How Albuquerque is boosting Black homeownership
New Mexico’s largest city is engaging Black residents in new ways to identify barriers to buying a home and how to overcome them.
By Christopher Swope
Homeownership is a critical path to building personal and family wealth in American cities. But it’s a path that Black residents often find blocked by soaring home prices and continuing racial discrimination. Nationally, the Black homeownership rate stands at 44 percent, compared with 73 percent among White households. Troublingly, that gap is growing.
In Albuquerque, N.M., local leaders are taking aim at this disparity. While the top-line numbers are daunting and mirror national trends, they’re finding that setting a concrete and attainable goal can be a galvanizing force. The goal they’ve set is to lift Black homeownership within the key 18-to-45 age group by 5 percentage points. Getting there will require launching 41 Black residents as new homeowners this year with continual increases to follow — an achievable yet high impact outcome for the community to rally around.
Albuquerque is tackling this challenge through participation in the Opportunity Accelerator (OA), a collaborative initiative led by Results for America aimed at promoting economic mobility and reducing racial disparities. A hallmark of the work in Albuquerque is centering Black voices in the process — something local governments often fail to do. City leaders and community partners are working closely with Black residents to identify barriers to homeownership and co-design solutions. While the effort is still in early stages, there are already lessons emerging for other communities focused on reducing housing disparities and building Black wealth.
The first of those lessons: Set a target that is both aspirational and doable. “41 new homeowners is not a huge number,” says Dennis Owens, a Black business leader involved in the Albuquerque effort. “And there’s lots of ways to get there. That’s where creativity and innovation comes in. And once we’ve designed a process, it’ll be scalable.”
‘You need to have those bonds of trust’
Another lesson from Albuquerque is to resist the urge for quick fixes and top-down decision-making. Those things in the past have only eroded trust with the Black community. Instead, city leaders are exploring ways to ensure that the experiences of Black residents define how homeownership hurdles are understood and the ways those hurdles are addressed.
The city’s Office of Black Community Engagement took the first step by assembling a strategy team of Black community leaders, business owners, professionals, and government employees. The group met regularly with city leaders and OA partners, lending their lived experiences and community contacts to build a root-cause understanding of what barriers Black residents face in buying a home. Residents shared tough experiences pointing to the no- so-long-ago history of a more divided Albuquerque, a landscape which the City and local partners are ready to shift for good.
Neema Picket, the Office of Black Community Engagement Liaison, says the steering committee centers Black voices in a way that’s too often missing. “Our city is really truly making an effort to say that we get big time that you need to have those bonds of trust — you need to have people in the trenches that look like you and are relatable to you,” Pickett says.
“So while much of this work is about creating sustainable mortgage readiness, it’s also about how this community is engaging each other and creating this support and synergy that really hasn’t existed before. It’s a really huge thing.” adds Pickett.
Owens, a leader on the steering committee, says the group has helped identify homebuying challenges that often get overlooked by governments and lenders. For example, he says, some Black residents fear the emotional toll of being rejected for a mortgage. Or they don’t have a trusted friend or family member who’s been through the home buying process before and can mentor them. “We’ve seen where agencies come in and say, ‘We know what the problem is, we’ve got to do this,’” Owens says. “And what we understand on the steering committee, with the variety of backgrounds where people come from, is that we have a pretty good handle on the hidden challenges.”
By building trust and ongoing engagement between the steering committee and government leaders — a key support provided by OA partner The Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence — Black voices will continue to be centered in its efforts to improve affordable homeownership opportunities. With the steering committee’s insights, Results for America developed a landscape analysis report that analyzed the landscape of existing resources available at the Federal, State and Local levels and provided recommendations to the City of Albuquerque’s senior leadership and decision-makers on how to increase equitable and affordable homeownership opportunities. By centering the needs and experiences of Black residents in Albuquerque, the City of Albuquerque can ensure they are developing solutions that address the persistent and historical barriers faced by its residents.
The steering committee is just one way residents’ lived experiences are informing Albuquerque’s efforts. Another comes via an OA partner, Code for America, an organization with deep expertise in engaging residents to design better government services.
