To become a homeowner is a lot of hard work, especially for a family that doesn't have credit or has some credit challenges, has low income. Owning your own home and being successful with it is a ton of work, and we can't do that work for you. It's about the family being willing to put in that hard work, and then it acts we're a coach because then at the end they've achieved something amazing. They don't need us
at all. But even better than that is when they help that next family member buy a home without us.
Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney, I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur, and I've been a high school football coach in inner City Memphis. And the last part, somehow it led to an oscar for the film about our team. That movie is called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits and big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of
normal folks. Guys, that is us, just you and me, seeing in the area of need and deciding, hey, maybe I can help. That's what Michael Gosman, the voice you just heard, has done. Michael is the head of AXE Housing, which has helped over four thousand low income families purchase homes to an incredible empowerment model that I hope will spread across the country and candidly, I'm dying to bring it to my hometown, Memphis. I cannot wait for you
to meet Michael. Right after these brief messages from our general sponsors. Michael Gosman from the Beer Place, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, what's up.
Absolutely thrilled to be here.
Thrilled to have you. When when did you get in?
I got him last night. Yeah, a little late. I got in about eight thirty, but it was not too late for me to explore just a little bit because it's my first time in Memphis, so I had to take advantage of it.
What'd you get to see?
I got to see some live music, so I walked over to Bill. Yeah, no, I went to the what's it called City Cafe?
Oh? Yeah, there was there was live music at Blue City.
There was. Yeah, it was Mine Morris.
Moose Blonde, Willie Morse and Willie Morris.
I think, yeah, that's all it was. I mean, it was so cool and I wasn't hungry, and I still ordered some food because I had a buddy who's like, you got to try the greens They're so good. Yeah, yeah, no I did. I couldn't go that deep. It was like ten o'clock at night.
You got to come back tomorrow, now, I mean, you got to come back soon and draw the ribs.
But we did get them at your favorite hotel too.
Finally, you stayed at the Bay.
Body what a place. See see, it's very cool. And please don't tell the hotel that they had a little soap that's carved like a dock.
And I stole everybody does everybody does well. I wish you had more time to enjoy our city. You're not far from the National Civil Rights Museum, Bill Street and the music. You know, we are the home of the blues. We are the home of the rock and roll and Elvis and Cherry Lee Lewis and Aretha Franklin and Isaac Hayes and you know Roy Orbison. So much of that is still ingrained in our gritty, GrITT and grind Memphis fabric.
And I love it when somebody from Milwaukee comes and only spends five five hours here but has a smile on their face. We got a lot to offers, for sure.
I got to come back. Yeah, I hope you.
I hope you do. Michael is the president and CEO of AXE Housing based in Milwaukee, and honestly, Michael, I want to come You want you to come back, and I'm dead serious about this. I want to introduce you to our city and our county mayor, and I want them to engage with you because I think AS is the answer to so much of what ails so many
of our urban areas. I think you guys have I'm really as I've read all of the information that Alex gave me on you and your organization, I just kept thinking, oh my gosh, Oh my gosh, why hasn't this been done before? Oh my gosh. So I can't wait to dive in. And I am dead serious. I invite you back. I really hope you'll take me up on it. Spend a couple of days into're a city, and let me introduce you to some people in Memphis, because I think what we're about to find out about what you and
AX does. We need what you do, as do many other cities so let's get into it, and we're going to get to where you are, but could you just first tell us kind of the founding story of Acts and how it evolved before you ever even showed up, when you were just a twinkle in your mommy's eyes.
So AXE was founded more than thirty years ago, and it really came from a rather simple premise, which was the priest at Saint Michael's Parish on twenty fourth in Cherry in the city of Milwaukee. He was getting frustrated that he was trying to build a strong congregation there and there was some struggles. So the neighborhood around the church wasn't doing too well.
I've been to Milwaukee once actually for a birds game. Give us what twenty fourth in Cherry is kind of topographically to the city geographically.
Yeah, so we're talking about a neighborhood community. It's like a mile and a half from our central downtown district, and so it is city, so it is very central, but it feels a world apart from actually being in our downtown, which now is a fairly thriving place. So it was a neighborhood that was had a lot of crime, had fairly expensive rents, even though the quality of the homes and the apartments that people were renting were quite low, and the church was struggling because they'd had an influx
of refugees from Southeast Asia. So actually a large among population individuals who'd helped the US during the Vietnam War. They got resettled by Catholic charities, and many of them wound up renting apartments right in this area around the church.
