When Detroiter Stephanie Coney applied for a homeownership program a few years ago, she not only received $25,000 that went toward the mortgage of her brick home on the city’s northwest side, she got access to her roots.
In 2023, Coney was selected for the program through Reparation Generation. The national nonprofit wants to create wealth for Black Americans, in part, by providing descendants of enslaved people in the U.S., living in metro Detroit, with homeownership funding and genealogy tracing. Six new recipients were selected last month for the third round of the program and Reparation Generation is looking to fund four more by the end of the year.
“You’re the recipient for not just you, but for your ancestors who paid the price for you to be here,” Coney said.
The program allowed Coney to trace her family back to the late 1800s and she said it was an emotional process for her to understand her history and how close her family was to slavery. She learned her great-grandfather was a sharecropper and saw her grandfather’s voter card — details she was able to share with other family members.
Coney had struggled to purchase a house in the past because of her credit score, like so many other Detroiters, and the high cost of homeowners’ insurance. So, when she finally bought her Detroit home, it was a major milestone, she said. Since then, the 48-year-old independent insurance agency owner has renovated the roof, changed the lighting and painted every room. There’s still more work to do, she said, but it’s just right for Coney and her teenage daughter. What’s more, it’s an investment for future generations.
“I’m looking to build a legacy through home ownership and build generational wealth,” she said. “What better way to do it than with home ownership?”
Not a new problem
Advocates for reparations have long pushed for legislation to study and develop ways to provide reparations. Locally, a 2022 survey of 2,339 Detroiters by the University of Michigan’s Detroit Metro Area Communities Study and the Center for Racial Justice looked at Detroiters’ views on reparations — defined by researchers as cash payments to Black Americans to counter the impacts of slavery and discriminatory policies — and found that more than half supported reparations in some form and most said elected officials should make it a high policy priority to address racial inequality.
The findings aligned with how Detroiters voted the year before: In 2021, Detroiters overwhelmingly supported the creation of the city of Detroit’s reparations task force to address historical discrimination faced by Black residents. The task force, which has since faced a tumultuous start, is responsible for creating recommendations for housing and economic development programs.
Reparation Generation — a project of California-based nonprofit Multiplier — was founded in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a former Minneapolis police officer. A group of people, Black and white from Detroit, California and a couple other cities, came together to develop what would become the organization on a mission to build wealth for Black Americans and provide data for a potential federal reparations program. Reparation Generation hired its first executive director, Christian Harris, last year.
The original founders, who Harris declined to name, though past local reporting has identified, came from various fields including banking, philanthropy, business, entertainment and health care. What brought Detroit and California together for this work were personal connections and a common interest in demonstrating what reparations could look like in real time and in a city with direct descendants of enslaved people in the U.S., Harris said.
Detroit, a majority Black city, exemplifies the resilience of Black people, Harris said. At the same time, residents have endured a tax foreclosure crisis and, decades before that, the city of Detroit was redlined, a practice by government appraisers that led to neighborhood segregation, disinvestment and stripped Black people of home ownership opportunities.
Reparation Generation initially started with funding from all of its founders. It raises money from individuals, foundations and corporations, according to the latest impact report on the organization’s website. Funds for the homeownership program — providing $25,000 for down payment assistance and other home-related costs — are raised from “Americans who have benefited off of harms against the Black community” and then that wealth is transferred to Black Americans purchasing a home, Harris said. From Oct. 2023 to Sept. 2024, Reparation Generation reported in an impact document $314,859 in revenue, with 76% coming from contributions and the remainder from grants.
Reparation Generation added genealogy consultation in the second iteration of the homeownership program to help applicants document their ancestry and connection to people who were enslaved in the U.S. The genealogy session is one of the most healing parts of the program, Harris said. Many people had been told their history didn’t exist or they’d never have access to it.
“One of our recipients is a farmer and found out that her ancestors were farmers and it was just a really powerful moment for her,” Harris said.
Since 2022, 12 metro Detroiters have become homeowners through the program. The application window for the third round was Sept. 1-10. To qualify, applicants must be a U.S. citizen and Black descendant of enslaved people in the U.S., meaning they have an ancestor traceable in the Census between 1870 and 1900 or an ancestor linked to the South up until the 1940s. They must identify as Black in the 2020 Census and currently live in Wayne, Oakland or Macomb counties and agree to buy a home in that area, among other requirements.
