Helping Drive Affordable Housing
“We needed that person having pride in their neighborhood,” McEvoy said.
McEvoy and his parents moved to Memphis in 1974. As he got older, McEvoy remembered the neighbor and noticed some rougher areas in the city he now called home.
“I think about my old neighbor in Chicago, but imagine getting chased by a drug addict in an abandoned home,” said McEvoy, now managing attorney of Home Surety Title and Escrow. “I want to help kids be able to walk to school safely and create a community where people have pride in where they live.”
Serving on the board of directors with both the local and state Mortgage Bankers Association, McEvoy has for some time followed his passion of giving back. He’s proud of having worked to improve blighted areas in his adopted hometown.
“You can make a lot of dollars in your life, but you always want to leave a mark somewhere,” he said. “Hopefully, we can make a significant change in some communities and provide housing to a child who has to deal with a dangerous neighborhood.”
CONVERGENCE Memphis
McEvoy’s company is participating in the MBA’s CONVERGENCE Memphis initiative to increase African American homeownership. In these communities, CONVERGENCE Memphis efforts are amplifying existing local efforts and deploying additional national and state resources to complete several work streams. The initiative has three main goals:
- Amplify the outreach and counseling efforts of the Memphis affordable housing industry to increase the number of African Americans who are mortgage ready and purchasing in Memphis communities.
- In the target communities, facilitate neighborhood revitalization that increases efforts to improve the existing supply of affordable housing and promotes an equitable and accessible housing finance system to make investments.
- Focus outreach on sustainable homeownership and preservation through strategies to promote generational financial well-being.
“We have a lot of blights in Memphis,” McEvoy said. “This program is focused on cleaning up the areas and creating affordable housing by knocking down buildings and building new houses.”
The COVID-19 pandemic that started in March 2020 slowed the initiative, but things are moving forward. Steve O’Connor, MBA’s senior vice president for Affordable Housing Initiatives, has worked with Memphis-area public officials, community activists, mortgage industry partners and other stakeholders to establish the initiative, which he says is the start of a multi-year campaign.
“CONVERGENCE Memphis allows us to test ways in which cross-sector collaboration can address the challenges of minority homeownership,” O’Connor said. “The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these challenges. Minority households have been struggling— they’re facing employment and health insecurity; they’re taking two steps back; they’re falling deeper into the hole. The communities we are trying to serve—the people who are on the front lines—need our help. We wanted to be creative in our approach. And we want to make sure that any recovery is an equitable one—it must help the people who we are trying to help in the first place.”
Memphis is an ideal location for the initiative. According to the most recent American Community Survey data, the overall share of Memphis households who own their home was 49% in 2015, while homeownership rates for the U.S. were 64%. During that same time, of the homeowners in Memphis, 43% percent of the city’s Black community owned homes compared to 62% of the city’s white households. At the Metropolitan statistical area level, the disparity is even wider—48% for African American households, compared to 75% for white households.