Reparations are a moral calling for these Quakers. First up: Help for Black homeowners

PHILADELPHIA — Tyrone Seldon inherited a house from his father, who died in 2018. Since then, he and his wife, Shawn, have been trying to navigate stacks of paperwork to handle the estate on their own, because they can’t afford a lawyer. They got the answers they needed in the social room of a Quaker meetinghouse in the Germantown area of Philadelphia.

“I feel like a weight is lifted off our shoulders,” Shawn said.

On a sunny Saturday morning this month, a handful of Germantown homeowners found solutions both to problems they had been struggling with for years and problems they didn’t know they had.

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Members of Green Street Monthly Meeting of Friends and the nonprofit legal services agency Philadelphia VIP are helping Black Germantown homeowners create wills, understand their deeds, and get help with tangled titles to help them keep their homes — for free. They referred Tyrone Seldon, a 54-year-old systems engineer, to a program that provides free legal help to clear legal ownership, or title, of properties. He also started the process of creating a will and learned about property tax relief.

It’s all part of Green Street’s racial justice plan to give reparations to Black residents in Germantown — work it hopes will spread to congregations citywide. Before the pandemic, members became aware of just how much money Green Street had in unrestricted reserves, and they wanted to put those funds to good use. The meeting dates to the 1800s, so “we have old money,” said Gabbreell James, a Green Street member for 15 years who is on its reparations committee.

Green Street owns almost an entire city block, and members leave money and stock to the meeting when they die, she said. That includes a gift more than half a century ago of shares in what later became GlaxoSmithKline from a daughter of one of the founders.

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The congregation plans to spend $50,000 per year on reparations work over the next 10 years. In the future, it might tackle issues such as mental health, food insecurity, or lack of resources in schools. But its reparations committee, led by Black members, is starting by helping Black Germantown residents stay in their homes. Because of generations of discriminatory housing and economic policies, Black families are less likely to own homes than white families, and they have much less wealth as a whole.

James, a regional housing coordinator for Self-Determination Housing of Pennsylvania, an organization that advocates for affordable and accessible housing for people with disabilities, said the foundation of many Philadelphians’ problems is housing instability.

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“I’m a homeowner in Germantown. I see the gentrification. I know people who are losing their homes behind tangled titles, behind taxes, family fighting when someone dies. And the developers are moving in,” said James, who has worked in housing advocacy in Philadelphia for more than 10 years. “I want to help stabilize Black wealth. I want people to keep their houses. I want people to have wills, so they don’t struggle when someone dies.”

“If one person who was going to lose their family’s house gets to keep it,” she said, “I feel like we succeeded.”

The city’s Commission on Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs hopes Green Street, which is more diverse than the typical Quaker congregation, can be a model for faith communities citywide. About a year ago, the commission started talking seriously about reparations as a “moral mandate,” said director Naomi Washington-Leapheart. “We’re doing this by faith because our faith requires us to seek to repair harm.”

“We felt reflective as everybody was marking a year since the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, a year after the uprisings all over the world about the state violence against Black folks,” she said. “We were interested in, ‘What will our work be to sustain the momentum and the urgency that came out of that summer of 2020?’ “

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This year, the commission plans to create a training program to help majority-white congregations of all faiths in the city give reparations in meaningful ways that help right wrongs and repair community relationships.

“There’s been a lot of mythology out there about reparations,” Washington-Leapheart said. “This really is not charity. This is redress.”

Green Street started to plan for reparations independent of the commission’s initiative.

“Here’s a congregation that is doing this work,” she said. “It’s messy, it’s often slow going, but they’re committed to doing this work.”

Because of the pandemic, volunteers have been virtually handling requests for help — about 40 so far —since January. April’s clinic was the first one homeowners could attend.

Linda Smalley just turned 63 and figured it was time to make sure her house was in order when she saw a social media post about the clinic. She doesn’t want to leave behind problems for her son. She walked out of the meetinghouse with a copy of her deed and the promise that a lawyer would contact her to finish her will.

“I’m thanking God for places like this,” said Smalley, who has lived in Germantown for two decades. “I’m so glad that I could see that Facebook page and that I could go somewhere and actually get some help. And it’s in my neighborhood.”

Kate Dugan, a staff attorney in the home ownership and consumer rights unit at Community Legal Services, supported volunteers at the clinic. She said the nonprofit often partners with elected officials and faith organizations to spread the word about legal assistance.

“This is a little unusual in that Green Street has set it up to help people on the spot,” she said.

Lynda Black, a Quaker and member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting and Ujima Friends Meeting, came to help her fellow Black homeowners.

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“I’m just really concerned about housing disparity in the Black community,” she said. Problems feel huge, she said, but Green Street’s initiative “is a fine example of what people can do.”