“We have an unprecedented crisis in housing”

Eyeing the housing aftermarket

NCST has trained its sights on rehabbing aging stock to mitigate the housing shortage. “We have a significant portion of our housing stock that was built before 1980 that is aging, that is in need of repair,” Tyson said. “So, we like to focus on those opportunities in what I like to call the housing aftermarket. This is what happens to defaulted, distressed, and abandoned properties as they find their way back to market.”

Yet much of that aftermarket activity hasn’t been traditionally undertaken toward the idea of creating affordable housing, he added.

“A lot of that activity exists in the auction space,” he noted. “Servicers of foreclosed property tend to dump those properties into auction spaces. Those spaces, just because of the nature of an auction, privilege those with cash and those that can move quickly. That tends not to be people seeking affordable homes to buy.”

That’s where the non-profit steps in. NCST works with local community groups to facilitate the purchase of distressed properties, while also providing policy research and guidance on federal level to combat the housing crisis and provide more affordable housing for families across the country, as stated in its mission statement.

It is guided by an ideal transcending a borrower’s ownership of brick-and-mortar property to call one’s own, but more the sum of its parts, Tyson suggested. Rather, the overall vision was described as predicated on helping to stabilize entire swaths of neighborhoods through homeownership in the aggregate toward building community wealth and advancing racial and ethnic equity.