So let's talk about that a little bit. We're talking the seventies. Yeah, the end of the Vietnam War. So these are Southeast Asians, primarily from Laos.
Yeah, so Laotian people. Typically they had spent then years, many many many years living in refugee camps and Thailand before they actually came to the United States.
But they had to do the refugee camps, right because described their involvement with the United States military and Vietnam and why they were refugees in the first place.
Yeah. So I'll use one of my colleagues's former colleagues as sort of husband as an example. I mean, he was a key partner, you know, he was working as a part of one of one of the units and had a real belief that democracy was important. Also, you know, developed strong relationships with some members of the military, and yet you know, the war ends and and sort of life is upended, and so they wind up being refugees
for a long, extended period of time. And I know for some, for some that was a period of years, for some it was much much much longer, until eventually some of them were able to because of their service to the United States, were actually able to move to the United States, and many of them settled in Wisconsin. A lot of them settled in Minnesota and some other parts of the country, typically in partnership with the Catholic Church.
So it was through Catholic charities and in Wisconsin that many of them got settled.
I think it's important for our listeners to remember or be aware of. Oftentimes these refugees are here because they assisted us in some war theater where they assisted the CIA. Great may if I'm wrong, but they're just the CIA and we lost or we left, and now that people in control were our enemies, which are now their enemies, and then they get persecuted. Was that the case with these folks?
Yeah, And my understanding of the life and the refugee camps, which is where they were, you know, in the aftermath the wars that that was that was not a great place, that was not a great place to be. And so you know, obviously you'd like to think that we as a country can do right by people and if they've really gone on a limb to try and support us, that then we can offer them something in return. By the way, these tend to be like the hardest working,
most incredible, democracy minded individuals. They buy into our culture completely. So and I.
Can't help but think, and again we're talking about the founding and the seventies and get there. But I can't help but think that these are were our generation Afghan interpreters, same type people people who have assisted our military and Afghan war. And then when we had our disastrous pull out, were left there and then the Taliban were hunting them down, killing them, persecuting them, jailing them for assisting us against them. And when we left Afghanistan and we left them, what
are they to do? And so that's what these people are. They're just the Laotian folks. What are they called their mun they're among people. They are from laos Hmong, Okay, the among people from laos that fought and helped and advised and interpreted and gave are Cia and our military information and fought alongside us for the for to try
to for democracy's sake. And when we lost and we left, they're screwed, right, Yeah, Okay, so that's who we're talking about who end up somehow getting here through the Catholic Church. But now they're these guys.
In America, right, and they're you know, they're sort of plopped down and the church did the best they could, but they're they're a part of this congregation. They don't necessarily speak the language yet. But this was a group of incredibly hard working people. And so the church actually, you know, it was growing because you've got all these Mung families who now are a part of the church. It's a really special place. The church still i think says Eastern Mass and seven languages as part of.
The service, kidding because it's awesome.
In addition to the Mung families, now there's there's Burmese families and there's multiple Bermese dialects. There's Hispanic families, there's white families, there's black families. It's a really cool place. There aren't many places in the country that worship and such a diverse, you know, such a diverse group of people come together to worship. It's it's very cool. But the priest who was leading the congregation at that time
was seeing that here's these people. They're so hard working, but you know, they're renting homes from often slum lords. And even though they were, you know, doing the best they could and they were all working, the amount of money they had left over at the end of the month was extremely small. And he wanted them to put down roots and become a part of the church long term.
He didn't want them every single year, every few months need to move because you know, the homes weren't being kept, or because the landlords were trying to jack up the rent. And so we said, well, what if we could help
them actually buy homes. What if you know, these these are responsible, working people, but they didn't know about our culture, they didn't know about the home buying process, and so it was clear that and they didn't have a lot of money, and they didn't have a lot of money, and they were tended to be debt averse, so even the idea of a mortgage wasn't necessarily something that you know, was intuitive to them or something they were comfortable with.
