Home Ownership Help

A Way to Evade Homelessness & Feel Glad to Be Alive

A couple years ago, I had the privilege to listen to hundreds of public housing residents and people using Section 8 vouchers to help them pay rent in a major metropolitan area. The housing authority that had hired my team wanted to know how residents and voucher participants were doing and what improvements the program could make. One big idea that surfaced was beyond the scope of what the housing authority could do, at least within existing regulations and budgets, but that idea has intrigued me to this day: help people buy their own homes. 

I own my current home - well, the bank does, but every payment I make takes me that much closer to this place being MINE (well, my husband’s and mine, but you get the point), which will give me a true asset if ever I get in trouble in the future. The peace of mind that comes with that is invaluable, especially for someone like me who struggles with compound PTSD, major depression, and anxiety and probably will for the rest of life.

Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on but the rent (Thanks, Gwen Guthrie, for this lyric! Rest in peace.)

Back when I was new to sobriety and to living in Colorado, my husband and I were renting a 1-bedroom apartment in one of the lowest cost communities in the Denver metro area, which at the time was experiencing rapid economic growth. Recreational marijuana use had just been legalized, and businesses and people were flooding into the Denver metro area. Rental rates were skyrocketing along with it. We could barely afford the apartment we had, and we were notified that rent would be increased at the end of our first year there. 

My husband was having a hard time keeping a job because of the excruciating physical pain he experienced by doing the work he was trained to do, and I had begun having trouble working the long hours expected of me because my PTSD was getting triggered badly. All the past trauma that led me to drink alcoholically in the first place had begun to loom large in my periphery, and I hadn't been able to find good help locally.  

I was terrified that we weren’t going to make it. There I was standing on the edge of homelessness for the second time (the first was at the peak of my alcoholism) - in a place where we had no social network to cushion a potential fall over that edge. I felt boxed in, suffocated by the lack of options. Yes, options would’ve been like oxygen. There is no better analogy.

And it gets much worse than we had it.

A good friend of mine lives on $1,200 each month from her disability check, plus a little extra that she gets from gig work. Her rent had increased by $100 per month a year and a half ago, and six months ago, she was facing another $125 increase. All told, even with the little extra gig money, she would’ve had a maximum of $350 to live on each month after paying rent. There was no guarantee that rent wouldn’t go up again the next year, and the thought of her disability check increasing was laughable at best. Most of the money she had to live on went to the food she could buy in the monthly grocery shopping trip a friend would take her on, since she didn’t have her own car or money to pay for other ways to get around. This meant that frozen and packaged foods were her primary source of sustenance, offering minimal benefits to support healthy brain and body function.

She was feeling absolutely panicked when she reached out to me about this, collapsing under the weight of living in poverty and wondering why this had to be her life. Her situation was much more extreme than what I had experienced, but I vividly remembered the panic I felt in my own version of this situation. 

I wanted to help as I had in the past when extra expenses came up for her, but I was in the midst of a major life change and had no extra funds. Thank God for a person dear to me in my life with whom I happened to share my worries about my friend, who also happened to be visiting her mentor at the time and whose mentor happened to have recently shifted her philanthropic efforts to giving to individuals instead of organizations. That person, three degrees removed from my friend, wrote a check to cover an entire year of my friend’s rent increases.

I delivered the check in person when I was in town next, and I drove her to the property manager’s office to give the check directly to them, per my friend’s wishes. I couldn’t help but think how wrong it felt. This real estate agency was getting the donation, it seemed, simply because they had the gall to continue to raise rent on people who could barely afford to make ends meet. 

Was that rent increase really necessary? I mean, that donation (if still available to her) would’ve been transformational for my friend in terms of covering the cost of healthier food, being able to pay for rides to get healthier food on a weekly basis, not to mention paying for a little fun and joy…the stuff that makes us feel human and whole, the stuff that might make her feel like she could put herself out there to date and maybe find love and feel less lonely. Yeah, human stuff, the things that make us feel grateful that we are alive and even prompt us to give back to the world in whatever ways we can.

Back to this idea of home ownership as a way to evade homelessness…

Getting into home ownership was not something I could do on my own, or even that my husband and I could do together. Even with the decent income I have generated through my work over the years, it wasn’t possible to save enough money for a down payment to use any time in the near future, especially with increasing rent without commensurate increases in income. 

How were we able to buy our first home together then? Like most people do, it seems - from parents providing the down payment (and for us, co-signing the loan in order to get a good interest rate). My parents, retired school teachers, were never in a position to help with a down payment, but his parents have income from a large trust that was passed down to his mother from her great aunt. Family money. She didn’t earn it, but there it was. 

We didn’t earn it either, but there we were in a life-changing situation. For me, it felt especially born of pure luck because I was lucky enough that a person with whom I fell in love and that fell in love with me and wanted to marry me came from a family with actual wealth. We went from paying $1,200 per month in rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in a low-income area to paying a $790 fixed rate monthly mortgage bill for a 2-bedroom house in an area where investments were likely to (and did!) pay off big due to state and local infrastructure investments nearby and wild increases in the housing market generally. (Increases, by the way, that seemed to cause more people, especially those who rented or had adjustable rate mortgages, to lose their housing.) 

Imagine a public system that helps more people to do this, something more accessible and reliable than the pure luck in my story. Imagine for a minute what this kind of help could do for my friend living on disability. I’m guessing that what comes to your mind is something that amounts to a total game-changer. Perhaps even enough of a game-changer that comes with increased peace of mind and overall wellness, which could translate into her being able to turn her extra gig work into a manageable level of business such that she wouldn’t have to rely on disability payments…as long as she would still be able to receive good healthcare benefits to manage her disability. Such a result could also be transformational for the public system, making best use of public resources and helping people change their lives rather than stay stuck treading water in life-defeating poverty. 

I know this idea of helping people who are unhoused or very insecure to own their own homes is just part of the story. In fact, for me, I again found myself teetering on the edge of homelessness a couple years later because of several factors: 1) I was struggling to build a new consulting practice in a new place, 2) my depression had become severe and life-threatening, and 3) I desperately needed quality mental health care but had no insurance or money to provide for it because my husband made just enough money to disqualify us for state insurance. We made it through those dark times with the help of my husband’s parents - lucky again.

That said, for people who aren’t as lucky as I was, I have to believe that there is a better, more reliable way to prevent them from experiencing the trauma of homelessness and to relieve the sometimes overwhelming panic of living in poverty. 

There must be.

Just imagine.