Why Are You Renting?

By: Omowale Luthuli-Allen

HOUSTON-Equity as a Goal. Why are you renting or leasing? If you don’t have a good reason, reconsider. Consider building equity as a compelling and gripping reason. Normally, in the African American community we talk about covenants and equity in a biblical sense. Biblically, we are talking about equity relationships with justice and fairness, in other words, leveling the playing field for all. Here we are lasered focused on financial capital. Equity building can take you from the class A minor league ball to the big Leagues.

Financial equity is the sum that you have when you subtract debts from assets. When you have more assets than liabilities, it means that you no longer tell people that you are surviving as cockroaches do. Cockroaches survive, but never prosper. If we build equity, we will be thriving and prospering as real winners do.

The bedrock of financial equity in America for the middle class is home ownership. 2008 Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg proposed that if he won, his administration would build 1 million homes for African Americans. It is a shame that he was not tall enough and he had an optics problem. We are at this weak home ownership level because of some factors that we could not control, such as historical wage slavery and theft, ghettos as a home because of redlining and other supremacist real estate chicanery. Black returning Veterans would be unable to use the GI bill immediately after the war to build homes. By the way, land theft is a crime and when you submit a fraudulent deed that you acquired through theft, that is fraud.

Owning a home rather than renting is a primary step in wealth building and wealth preservation. Wealth building is Substance. Gold teeth, embedded diamonds, rented jewelry, spinners, and rims equal form.

Harris County Community and Economic Development and the City of Houston feature a Home Ownership Down Payment Plan. This program will help you teach you how to build and repair credit to qualify. Call them today. Don’t procrastinate.

Yes, the sucking sound that you hear is your money being flushed from making bad choices which is partially a result of the miseducation that we have received.

When Booker T. Washington moved from Hampton to Tuskegee, he and his engineers, drafters and carpenters built every building on the campus except the chapel. Washington planned to build houses and hold the mortgage of white homeowners. Then, Washington would see how they voted when Black people held their mortgage. Yes, generally, he who holds the gold rules. Washington and Tuskegee held the gold and equity that made them kings of their own kingdom.

You can’t seize what you don’t own. You can’t repossess what has been paid for. Well, what I mean is that you are protected from seizure by the rule of law until the robbers seize the law.

If you want to impress, if you want to shine, let your diamond sparkle by making a true stakeholder statement for future generations.

Equity allows you to live larger by going from two to four bedroom when your family grows. Equity can answer the question, “Do you have security-collateral?” Rent forever and a day but you will never have the cushion of equity. Houston is going San Francisco real estate crazy. People in California are using their equity and buying large comfortable homes in Houston.

JT, the downfall of too many men and women is not owning the land where they stand and sleep.

Harold Cruse, former Prairie View professor and author of the monumental The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual makes the point that in a country founded on property rights that it is an imperative to be a full citizen, you and your racial group must own property.

Forget about Optics and form and focus on equity. Remember, it is not what you make, it is what you can save.