So it wasn't going to be an easy process. But he said, these are the types of peace we want owning homes in our city, right, right, We wouldn't want want them to be temporarily here. We want them to put down roots and be a part of building you know, a great, a great neighborhood. And so he was. He was smart enough. The priest, Father Dennis Lewis, he's still he's still around, amazing visionary leaders still in the Milwaukee community. And but he was smart enough to know he couldn't
do everything. So he needed a partner. He needed someone who could actually operationalize this, right because Father Dennis is mostly going to be, you know, performing his pastoral duties. He can't be running this housing program. And so he went he went to the mayor of Milwaukee at the time and said, I need some help hold it.
That's government and church working together.
I know, right, this is blasphemy. This story is going to blow your mind. It's it's a fascinating one. And I'm gonna maybe not share the names of all the individuals are involved.
To protect come on to share them let's go. But go ahead, I got you. And the priest reaching this is still seventies.
Well this is this is actually late eighties. Okay, this is late eighties.
But he's got that. Okay, seventies. The people calm. Now it's a decade of it. His church is growing with him. He sees a need and he reaches the mayor exactly.
And the mayor at the time was rather forward thinking. He sort of bought into this vision and he had the i think, the intelligence to realize that while this was a great idea, it didn't need to be a city program. That you know, if we tried to make it a city program, it might not be as successful as if there was some way to sort of make it its own thing.
Partner started to love you, mayor or this mayor back then.
So he made an offer. This is the story. I've heard this story many many times. He made an offer to the priest and he said, so, okay, go down to the Department of City Development and see see if there's anyone there that you think could really help you with this. And so the priest goes to the Department of City Development a father Dennis, and he looks around and this is his perception. He sees a bunch of
mostly men wearing sort of business shirts. You know, they had like, you know, pencils in their pocket, and they've got very neat desks, and they just don't seem like the type of person to him who's going to be able to really come into the community that he's a part of and make an impact. And there's one desk that's just a mess it's just you know, it's it's messy. And he's visited now a few times. He never sees anyone there. He's like, well, who sits there. It's like, well,
that's that's a guy named John Worm. You know, yeah, he works, he works here, but he's he's always in the community. He's always got some some you know, special projects he's working on. You know, we don't see him
that much. And father Dennis said, that's my guy, and so he started partnering with this John Worm, the city employee, and and the two of them, you know, we're the leaders of the organization and they're the reason that the work we do today helping families transition from renters to owners is happening, is flourishing at a huge scale just from those sort of humble, humble beginnings.
And now a few messages from our general sponsors. But first, we're thinking about launching a few low chapters of the Army this year. To dive more into it, check out our recent shop Talk episode titled experimenting with Local Chapters, and if you're interested in potentially leading a chapter in your community, email Army at normal folks dot us and Alex would love to connect with you. We'll be right back. Okay, So at the beginning, you got a priest, you got
a mayor's blessings, and you got messy worm. Mm hmm, boy, this sounds like a recipe for success if you ever came up with right now, what was their idea then?
Yeah? So the idea was, we need to make the real estate market work for these these refugee families. So how do we do that. We need to figure out how to first of all, get them to a place where they can get financing. So there's going to be some work with them to establish credit. We're going to need to talk to them about the importance of that.
This wasn't an issue of credit repair. These were individuals who you know, had just zero They just had zero credit right, So how do we help them start to build some credit, and then how do we develop the relationships with banks that we're going to need so that when we have a good loan, that we're able to navigate that with the family. Because these families, you know,
some spoke some English, some spoke very little English. You know, they were still adapting to living in this country, and they weren't going to be able to navigate the banking system on their own.
But I hear this, and I'm still thinking these largely have to be middle income at best to lower income folks, although maybe everybody in the family's working and cumulatively they're making enough money to get along, but they're basically barely paying rent and getting along. The idea of a two
hundred thousand dollars house seems a little difficult. But they also figured out a way that the city could take non performing assets and get them on the tax rolls, which is also incredibly bright and interesting to me.
Yeah, and this wasn't the age of the two hundred thousand dollars.
Homes, okay, even eighty back.
Then, this was this was the time of the dollar homes. You know, there was such distress in the neighborhood around the church, that there were a lot of deeply distressed homes, and there were opportunities for these families to actually purchase homes, sometimes for a dollar, sometimes for one thousand dollars. Put ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars into these homes, and actually that was enough for them to be decent, safe, and code compliant in a lot of instances.
