“Every night I get up and walk my house and just look around. I feel normal. I feel like I have become part of society again,” says Lisa, a 53-year-old U.S. Navy veteran. “And it’s not just the house that’s building my dignity and pride – it’s working with Habitat from the beginning.”

After leaving the military, Lisa faced several setbacks due to injuries sustained in Operation Desert Shield. She later became homeless, living in her car with her teenage son. The green Buick Century was a blessing and a target. “A car is worth gold to a homeless person because it’s shelter,” says Lisa. “I was broken into many times.”

Lisa’s car had no air conditioning or heat and only one working window. In the evenings, she often parked in well-lit parking lots, like at hospitals, to stay safe and slipped into public bathrooms to bathe. When temperatures plummeted, she sought out emergency warming centers.

While living at a transitional home for women veterans, Lisa met staff from Habitat for Humanity of Brevard County who were recruiting applicants for its Cocoa, Florida, Female Veterans Village. Having been recently approved to receive disability benefits by the Department of Veterans Affairs, she finally had the financial means to secure a home of her own and applied. “I felt like God was saying ‘Now you’re ready, and now it’s your time to get a house,’” says Lisa.

“Everybody knows Lisa, and everybody loves Lisa,” says Anna Terry, executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Brevard County. “Her story shows that anyone can change their life for the better with a hand up.”

Developed by Habitat Brevard, Female Veterans Village is a community that will feature six single-family homes. While providing a safe space for women veterans to overcome housing instability, the community is also a place where residents can develop a support system amongst fellow service members. Lisa is the second resident to move into the community, following in the footsteps of Karla, a U.S. Army veteran. “The village speaks to our core mission to help create a world where everyone has a decent place to live,” says Anna.

Since 2012, The Home Depot Foundation and Habitat have helped improve the health, life and safety of more than 1,300 veterans and their families through Habitat’s Repair Corps, which funds critical repairs on the homes of veterans. Members of Team Depot, The Home Depot’s associate-led volunteer force, partner with their local Habitat organizations to build alongside veteran homeowners nationwide. Store manager Frank Branson was one of a dozen volunteers from Team Depot who helped Lisa and Karla make their homes a reality. “It was an honor for me and our associates to work alongside these amazing servicewomen to build their homes,” says Frank.

To fulfill her sweat equity requirements, Lisa volunteered in the Habitat ReStore and worked on her own home and on other builds. She met her future neighbor Karla while volunteering at one of Habitat Brevard’s build events. The two became fast friends and volunteered to work on each other’s homes.

“I met Lisa on my first day volunteering with Habitat,” says Karla. “I didn’t have a car at the time, and she ended up giving me rides. We became pretty close, so it’s really neat that now we’re forever neighbors.”

Karla entered the U.S. Army after high school and was stationed in Germany. After leaving the military, she struggled to make ends meet while raising two kids as a single parent. “The kids went to live with their father while I tried to get on my feet. I was sleeping on couches or renting rooms. Later, I lived with my daughter for a while when she bought a house,” says Karla.

Karla learned about the opportunity to join the Female Veterans Village community while living in transitional housing and began saving for her down payment. “Before Habitat, I didn’t know anything about mortgages or homeowner’s insurance, but now I do,” she says. “I learned a lot in the finance classes about paying your debt down and having an emergency fund. It’s been an all-around rewarding experience.”

“We’ve seen Karla in action, and she is a determined and hard worker,” says Ginger Blair, former director of family services at Habitat Brevard who is now with Alabama Association of Habitat Affiliates. “She sees something she wants, and she goes for it.” Now that Karla has a home of her own, she has set her sights on finishing college. “One of my goals was to get my accounting degree and start my own business,” she says. “Now, I have a firm foundation so I can do that.”

Housing inequality is a primary culprit behind the large racial wealth gap between Black and white households in the U.S.

Mobilizing public and political will to craft and implement remedies necessary for a more just future is critical to rectifying the years of unjust housing policies that continue to impact families today.

Habitat’s Cost of Home campaign provided a vehicle for advocating for equitable housing and land use policies at the local, state and federal levels. The following is a non-exhaustive list of housing policy solutions that we can all help push forward to redress the nation’s legacy of discrimination against people of color — and especially Black Americans — and to help our nation begin to heal.

