Charles Touhey spoke to local Returned Peace Corps Volunteers last month. Charles was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia. Once home he immersed himself in the needs of homeownership for African-Americans in the South End of Albany. There he met his wife, the late Alice Green, the voice of Albany’s Black community on civil rights. Charles is a builder of low-income housing. They became one of Albany’s power couples and I've felt privileged to know and call them friends for the last three decades.
Charles is very modest and soft-spoken but the clarity and power of his presentation were remarkable. He has been working with Alice for half a century to help people buy their first home.
A first-time home buyer gets bedrooms for their children and generally can’t be evicted by a third party. But the perfect starter home, for those with limited resources, is a two-family house. One apartment pays the mortgage. Plus, Charles found, two families usually work together for their mutual advantage.
Those with more privileged backgrounds want to buy single-family homes for themselves. But the economics are less viable for lower income families and the banks are less likely to provide the necessary financing. A single crisis, a hospital stay, the birth of a child, likely throws a poor family’s finances out of whack. That extra check matters.
Charles worked with the late Sam Aronowitz, whom many would remember as one of the founders of the Albany law firm, O’Connell and Aronowitz, but more important for the work Charles does, Aronowitz also created an organization called Better Albany Living. That organization identifies and counsels buyers and their funders to prepare them all for the purchase of a home. A financial adviser works with the potential buyer/owner to identify all the necessary expenses to make the purchase a reality. But there are always some extras that need to be handled. So, the team added an unrestricted gift to make up for whatever that was. It would be delivered as part of the closing but otherwise it would be used any way the buyer needed without restriction. Sometimes it was just enough to enable the buyer to open a bank account. Sometimes it might be paying a judgment or closing a lien.
Clearly not all of what Charles and his colleagues have been doing could be replicated by the government but Charles has lobbied the state for larger subsidies for two family houses, while building on existing subsidies. And they have focused on those whose disadvantages have been aggravated by the kinds of trauma that left people completely discouraged – redlining of their parents that robbed them of a start, being constantly told they couldn’t ever become homeowners, or local events that repeatedly robbed them of accumulated resources or led to forms of post-traumatic stress that blocked people from thinking it was worth the try. As an attorney I have been very much aware of the kinds of obstacles thrown in the way of the poor trying to improve their position.
Charles’ continuing commitment to this effort is also his way of dealing with the loss of Alice, his wife of half a century. Bless them both and the people and organizations which have been helping to make this program a reality.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran. He enjoys the help of his editor, Jeanette Gottlieb
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