Okay, but this is what I just when I read this part. I'm telling you, bro, this is when I just went crazy. You've got homes that have been foreclosed on or abandoned and that the city is really now responsible for because they're gone there. Nobody's paid the taxes and they're just sitting there. It's a plot of property with the bones of a house still sitting there and nobody to pay the taxes, and it ends up being on the assessor's rolls, the city or county assessors roles
of properties. And every once in a while they have tax sales, and tax seals come up and slum lords come and by them and put them very littlest amount of work that can in them and rent them. That happens all day, every day in cities, all the country. Yes, all right, So what the city is saying is, if you can get your people to learn how to buy homes, will open up the roles of these properties that we're getting absolutely no tax revenue for, and we'll sell them
at almost nothing. If these people come in, fix them up, pay a note, and therefore start paying property taxes. So when I caught when I read that, it's like, hold it. This is a win win. You're getting people in ownership, you're getting people out of out of renting, and you're getting dilapidated properties fixed up, and the city is now getting tax revenue on properties that have that are nothing but a drag on the city's balance sheet. Is that is that it?
I wish I could say it as well as you just said it. That's exactly that's exactly right.
Put worm and a priest came up with this in nineteen eighty.
Yeah, it's pretty I mean, it's pretty amazing that they had the vision to put this, to put this thing together. So that's what happened, That's that's exactly it. And it was what if we could help them get loans, what if we could what if we could coach them through the rehab of the homes because these families often were very handy, but didn't know about our building codes, didn't know about when permits needed to be pulled they need.
It's sort of a guide make sure they don't get ripped off when they're contracting for the services that they were getting. And it was really the two of them at the start, and they were really smart. The way they went about this was incredible. You know, they were struggling early on to attract enough families for the sort of dollar homes that were available. And they got a call from a woman named Baliah among refugee wanting to buy one of the homes, but she she already owned
a home. She wanted to buy it as an investment property. And they said, okay, Bliah, you've missed.
One of the greatest parts about Lilia how she learned to speak English. Watching Wonder Woman and Star Trek. I read that. I'm like, okay, I really that's how she learned to speak English. According to what I've.
Read, she's I mean, one of the more She's someone who whatever she decided to do in this world, she was going to be wildly successful. She is so tenacious, so hard working, so she hears a no from John Warren, but she wants to buy a house, and he says, this house isn't for you, Bilia. We're trying to help new families buy homes. You already own a home. So she decides to start letting people know about these homes. And so there's an event.
So is it a foreclosed house?
Is that foreclosed homes? Foreclosed homes available for a dollar at that time tax sale? Yes, And so even though she has no ability to buy the home, she brings six seven families out just for this one opportunity, because she knows what a good opportunity it is, and she wants to share that with her community. And so John sees that she's brought, you know, a lot more people to this home than he's ever getting. When when he's trying to recruit and he says, what are you doing
for work right now? And you know, she explains to him that she's got sort of a part time job that she's doing. She's raising her kids, her husband's also working. And he says, have you ever thought about being a real estate agent?
Really?
And she says, no, you know, I can't read English that well, I don't know anything about the practice of real estate, and he said, what you just did getting seven families to this house who wanted to buy this home, that if you can do that, I will help you get your real estate license. I'll help you understand the real estate practice because you have what it takes to
be very successful representing this community. And Bileo wound up becoming one of I think the first woman Southeast Asian women in southeastern Wisconsin to get her real estate license, and over what wound up being a twenty five year ish career at ACTS before she retired, she wound up helping something like six or seven hundred families, the vast majority of whom were Southeast Asian families, purchase homes in the city because of her work.
Okay, Dave, we're still at the beginning. We haven't even gotten to what you're doing now. But if you go to Shelby County is our county. If you go to the Shelby County Assessor's Office property list right now online, I think it's seventeen thousand properties in this county that are in some level of process of taxes admin k foreclosure. When I say foreclosure, not by banks because many times they're eighty seventy sixty eighty nine year old homes, but
they've been abandoned. Nobody's pay taxes on them, and they're just sitting there on the city's rolls or the county's rolls, and they're producing absolutely no revenue for the city. And actually the city's kind of responsible taking care of them
because they've had to take possession of them. Right. Meanwhile, forty percent of the people inside the city of Memphis rent, So you have all these homes that the city would love to get any tax revenue on and get off the rolls and get fixed up so you don't have blight in some of these lower income communities. And you have all these people paying rent, oftentimes the slumlords, or at the very least paying for nothing and not building
any American dream ownership. This seems like the fix. And you got worm and a priest and now believe the Southeast Asian person actually doing this in Milwaukee. How many homes I mean, first year, second year, you know, how to grow? Yeah.
