they got the opportunity that is actually like having blinders on. I myself am black and I would view this as a foolish move on your part. Yes, I would turn around and flip the house for a forty thousand dollar profit if I had the chance. Just because I am of an oppressed people would not mean that I would turn down an opportunity, as you yourself did. This is just the beginning of how this piece smacks of bigotry, prejudice and, sorry to say, foolishness. It is just an idea that is cloaked in liberal do-gooding that does not work. If the neighborhood was so scary to live in that you would not move back, what makes you think your black neighbors would NOT want it gentrified and made better for their families? I’ve been there, I grew up in it and I want better for myself. Just like you do. Sorry, I just don’t buy this as a shining beacon.
how exciting that this post has so many comments! Thanks Voltina and “neponatron’s dad,” if that is your real name(!), for adding your 2 cents.
Serena, I think you’re missing a crucial point in how we found people to buy the house. We didn’t sell to people just because they were black, but because they were committed anti-gentrification activists with intentions to not flip the house because of those politics. We looked for buyers through an organization of black anti-gentrification activists because the neighborhood was 99% African-American. Our intention was to sell to people who wouldn’t flip it. That said, the owners can do whatever they decide is right and we didn’t write any clauses into the deed to make sure it wouldn’t be flipped.
We sold the house for twice what we had paid for it, and $5,000 less than the appraisal. I don’t see that as giving the house away to people just because they are black. We had figured out that $60k was the right amount to sell for, to not mess with the home values of others on our block, and that’s why we didn’t sell for $100k, or $45k when the buyers tried to talk us down. It was hard to stick to that number, but I’m glad it worked out.
I also want to clarify that I didn’t move out of the neighborhood because it was scary. I say I wouldn’t move there again because for five years I didn’t feel right about taking up space as a house of white people in a black neighborhood. I’ve talked about why I don’t think that’s “reverse racism” in other comments.
Thanks for joining this conversation.
I just read this article now. It’s amazing how you got so much useful information into such a short, practical piece of writing, instead of really going into detail about the trials and tribulations, which would have been understandable.
It’s inspiring how you never betrayed your high hopes of chosen family and being responsible to the world you want to live in, even when it got hard and you had to balance those things with the conditions you were dealing with. This is a great resource and should be sent all around to activist communities around the country.
I understand that but where does it take us?
Jack Kevorkian for White House Physician. 🙂
I really appreciate this article. I’m reflecting on how and why it made me uncomfortable. Partly this is because of internalized myths of wealth accumulation. Thanks for posting this!