Source: United Housing
For almost 30 years, United Housing has acted as an integral resource to homebuyers throughout Memphis. Providing homebuyer and finance education, the group has worked to ensure that residents in Shelby County are knowledgeable about the complicated process of buying a home. Memphis magazine sat down with their executive director, Amy Schaftlein, and grants and communications manager, Rachel Starks.
Memphis: United Housing has strived to help Memphis for years. For somebody who is unfamiliar with your organization, tell us who you are and what you do.
Schaftlein: United Housing is a nonprofit housing provider. We provide homebuyer, financial literacy, and budgeting education, as well as credit counseling. All of this is centered around increasing access to the homeownership industry as a wealth-building tool for families. Education is one of the big areas of our mission. The second area is lending. We have a mortgage lending program, which is not like working with the bank, and provides pathways to financing that many folks can’t get access to. So, it is kind of a step into the door to get access to financing for either homeownership in terms of down payment systems or first mortgages.
Something interesting you touched on is the education aspect. When you work with Memphians, what is something that many might be missing when it comes to financial literacy?
Schaftlein: The real estate industry is convoluted. I think there's just a lot of things in the marketplace that are not as transparent as they should be. I take it for granted that my parents owned their home and when they sold it, I could see they were able to put money down on something else. There is this kind of transfer of wealth and transfer of property that a lot of people don't get to see in their day-to-day life, and so I think getting access to that, and information around how it works in the mainstream, is important.
Starks: Our housing counselors not only work with folks to help show them what opportunities and incentives are out there and available for them for homeownership, but also how to navigate scams or predatory lending, which is, so often, some way families are targeted. Even folks just out of high school are targeted by predatory lending, and that can do some years of credit damage.
Many Memphis neighborhoods are very defensive of the culture and community they have cultivated. When United Housing is heading into neighborhoods to renovate properties, overturn urban blight, and offer education, what are some ways you ensure that you're not changing the dynamic of the area?
Schaftlein: We have a long history of working with neighborhood organizations. More recently, we were funded through the Memphis Affordable Housing Trust Fund to work on home repair and rehabilitation in Orange Mound, and our staff members went to a lot of meetings with the Orange Mound Community Association during the process. The reason for this was to talk about what Orange Mound residents saw as a major need in their community. We work with neighborhood groups in both soliciting their feedback in terms of what they might want to see their neighborhood either grow to be or be stabilized, but also to get the word out about some of the resources that we have and that their residents might be eligible for.
Another example is our work with the Binghampton Community Land Trust. As a neighborhood, they created a community land trust and United Housing was asked to support this. It was well within our mission, and we were able to help them secure financing for the construction of one of their first homes. We’ve been working with them on their vision for the area.
How many families and communities do you work with every year?
Schaftlein: We typically see, on a non-COVID year, 900 to 1,000 people using our education and lending program. Last year we saw a little less, but we still have a pretty big need. We also started something new last year; we rolled out a Rental and Utility Assistance Program. Now we have a full-time rental counselor. We are doing a lot more counseling around tenant rights, access to eviction prevention, and then rental assistance. We saw an increase in those topics in 2020, and we'll continue to educate around those, as well as help people avoid foreclosure in the coming months.
What factors led to your push for the rental counselor? Was it something that was coming down the pipeline or did it just feel like the right time to push for it?
Schaftlein: The rental counseling program started in 2020 because of the need that sprung up with rental assistance and eviction prevention. We were one of the few HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) certified counseling agencies out there that could provide that counseling. So that's why we saw an uptick in that.
Starks: There was a need for the program due to COVID. This specific program was for anyone who had some sort of financial hardship related to COVID-19. We saw lots of folks jobless and furloughed back in March and April take advantage of it.
A good majority of the work that you do is done in the community. There is also a construction aspect to what United Housing does. How has COVID-19 changed how United Housing approaches a project?
Schaftlein: On the construction and home repair side, at first, we kind of put a stop to it. We didn't want to be in people's houses when the numbers were pretty high, especially in the beginning. Some of the construction was also delayed, but besides that, not a whole lot changed. We do rely a lot on government subsidy funding, so when they all went remote, things were delayed
We are doing a whole lot more now and learning a lot more now about tenant’s rights and eviction prevention than we had. I think now moving forward, we're going to do a lot more around educating ourselves in that area and making sure that we can continue these settlement programs that sprung up during COVID. We need to normalize them and we need to make them something that is always available for people because even pre-COVID, we've had high eviction rates.
Ideally, if you can have the perfect Memphis, what would that look like to you in terms of your organization. And then, what is something that you think in the next three to six months that your organization could accomplish that will make Memphis a better place?
Schaftlein: We really need to get more funds in the hands of families, small developers, business owners, and property owners that have a community-minded approach and love Memphis so that they can build their community themselves. One of the things I really want to see is United Housing grow our financing arm so that we can invest more in a small developer, or a new landlord, or a family for homeownership — so that we can see our housing stock become higher standard, better quality, while still affordable. That's one thing I would like to see us do.