So, interestingly enough, at the start, the idea was really just around the real estate peace and so they had realtors that they were hiring sort of real estate professionals to represent the families, and they didn't have a formal education program for the families, but they had this vision. They had some realtors who took a real interest in supporting the community, and they pretty quickly were able to do you know, maybe a few dozen homes a year,
which is prettyificant volume. And then over time there became an awareness of you know, Okay, having the agents is really important. We need families to represent. We need people to represent the families make sure they're getting a good deal, but we also need designated support. If they're fixing up
a distressed home, that's really hard. So we need to make sure that families have some support in that work, because especially if you've never owned a home before taking on a massive rehab project, hiring out all your own contractors, knowing the order of operations, making sure, yeah, you got to do the roof before you start worrying about the kitchen, Like, let's make sure that you're doing things in a smart way to be successful and make good investments in the home.
And so over time we sort of have been able to layer in some of that additional support in a more formal way to make sure that First of all, we can get to significant volume because the idea behind our program is that neighborhoods do better when families have
the opportunity to own the homes they live in. And if we can create more communities where there are large numbers of homeowners, you know, the schools are going to be better, communities are going to be safer, families are going to be healthier, and it's a good platform then for these families to figure out what's next. Right you accomplish this thing, you buy a home, you experience that
pride of home ownership. You've done something really hard. Well, then maybe you're ready to take a step in your educational journey or in your journey towards a more meaningful career. Maybe it gives you more ability to finance your kids'
education or to give them some opportunities. And so as we've been able to sort of continue to invest in these strategies and make sure that families have the right support, we've seen that home ownership can flourish in a city like Milwaukee, and we think that we've learned some things that can certainly benefit a lot of other cities around the country. And from what you're saying it sounds like maybe, you know, Memphis White might be one of those places.
Yeah, I'm bringing your butt down here. We'll be right back. So back to chronologically how this happened. In ninety two, father Dennis and John Worm said were onto something, yep, and so they founded what's it called.
AXE Housing And they didn't even they didn't.
Even applied churches teaching self empowerment.
Yeah, so that was the initial name. That was the name we were incorporated under. And it was it was the two of them, it was some other church leaders from the area who saw what they were doing and said, we want this for you know, the neighborhoods around our churches too. And they didn't even have like a five oh one C three designation. They weren't even an official nonprofit. They just started doing it right. They weren't worried about sort of what what paperwork might need to be formed.
It was about, this is work that needs to happen, let's let's start doing it.
I read I think it's on a website somewhere. I don't know where Alex found it. But they clarified their vision putting people in charge of their own lives. AX was not interested in more affordable rental housing. The organization wanted documents to become owners as soon as possible, so as went to work. And when I when I when I read that, I also read about the father's attitude toward if we can get people to own, that means
they invest in the communities and the communities improved. Talk to us about that.
Yeah, so clearly there's a value to the individual family through ownership. You know, often there's a savings. They actually spend less owning the home than they were paying in rent. They're building equity. But you know, key to Father Dennis's vision wasn't just that that one family would be successful. It was that the example that they would set for the block, for the neighborhood, the fact that there would be more families on the block who'd feel like they
have this ownership interest. It would mean that the neighborhoods would get safer, people would be looking out for each other. It would mean that there'd be much less moving around, which is a huge challenge for the church and for the neighborhood. Now, if you've got families on a block that are moving all the time, you're not building that sort of network of support much more likely than to attract nuisance, attract crime, have things maybe fester that otherwise
a longstanding homeowner wouldn't stand for. And so they really focused on the area right around the church and figured if they could get multiple homeowners on every block, that that could not only improve the lives of the families who are the new homeowners, but improve the lives of the renters too, right, and also give them renters an example of maybe home ownership something that you could strive for, you could achieve.
