MIT hackathon team members prepare to pitch their idea for tackling the racial wealth gap.
MIT Professor Karilyn Crockett (standing, right) chats with hackathon participants.
Discussions center around affordable housing
Hackathons usually involve computer programmers and sometimes engineers gathering together to brainstorm, trying to solve a technical challenge. But the 75 activists, faith leaders and students assembled for a hackathon at MIT last weekend were focused on an economic and social challenge: the racial wealth gap.
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no bigger challenge than the racial wealth gap,” explained Karilyn Crockett, a professor of urban history, public policy and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who organized the novel hackathon.
Teams of collaborators spent a spring Saturday gathered around small tables inside a cavernous MIT building that fronts on Massachusetts Avenue, trying to extract from historical archives potential solutions to the massive wealth gap between white and Black residents of Boston.
The second “Hacking the Archive” session on May 20, which followed another in 2019, narrowed the focus to housing as a prime generator of wealth at a time affordable homes are hard to find locally.
One
of three winning teams proposed a radical solution: abandoning
traditional homeownership for more feasible options that can still build
wealth.
“We felt that
the barriers to homeownership are the stock. We don’t have stock in the
city of Boston,” Connie Forbes said during the team’s five-minute
pitch, referring to the supply of existing homes and their high cost.
“Why
not look at alternatives that not only provide a stable housing
situation, but also equity? So co-ops — and there are several in the
community that I am from that were built by churches,” said Forbes, a
Roxbury resident.
Residents
of co-ops, or housing cooperatives, buy shares in the company that owns
the building and pay maintenance fees in exchange for the right to
occupy a unit. A co-op’s rules may allow shareholders to sell their
shares at market rates or limit the price that residents can get when
they move out.
Forbes
pointed to Marksdale Gardens, built by St. Mark’s Congregational Church
and converted to a co-op in 1984, and St. Joseph’s Community, named
after a nowclosed Catholic church. Both of these Roxbury co-ops were
built in the 1960s and limit the equity that residents can earn when
they sell.
“You don’t
have a mortgage that locks you in for 30 years,” she said in an
interview. “It’s a combination of homeownership and rental at its best.”
Forbes
said she lives in a house that has been in her family for three
generations. “We couldn’t live where we are now if we had to come in
this year, or even the last 10 years,” she said.
Another
team member, Breana Norris, lives in Somerville as she attends the
Harvard Divinity School and works for Greater Boston Legal Services.
Norris said she could wind up inheriting her parents’ home in Los
Angeles or her grandparents’ home.
“They’ve already created their intergenerational wealth,” Forbes said of Norris’ family.
Other
alternatives to home ownership that the team endorsed were community
land trusts like that of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative,
lease-to-own arrangements and “shared-equity deed-restricted homes,”
which can be resold after 30 or more years for a set price, limiting
appreciation and thus keeping them affordable for the next generation of
buyers.
Asked whether
the team was calling for abandoning the American dream of
homeownership, Forbes replied, “The dream has to come into the 21st
century, at least in the urban areas.”
Other teams suggested ways that suburban churches, in particular those affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry in Roxbury, could help increase Black wealth.
Those
recommendations include suburban churches spending more money with
businesses owned by people of color, reassessing how their endowments
are invested, advocating for additional affordable housing “in their own
suburbs” and raising funds to support low- or no-interest loans to buy
homes in Roxbury.
One
Black church in Dorchester is moving to add to the supply of affordable
housing. Pleasant Hill Baptist Church plans to partner with Nuestra
Comunidad Development Corporation to build 29 units beside and behind
the church on Humboldt Avenue, according to Rev. Miniard Culpepper, the
church’s pastor. Community meetings and zoning hearings are expected to
occur this summer.
The
Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry, Greater Boston Interfaith
Organization and Morning Star Baptist Church were among the community
partners participating in the interracial, intergenerational hackathon.
Two
more are planned in coming years, organized by Crockett and funded by a
grant from the endowment of Trinity Church Wall Street in New York
City.
Separately,
Crockett is partnering with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to update
the 2015 “Color of Wealth” report that showed a yawning disparity
between the assets of the city’s white and Black residents. She has
indicated it will take three years to complete the new report, which
will be expanded to examine the situation in the Boston metropolitan
area and Gateway Cities around the state, using a larger sample of
residents.
That report, Crockett said, will explore the root causes of the racial wealth gap and model strategies for closing it.