Then applicants are required to go through an orientation period, including homebuyer education and a financial readiness assessment, and apply through an official link. Completed applications are sorted by Detroit median family income (to ensure diversity in income levels) and randomly selected within income categories. Applicants are invited to schedule two other required steps before being fully approved: genealogy and personal and financial readiness consultations. Remaining applications are placed on a wait list. Enrollees have 120 days to find, finance and buy a home and once all the documents are verified, they receive the $25,000 wire transfer to an escrow account, according to the organization’s website. Participants must also agree to participate in Reparation Generation’s evaluations for two years after enrolling.
Detroiter Glenda Price, the former president of Marygrove College and now a member of Reparation Generation’s board, said the organization’s approach has longstanding benefits since owning a home is the start of building wealth.
“Families will see a different future for themselves and for their children and I think that it will also have a broader impact on the community,” said Price.
Price sits on The Center for Michigan’s board of directors. CFM is BridgeDetroit’s parent company.
Contributors feel it matters
Joni Tedesco, who is white and contributes time and money to Reparation Generation, knows what it’s like to benefit from wealth building across generations.
Tedesco’s father grew up on the north end of Detroit in a home without heat, across from a railroad and junk yard. When her dad got out of the army, he had a desk job but wanted to make something of himself and exit the cycle of poverty. So, he attended college on the GI Bill, eventually earning a PhD, granting opportunities that Black people didn’t necessarily have, she said. In a 2022 research brief from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, researchers found gaps in how Black and white veterans experienced the benefits, including a racial wealth gap into the next generation.
Tedesco, 69, of Livonia, said her own kids attended good schools, left college without debt and received help from family to purchase homes.
“My husband and I are products of generational wealth,” the retired audiologist said. Tedesco’s dad worked hard to get out of poverty and she and her husband, through their own careers, eventually achieved a comfortable life.
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, witnessing civil rights events such as the March on Washington, left an impression on her. She said she saw the overt racism of the time, even at her own wedding, from a relative toward a guest. She recalled the turmoil after schools were integrated in 1970 and the white flight in her Rosedale Park neighborhood.
Tedesco learned about Reparation Generation last year through a church group and further got involved by hosting home meetings this year to educate others about the organization’s work. She and her husband, Jim Tedesco, also contribute monthly to its home ownership program and the $25,000 reparative transfers.
“This really struck home to me, the whole idea of helping with reparations in a way that helps provide people the opportunity to obtain housing,” Tedesco said.
Marie Lowry, who is also white and contributes monthly to the homeownership program and leads meetings about reparations, moved out of Detroit in the mid-1960s to Redford. She grew up in a majority white environment and saw how poorly Black students were treated at her high school — her first awareness of race and racism. Her parents could afford their house and save money.
“We were able to go to solid good schools and from there, we were all able to go on to the colleges we chose to go to and build careers and none of that would have been possible if the GI Bill hadn’t made it possible for them to buy that house,” Lowry said about her parents.
The motivation for her to work with Reparation Generation is simply put, fairness, the 64-year-old Redford resident and instructional designer said.
“It doesn’t seem right not to try to rectify, even on the small scale I can, whatever injustice I’ve been a beneficiary of,” she said. “I love that it’s not charity. It’s about justice.”
A future of possibilities
Jasmine Simington, co-author of a 2023 report on Detroiters’ views on reparations, said survey analysis has shown that 75% of Detroiters said financial assistance for buying or improving a home would be one of the ways they’d like the government to make amends. Reparation Generation’s homeownership program is a noble approach to addressing historical and ongoing discrimination, she said, but the call for federal reparations is still important because local programs can only do so much.
“It’s just not financially possible to really close the Black white wealth gap through a local model of reparations,” said Simington, a graduate student of public policy and sociology at the University of Michigan. “Now, that being said. What a program like this absolutely can do is increase access to home ownership for a historically excluded population and that is a good thing.”
Program leadership should also consider the unintended consequences of focusing on home ownership, she said. Are Black renters being excluded or those who don’t qualify for the financing of a home? Detroiters are also thinking about reparations in various forms — not just home ownership, she said. Survey results, for instance, showed support for financial support for postsecondary education and Black businesses. The benefit of a cash payment model is that people can use it as they see fit, for housing, college or health insurance.
“We do want to keep really big expectations for a policy of reparations because of what it can do to close the wealth gap,” Simington said.
I’m ready to apply and receive my reparations compensation.