Yeah, you know, it makes sense. If I'm living on a street and I'm renting a house and it's not it's just a place that I stay because I pay a monthly rent and there's a polish crap on a curb then bothering me that bad. It's not my power crap and it's not my curb. But when I own it, if there's a power crap on my curb, I'm going to find out who's dumping it. I'm going to get it cleaned up, because now you're messing on my thing.
So when you instill ownership in a community, you instill a sense of community bride and things start changing.
That's exactly right, and I've we've seen it firsthand in Milwaukee. I've seen it firsthand. I was talking with a homeowner. I do some walking tours sometimes in areas where we've had sort of the greatest impact, and I was talking to a long standing homeowner. I didn't know they were an AX alumnus. I just was walking on the start talking to them, ask them how they bought their home,
and they wound up being an AXE homeowner. And while we're talking, there's a car that's just sort of parked on the block and the person in the car dumps some trash out and I didn't see it happened. My back was to the car. But the gentleman I was I was talking to, said, hey, give me a second. He goes, he knocks on the window and he talked to the guy who dumped the trash and he said, hey, don't do that. Don't bring that here. Right. And I'm not saying that's.
The greatest story I've ever heard. That is perfect, is awesome.
And you know a renter could could do that too, but way less likely. Right, this is someone who's had a long standing stake in that block, and more likely that they're because of that position, going to feel confident to set some good some good norms for what goes on in that block and what doesn't.
The more I hear about this, here's something else that Alex said that I'd like you to comment on. Most solutions are top down solutions. They don't deal with people. They think if we just build enough, that's going to fix things. But they don't necessarily solve the problem because that doesn't help families provide for themselves. And what we're doing at Access, we're starting from the bottom up. We start with the family.
Yeah, so the for Acts, it always started with the individual family. So although the hope was that neighborhoods would improve and that we would start this ownership ethic that could be could be contagious. It was all about if we can help one family improve their lives, if we can work hand in hand with them, help them navigate our home buying process, we're setting they're going to be set up for success. And it's not about providing home
ownership to a family. And this is a real key distinction and something that I really always like to make clear. To become a homeowner is a lot of hard work, especially for a family that doesn't have credit or has some credit challenges, has low income. Getting ready to become a homeowner, owning your own home and being successful with it is a ton of work, and we can't do that work for you. It's about the family being willing to put in that hard work and then it acts.
We're a coach, right, That's how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as how do we provide the families. We're not on the field. They're the ones in the field, they're the ones who are doing all this hard work. But we want a position for them for success. We want to help them understand the key habits that they're going to need to invest in if they're going to
be successful. We get to cheer them on when they're able to, you know, clear off debt and make strides towards home ownership, and when they're falling short, we get to at times give them a little you know, kicking the butt, right, like, hey, we know you can do this, and you know, based on what we've seen over the last couple of months, is home ownership no longer something that you're passionate about? Is it no longer something that is a priority for you to be able to provide
for your kids. So sometimes we've got to do some of that too, But it's about the family stepping up and doing this really hard work because then at the end they've achieved something amazing. And the coolest thing is then they typically they don't need us at all. It's not like they're coming back to us every time something goes on at the house. Even more than that, pretty often their next family member who buys a home, sometimes they refer that family member to us, and that's that's
really cool. That's an honor when someone refers someone to us and says that we can help them. But even better than that is when they helped that next family member buy a home without us, they don't even need us anymore. And we don't always.
Hear that story into how things work, which is.
Beautiful exactly, and and so we don't always capture those stories. But on my walks sometimes, you know, I on this this very same block, I shared the story of the trash. There was a gentleman and he had the nicest house in the block, and he just had done a ton of work on it. It was really impressed, and so I saw him outside the house, and so I just introduced myself to him, and I asked him if he heard of Axe Housing and he said, heard of you. Of course, I bought my first house with you, So
you know, he bought his first house. And I don't know if this was house number two or number three, but he kept, you know, his family had greater needs. He'd done well enough. He was able to sort of move up, move on to that next house, but we didn't help him with transaction two or transaction three. He'd learned through the process. He was now able to access the home buying marketplace successfully by himself with confidence. That's the best case scenario.