Late last year, Code for America, led by Clara Asumadu, interviewed a dozen Black Albuquerque residents, including four who have successfully bought homes and eight who have not. She and a colleague, Hashim Mteuzi, are taking what they heard and building something called a “journey map.” Essentially, it’s a way of visualizing all the steps required to qualify for a mortgage and buy a home — and all the pain points Black residents are encountering along the way.
What they’re hearing is that there are a lot of pain points. Some are financial — the need to repair credit scores, pay down student loans, or save enough cash for a down payment, for example. Others are emotional: the steps involved in buying a home and the finances involved in maintaining it can be overwhelming. Some Black homebuyers report encountering bias among real estate agents, lenders, and others they interact with, with a 16% mortgage denial rate faced by Black residents in Albuquerque despite a close to 14% mortgage readiness rate.
Asumadu says assembling these insights into a journey map helped to “share with the city the storytelling of the Black narrative when it comes to the process of buying a home.” She and Mteuzi also hope to lead an ideation workshop with residents to turn that narrative into ideas for new or better services to help Black homebuyers navigate the process.
Journey mapping is common in private-sector service delivery but is still catching on in the public sector. Mteuzi has used it in other cities and seen how it helps them serve residents better. He has high hopes it will do the same in Albuquerque.
“Journey mapping provides clarity to the greater challenges that exist and have existed over time, helping the city to see the problems individual people are experiencing,” Mteuzi says. “We understand how redlining has impacted cities across the nation. We understand unfair lending practices. These are well-known challenges. But what’s not well known is how residents in the city of Albuquerque have internalized these things and experienced them. This work is bringing that to the forefront.”
‘They’re not tackling this big system by themselves’
Alongside these community engagement efforts, Albuquerque is simultaneously priming a pipeline of potential homebuyers. This effort is led by United South Broadway Corporation, a nonprofit that offers financial counseling and legal aid to help residents find housing and avoid evictions and has led anti-racism trainings for decades. Albuquerque “has made a promise that there will be 41 units of housing for Black homeowners, and we’ve got to deliver,” says Diana Dorn-Jones, United South Broadway’s executive director. “Let’s get homeowners in the door.”
Outreach began in September with a “Friday Night Out” event that pulled in more than 50 residents interested in buying a home, as well as mortgage lenders and real estate agents interested in serving them. With support of OA partner GovEx, participants learned about existing resources for first-time homebuyers over dinner. Twenty-six of them went on to fill out an initial application to participate in United South Broadway’s programming.
What they get is one-on-one financial counseling aimed at preparing them for success in obtaining a mortgage. It looks different for each person, depending on their needs. Some get coaching on how to raise their credit scores. Others need help with budgeting and saving for a downpayment. Others mostly want an emotional boost. “It can be a frustrating process,” Dorn-Jones says. “What we give them is a sense of security that they’re not tackling this big system by themselves.”
As of early January, seven potential homebuyers had met with United South Broadway’s counselors. It can take years to pay down credit cards or build savings, and some participants won’t ever get there. To get to 41 new homeowners, Dorn-Jones says at least 100 people will need to get into the counseling pipeline. United South Broadway hosted a second outreach event in December and continues to look for ways to get more prospective homebuyers in the door.
For those receiving counseling, a February workshop will break down the road ahead and all the players such as mortgage lenders, title companies, real estate agents, and others they’ll meet along the way. Once they’re approved for a mortgage, they’ll be set to go out home shopping.
But assistance won’t end there. Counselors will review purchase agreements for unfavorable provisions and help new homeowners handle maintenance issues or financial emergencies. “We tell them: ‘If you’re going to miss a payment, call us,’” Dorn-Jones says. “We’ll help you get your feet back in the right space. If we have to do a loan modification, we’ll help with that. The best thing we can do is to connect low-income communities of color with organizations that have the resources and mission to help them stay in place.
“It’s one thing to get a new home,” Dorn-Jones says. “It’s another thing to retain it.”
The Opportunity Accelerator is a collaborative initiative — led by Results for America and in collaboration with the Bloomberg Center for Government Excellence at Johns Hopkins University, Code for America, the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab, and the W. Haywood Burns Institute — that supports government in promoting economic mobility, reducing racial disparities, and improving the wellbeing of their residents. The Opportunity Accelerator was funded by Blue Meridian Partners from July 2020 to December 2023.
