When Kenyatte Reid, 47, who works for the Department of Education, and Crystal Granderson-Reid, 48, a writer, were newly married, they knew they wanted to buy Mr. Reid’s family brownstone in the Lefferts Manor Historic District in Brooklyn. But their window was closing.
Some members of Mr. Reid’s family were eager to sell and move South, but the couple needed more time to qualify for a mortgage. The relatives reached a compromise allowing the couple to rent the home for four years while improving their credit and savings, a luxury many do not receive.They bought the house for less than $300,000 in 2003; today it’s worth about $2.2 million.
“We would never sell it,” said Mr. Reid, who had dreamed of buying the house that his grandparents, one of the first Black families to own in the neighborhood, purchased in the 1950s.
Mr. Reid comes from a history of homeowners, dating back to Black oystermen in Sandy Ground on Staten Island, one of the oldest free Black settlements in the country, established before the Civil War.
Ms. Granderson-Reid’s experience was more common: Her mother sold the family estate, a big house on a hill in White Plains, N.Y., below market value in order to split the proceeds with family members, and she grew up renting. “The cycle broke,” she said.
Many families are forced to sell because financial hurdles make it difficult for one family member to buy the others out. From July 2019 to June 2020, 10 percent of Black applicants in the United States were rejected for mortgages, 2.5 times the rate for white applicants, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors, a large trade group.
Black borrowers also incur the highest financing fees — nearly $14,000, compared to $6,000 for white borrowers, who paid the lowest fees on average, according to the Center for N.Y.C. Neighborhoods.
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