If you don't care about that from a if you don't care about that from a social point of view, you should care about that just pragmatically, because you took a renter who was really contributing very little to the tax space, and you created a guy now who has fault and rehabbed two or three homes and stepped himself up in the tax space to continue to be a greater contributor to your society pragmatically. If you don't even care about the social sciety, pragmatically that is that is
how cities grow. And if you believe that we're only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and you strengthen that weakest link. Think what that does if you had that's one story. If you have ten thousand of those, think of how your city changes. It's phenomenal. So somehow I want to I really want to know how you did this. Somehow throughs you worked out a deal with the city. I may be screwing this up.
Straighten me out that properties valued less than twenty five thousand that were on the city's foreclosure listing for more than thirty days could be purchased for one thousand dollars. Then those that have been on the listing for more than sixty days can purchase for a dollar. And certainly their inspection costs and things have to be done to
the house to get it livable. But the point is, somehow, the priest worm somebody got somebody at the city to say, yeah, it makes more sense to get these off the rolls and fixed up for blight for tax purposes. Who and how did that go? Because that, to me is kind of a public private agreement that serves everybody well. But is that correct that properties valued at less than twenty five thousand dollars that were on the city's roles for more than thirty days could be birth for a thousand bucks,
sixty days for a dollar. How did that all happen? That's awesome.
Yeah, So, I really think ACTS has always been i would say, a strong partner to the City of Milwaukee. And because of the early success we had helping families purchase and fix up these distressed homes, it encouraged the city to try and expand the partnership. How do we create more pathways for home ownership? And what the city was seeing was that when homes were taken through tax foreclosure,
typically one of two things was happening. And this is really in the aftermath of like the two thousand and eight foreclosure crisis that they started to have, you know, massively more inventory, and one of two things happened. Either the home sold quickly to an investor, and I'll put investor in quotes, because most of the individuals who are buying those homes, many of them, you know, they aren't from our community, they don't live in Milwaukee, and they're
seeing dollar signs, right, They're seeing dollar signs. They're hoping that they can you know, just not do any repairs, hopefully put someone who's desperate in the apartment or in the home, charge a bunch of rent, and then you know, ultimately those homes pretty frequently they get lost because because they're not maintaining them and they're just trying to create as much short term sort of rental income as they can. So the city saw a lot of that activity happening,
which they saw is very negative. Or some of the more just stressed homes, they would just sit forever. And the longer a home sits vacant, the worse it gets and the least and then it becomes less likely that it can be reclaimed because a lot of the homes, once they've sat for years, you know, they really do
need to be torn down. By the way, if the city owns the property, that's twenty twenty five thousand dollars maybe depending on the size of the home, for the city just to tear it down, and then you've got a vacant lot. And in most of Milwaukee's neighborhoods, unfortunately, there is not a sufficient market for brand new construction. You wind up spending a lot more to build a new home than you can sell that home. For and so the vacant lots are a big problem because long
term it means they just sit there. There's a vacant lot. It's not good for the block, it's not good for the neighborhood, and it's very bad for the city's tax base.
And the grass doesn't get cut and it looks like a hell and that makes the community feel bad.
And so so the city was pretty proactive about wanting to partner with us and others to see how can we get more of these homes into owner occupied state. And as a result, especially in that you know two thousand and eight to maybe twenty and fifteen period when there were so many tax foreclosures, we were literally able to help more than a thousand families purchase and fix up formally foreclosed properties.
Which are a thousand homes now on the tax rolls hanging into the city's revenue buys and a thousand families taking ownership and community a thousand a thousand.
Yeah, we've helped more over our thirty year history. It's more than a thousand families have purchased these these foreclosed homes, and the vast majority that was in that period right after two thousand and eight when there was just so much, so much unfortunate inventory, and I just think it was really smart in the city's part. You can look at it two ways. You can look at these tax foreclosures as a liability, and of course they are. The city
needs to maintain them. They're not bringing in revenue, but the City of Milwaukee to a large degree, decided to look at it as a significant opportunity to promote home ownership. And how often are we going to have this situation where our city owns so many homes. If we can get a large person manage of those to actually be owner occupied instead of being absentee investors, that's a good investment in the future stability of our city.
And that concludes Part one of my conversation with Michael Gosman, and you don't want to miss part two that's now available to listen to you together, guys, we can change this country, but it starts with you. I'll see in part two.