1. Increase opportunities for Black homeownership.

To start, we must set a goal of closing the Black homeownership gap within a generation. We can achieve that in several ways, including:

• Increasing access to down payment assistance. Discriminatory policies that have excluded Black families from homeownership, education and job opportunities often leave Black parents with less wealth to pass on to their children. Down payment assistance programs, like matched savings programs and advanceable tax credits for low-income first-time homebuyers, can help reduce this common hurdle.
• Increasing access to affordable credit. Given the history of redlining and discriminatory lending in the U.S., we must extend mortgage and business credit to underserved, low-income and minority homebuyers and communities. Many tools for rectifying racial inequities in lending exist but need to be strengthened.
• Investing in affordable homeownership. Even when down payment assistance is available, unaffordable home prices remain a major obstacle to homeownership. Expanding government grants that finance affordable home construction can help builders like Habitat create lasting, sustainable homeownership opportunities.
• Retargeting the mortgage interest deduction. The mortgage interest deduction for homeowners is strikingly inequitable — often only benefiting high-income homeowners with the largest mortgages. It is also quite expensive — historically costing more than all of HUD and USDA’s housing programs combined. Restructuring the MID as a tax credit to make it more accessible to low-income homeowners, including homeowners of color, and limiting it to low- and moderate-income households would free up scarce federal resources for other solutions to help those who need it most.

2. Invest in distressed, racially segregated communities.

Many formerly redlined and segregated neighborhoods continue to suffer from disinvestment and economic distress. Reinvestment and tax incentives targeting these communities would help spark recovery and opportunities. But these investments must be carefully designed to ensure they don’t price out existing residents and businesses.

One promising idea is tax credits to rehabilitate distressed homes in communities with low home values, to expand affordable homeownership opportunities for residents, such as the Neighborhood Homes Improvement Act. Property tax relief for low-income homeowners and investments in home repairs are also important for ensuring existing residents can remain and benefit as their neighborhoods improve.

3. Stop perpetuating segregation.

Segregation is the legacy of deliberate policy and zoning choices that led to the underinvestment and isolation of communities where Black households lived, and the creation of separate, higher-opportunity communities that excluded people of color. Today’s economically exclusionary zoning perpetuates this segregation. Governments at all levels are obligated to increase opportunities for Black households to live in neighborhoods with good schools and safe streets. They can do this by:

• Reforming zoning to allow mixed-income communities. By diversifying the types of homes allowed in their communities, localities can make them more racially and economically inclusive. Zoning modifications like lowering minimum home- and lot-size requirements, permitting duplexes and triplexes, allowing apartments in more locations, and/or minimizing discretionary review processes help achieve this. In considering these reforms, again, it is important to be mindful of how zoning changes might inadvertently displace existing residents of color and prevent this from happening.
• Building and preserving affordable homes in communities of opportunity. Zoning reforms are necessary but often insufficient alone — governments must also increase investments in affordable homes in non-segregated communities. Local and state governments can help by incentivizing mixed-income housing developments and making public land in well-resourced neighborhoods available at low cost for intentionally affordable homes.
• Increasing the mobility of families with vouchers. Federal housing choice vouchers were designed to help low-income households afford modest rental homes in every U.S. neighborhood. But landlord resistance, high deposit requirements and unaffordable moving expenses often restrict families from using them outside of high-poverty, segregated areas. Voucher mobility programs that include landlord outreach and mediation, tenant counseling and moving-cost assistance can dramatically improve access to high-opportunity neighborhoods for families with vouchers. Scaling these programs would bridge more low-income families to communities of opportunity.

4. Invest in affordable rental housing.

Public investment in rental affordability is critical to address the disproportionately high cost burdens and housing instability experienced by Black households. Housing choice vouchers are one of the most efficient tools for increasing affordability for very low-income renters, but currently there are only enough to assist 1 of every 4 eligible households. The federal government can quickly alleviate housing cost burdens for hundreds of thousands of Black renters by expanding voucher availability. Charlottesville, Virginia, and other cities have successfully implemented their own housing voucher programs.

5. Minimize the damage of COVID-19 on Black households.

A crucial, immediate step for remedying racial housing disparities is preventing eviction and foreclosure during and after the pandemic. On average, Black renters and homeowners are at higher risk of losing their homes, having entered the health and economic crisis with less access to stable and affordable homes.

Eviction and foreclosure moratoria as well as forbearance options are critical for stabilizing households during the pandemic, and just as critical is assistance to help families make up missed payments after those periods end. Foreclosure prevention assistance targeting low-income homeowners, emergency financial assistance for renters facing eviction, and extended repayment options for renters and homeowners alike are key to their — and our — recovery.

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The time for racial equality is long overdue. Join us in helping to ensure that all families have access to a stable, affordable place to call home.

Read Habitat’s full Racial Disparities and Housing Policy paper for further history on discriminatory housing policy and our specific policy recommendations for a more equitable future.