Welcome to Part 14, where we introduce the Level UP Housing Stability App.

In Part 10 we introduced Housing as one of 3 necessities that are closely guarded by the “System that Profits from Poverty”.

Correct - these 3 necessities are Employment, Housing, and Cost-of-Living.

In Part 4 we covered the “barriers that people experience” in attempting to level-up their financial lives through new or upgraded employment.

Can we similarly review the barriers your Housing Stability App is designed to help people overcome?

Yes.

Let’s start with Rental Housing. Here are 5 barriers that applicants experience when navigating through the system that controls access to rental housing:

1. Negative language and less than respectful image: The term “renter” carries negative connotations. As do “landlord” and “tenant” whose use carries through from the bleak world of sharecropping. These words, and the current rental market mindset, frame and define the relationships as unequal, even adversarial or hostile especially when compared to words such as customers, clients, and providers.

2. Proxy protocols: Trust building through proxies is an oxymoron and precludes the likelihood of a person-to-person relationship such as what occurs in the majority of our business and community affairs.

3. Isolation: For decades, the customers in the housing rental marketplace have been deprived of support or tools to help them research and understand the quality of the housing experience they are committing to. For example, is it going to be a 5-star or a 1.5-star experience?

4. Fees and bias: The rental agent or property management industry has become dependent on revenue from application fees, which are purportedly for processing, and credit and background checks. Extensive research shows these practices and systems facilitate rampant exploitation and discrimination.

5. Zero Equity: “Renters rent accommodation, there is no other benefit for their payment”. Just because this is “the way it is” doesn’t mean that this way of doing things can’t be vastly improved with associated benefits to the customer, provider, and society.

Ok – Thank You.

These 5 are easy to understand though probably better recognized as “just the way things are” rather than barriers.

Thanks for making this point.

If you remember the degenerative cycle – alienation, rationalization, exploitation, automation, and socialization. Most, if not all, of these 5 barriers listed above fall under “automation and socialization”, which is how we have been taught by society’s constructs to disregard the systems that oppress people as “just the way things need to be done”.

This is not the case. Other ways of doing things that regard all people as equals deserving of both respect and adequate support can be far more productive for everyone involved. Only, in this case, the system that extracts profits from poverty loses.

Next, let’s look at barriers that applicants experience when navigating the system that controls access to homeownership.

Yes – there are 3 obvious barriers.

1. Unaffordable: 75% of working Americans make less than $70,000/year before taxes, and a full 50% of us make less than $50,000. It should be apparent that without generational financial support, homeownership is out of reach for virtually everyone in these groups. We’ve previously covered this in Part 9, “A deep dive into the Numbers under Poverty”.

2. Unrealistic Requirements: When we reverse engineer the requirements to be met by prospective buyers it becomes clear that these are fully functioning “profit centers” and not the reasonable terms they are “greenwashed” as. Take credit scores, background checks, and tiered mortgages, all of which are broadly accepted gatekeepers – but each is designed to extract as much money from the applicant as possible in the process of blocking, limiting, or creating selective access.

3. Downpayment Despair: As mentioned in Part 9, in the section on “people living in their vehicles”, the downpayment upward trend keeps more and more people down.

Good – thank you, Paul.

I now recognize that seeing these barriers “as just the way things are” is the way the system

has trained us to think. But, if we start with the principle of “people first”, rather than “profit first” there must be several ways to improve the processes and reduce or bypass the barriers for everyone’s benefit.

Yes – that is exactly the thinking and reframing process we have undertaken over the past 7 years.

Can you give a summary of your Housing Stability Level UP App?

First, let’s define housing stability from the perspective of those who don’t have it.

Housing stability means not having to wonder where you will sleep tonight, how you will shower and relieve yourself tomorrow morning, or how you will cook and store your food this evening.

And housing stability is a pillar under the bridge to escape poverty.

Yes – we are well aware of how lacking a place to call home essentially destabilizes every other aspect of a person’s life, from psychological health to longevity. Yet homelessness, the exact opposite of housing stability, continues to rise.

What are the App goals and how will you achieve these?

The goal of this App is to broadly change the way the housing market itself works.

