Dorothy York of Acts Housing

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Photo by Tom Jenz

Dorothy York

Dorothy York

If you were to drive the streets of the central city, you would observe many neighborhoods with several boarded up or vacant houses, the landscaping unattended. You might see For Rent or No Trespassing signs. The city owns some of these homes. Others are privately owned.

The nonprofit Acts Housing makes it possible for disadvantaged families to become homeowners. Acts Lending offers buyer and rehab loans for these families who have been locked out of the traditional mortgage market and are purchasing distressed homes. They might have issues with credit, savings, finances or even language barriers.

I met Dorothy York, vice president of real estate, at Acts Housing’s headquarters in the St. Michael Catholic Church Rectory building on 24th Street in the central city. Through her peaceful affable manner, she spoke about the Acts Housing mission with understated pride.

Let’s start with your background—your parents, neighborhoods, schools you attended. Then, take me through your advanced education and how you ended up at Acts Housing.

I feel like everything I’ve learned and done in my career prepared me for my job at Acts Housing. To help this organization move forward and do our good work, it took someone with a varied background like mine. I grew up in Milwaukee in the Harambee neighborhood on 1st Street near Clark. There were eight kids in my family, and Mom was a homemaker. Dad worked at the Foundry. Ours was a good safe neighborhood. The kids walked to the public schools, and the families got along. I graduated from West Division High School in 1976. 

When you were at West Division High, did you have a career goal in mind?

Not really. I didn’t expect to go to college. Out of high school, I took waitress jobs, and then I heard about doing computer work. I enrolled in Milwaukee Area Technical College and earned a one-year degree in computer operations. I was able to get a job at Blue Cross Blue Shield. Eventually, I ended up taking a job at Johnson Controls as a computer operator. I worked at Johnson Controls for 22 years. The company had tuition reimbursement for further education. I went back to MATC and earned my associate degree and became a computer programmer and later a systems analyst. This tuition benefit also enabled me to earn my bachelor’s degree in business management and communications from Alverno College, and then my masters degree in finance from Concordia University. 

And eventually you moved from computers into the business field, I believe.

Yes. I shifted career paths to human resources and into the Six Sigma program where you learn how to use statistics to make procedures more efficient. Along the way, I worked for different companies. Eventually, I got a real estate broker license. All those job experiences led me to ACTS Housing. I started here in 2017. 

Can you give me a short history of ACTS Housing? 

Acts Housing started in 1995 as a grassroots organization in St. Michael’s Church basement located right across our parking lot on 24th Street. Father Dennis and John Worm started the program. At that time, they were helping disadvantaged people get into some of the vacant houses in the area neighborhoods. Some philanthropists and foundations invested, and Acts Housing grew from there as a nonprofit. Through the years, our funding has come from philanthropists, individuals and foundations.

You are the Vice President of Acts Housing Real Estate. Describe the responsibilities of your job.

I oversee the real estate work, and I manage our five real estate agents and our real estate brokerage. But the biggest part of my job is to oversee the Home Acquisition Fund. I hire and train the staff and set up our systems and workflow so that we can purchase houses and do repairs, then make them available for families to purchase. 

From what I’ve read, Acts Housing offers residents homebuyer and financial coaching, lending and real estate services, and home rehab coaching. How do you go about that?

At Acts Housing, we have all the different segments that go into buying a home. If you as a homebuyer are interested in purchasing a home, you start with an Acts homebuyer coach who evaluates your financial situation, credit report, bank statement, spending habits, and the process of buying a home. The homebuyer coach gets you from where you are now to what you need to do in order buy a house. Through the process, you work on a plan and keep checking in with us. 

I would guess that many families who want to buy a home are struggling financially and may not qualify for the normal home loan.

Some families have a very wide gap in terms of getting a loan. For those folks, we have PowerPacks monthly meetings with other potential homeowners and a home buying coach who are working on improving their credit and financial situation. When people are ready to buy a home, we help them submit applications to various lenders to get pre-approval, whether with Acts Lending or with a bank. The qualifier is that Acts Lending only makes loans on a property in need of repair. Because Acts Lending doesn’t rely as much on credit scores, the process may be faster. 

How does the home buying process proceed?

The next step is that the family gets paired with a second Acts coach who will guide them in working with contractors. We are a one-stop shop, although the potential homeowner has the option of working with our realtors or with an outside real estate agency. In the last two or three years, we have assisted more than 300 families to purchase and/or rehab homes in Milwaukee.

You have recently launched this new Homeowner Acquisition Fund to purchase Milwaukee homes and resell them at affordable prices to city residents. In 2023, Acts Housing plans to purchase at least 100 homes and sell them to mainly Black and Latino families. For this to happen, you will need to raise $11 million. Can you elaborate on your rather ambitious plan?

In Milwaukee, we used to have a high level of home ownership. In 2005, it was 80%, but it has dropped to 69% in 2020. Out of state investors now own 23% of homes in the city, and they rent them out. That tends to create a permanent rental class of people and does not help improve neighborhoods. This is the reason we established our Homeowner Acquisition Fund program, which focuses on buying existing houses in need of repair. Our Fund was spawned out of the Community Development Alliance, a collaboration of every group in the city who is into housing. The Housing Acquisition Fund is one part of the Alliance. We started this program in the fall of 2022, and so far, we’ve hired three new employees, purchased five houses, and raised $7 million of the goal of $11 million.

Once Acts Housing buys a home that needs work, do you hire the contractor to do the rehab?

We have a project manager and rehab manager on staff who go out and scope the house for what needs to be improved. 

When the house is rehabbed and ready for sale, do you go through the normal sales process in finding a buyer?

As an example, we just finished a house on 18th and Highland. First, we see if we have families in the pipeline looking for a home. An eligible family must have gone through our homebuyer education program, namely homebuyer coaching. It’s important that potential buyers know what it takes to maintain and keep a home. We won’t put a house on the open market unless there is nobody in our homebuyer pipeline.

Is there an area of the city where you focus your resources? Black and Latino neighborhoods, for example?

We are open to buying houses in the entire city, but we do focus on central city neighborhoods and on Black and Latino families who have traditionally been left out of home ownership.

As you indicated, large out-of-state investors are buying properties and renting out the houses. Here is a quotation I found from you from last summer: “We have lost 12% of our homeowners since the economic downturn of 2008. We are losing 1,000 homeowners a year because of owner-occupied properties being sold to investors who are turning them into rentals. The big picture is actually increasing the number of people owning homes in the city of Milwaukee.”   

That’s exactly why we are jumping into home buying in order to compete with the out of state investors. The difference is that we are investing in houses to make them affordable for home ownership, and not to create rentals.

I understand that Acts Housing has a 30-person team. Are they all salaried employees?

Correct, we have 30 employees, but that does not include our independent contractors. Acts Housing has been around for 26 years, continually growing the number of families we’ve helped get into home ownership. And this helps the city because we purchase and rehab houses that otherwise would get boarded up and become a drag on the neighborhood. 

If you own a home, you have pride. If a neighborhood is full of homeowners, they look out for one another, take care of their landscaping, their kids play together, and there is an overall pride in the community. It’s kind of sad what’s happened to the central city in the past couple generations because of a large number of vacant homes or the neglect of the rental houses. 

You are right. Our model is “Buy a house. Build a community.” We have some wonderful stories of people who end up buying a house and take pride in keeping it up. When you work here at Acts Housing, you hear stories of what it means for families to own a home, and you really don’t want to work anywhere else. It’s the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.