It does so by removing the barriers and making home rentalship more widely available to everyone who can pay, and reimagining homeownership so that practically everyone who can afford to rent can also afford to buy.

This will require creative, but readily achievable, restructuring of some aspects of the home construction industry and the qualification process for rental and ownership.

Who will participate in this restructuring and what will motivate them?

This restructuring will be economically worthwhile for the participating industries and agencies. These include zoning boards and their communities, local contractors and building vendors, home renters, homeowners and home sellers, banks and mortgage companies, and small business communities in depressed urban areas. Each of these will see a new expanding market emerge for their services if they have the foresight to participate – which many of them already demonstrate. Just as they do in Crystal’s HomeWorks story which follows shortly.

Economically - this “affordable housing sector” is an untapped growth economy. U.S. housing and related industries are shrinking but still represent almost 20% of the US economy, or $2.5 trillion annually. In the future, this new housing subsector will replace and expand much of what housing does today because it represents and affects far more people – and it will naturally nurture micro-economies in which local communities benefit.

Needless to say – people currently excluded from home stability, for both rental and ownership, will be major beneficiaries.

Yes.

The Home Stability App has three major components:

1. A simplified home rental marketplace that improves the process for all parties,

2. A home purchase marketplace for “ultra-affordable” homes, and

3. An accessible mortgage instrument.

What price structure and qualification targets are you aiming for?

The focus will be on putting both independent housing and homeownership within reach of

every household with an income of $30,000/year, (which is $15/hour, full-time), then helping foster a market of even cheaper, creatively structured options that allow most everyone to, by retirement, have a home they own.

That’s a big shift from today’s housing marketplace.

Is having poor people purchase a home realistic?

Yes, and as you know our goal is to make it normal.

It is already underway in many programs. You can read more about these in our Housing Stability App White Paper under the Resources Section.

One of these projects is HomeWorks, one of the Housing Stability partners we’ll highlight on our Housing App.

Rodney helped his youngest sibling Crystal and her business partner Damien to establish HomeWorks in 2022. I mentioned Crystal earlier when I referenced her early life in poverty.

Can you tell us more about Crystal and HomeWorks?

Of Course. Crystal is not only an ally and core member of the Level UP team, but as an ethnic minority, a woman, and someone who grew up in the South, she’s had a lifetime of contending with these poverty-creating systems first-hand. She and Rodney also saw the toll this system took on their four other siblings, Josie, Necie, Marzell, and Joe – all of whom are no longer with us.

This experience and her virtually inexhaustible optimistic and persuasive personality allow her to create relationships, trust, and traction across the poverty divide.

Using this traction and Rodney’s business expertise, HomeWorks is in the process of completing its first conversion of a single-family, Oakland, California home into three ultra-affordable condos that will allow three, low-income workers to move from homelessness to homeownership by the end of 2023.

HomeWorks is an example of the upswell I mentioned back in the first paragraph of Part 1 – it shows the kind of societal readiness that makes ending poverty in one generation possible.

Crystal has already built a waitlist of nearly 500 people who are both working and homeless, and she has a growing number of home sellers who are ready and excited to participate in the HomeWorks program – all of whom have sought her out.

How is HomeWorks Funded?

Programs like ours and HomeWorks do not rely on government programs or grants. Instead, they are a financial success for all participants.

Profits are made available to the participants when “The Gatekeepers” first mentioned in Part 10, are bypassed.

Remember the Gatekeepers and the existing system are profit-seeking rather than solution-driven.

In this case, the participants include:

• homeowners seeking to sell their

  properties and are willing to carry the

  loan for the buyer,

• Contractors who are willing to remodel

  larger living units into affordable smaller homes at a slightly reduced rate or payments over time.

• Traditionally excluded homebuyers who can commit to affordable mortgage payments.

• Eventually, it will include “banks” that offer a new class of low-interest, low- requirement mortgage instruments – which Level UP is already designing. These elements make HomeWorks, like Level UP, sustainable, scalable, and self-directed, allowing it to remain true to its founding principles.

  Sounds truly impressive. Congratulations and thank you to Crystal, Damien, and Rodney.

  For sure!