She extols the virtues of homeownership from a unique perspective
Every now and then, one comes across a person who was clearly born for a certain role – one with an intrinsic makeup forged by personal experience yielding what seems like a genetic predisposition for a particular journey, as if being touched by providence along the way.
Tai Christensen (pictured), the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer at CBC Mortgage Agency, was recently appointed as the new chair of the American Mortgage Diversity Council, tasked with increasing the rate of minority homeownership in the US. Since her hiring in 2018, Christensen has furthered the same goal at CBC Mortgage, which offers the Chenoa Fund, a national down payment assistance program designed to increase the level of homeownership among minorities. The mission of that company – and by extension that of Christensen – is to increase affordable and sustainable homeownership, with a focus on creditworthy, low- and moderate-income individuals. It’s worth mentioning that Christensen has 20 years of real estate experience.
As remarkable as those achievement clearly are, it’s when one considers Christensen’s personal narrative when it’s clear her occupation is more of a calling. Homeownership has long been part and parcel to her personal narrative, going back several generations. The fact that the ancestor who started the legacy was once a slave makes the tale that much more remarkable.
“We go back five generations to Henderson,” she told Mortgage Professional America in an interview, referring to her great-great-great-grandfather Henderson Faribault. “He died in 1902, and was the first homeowner in our family,” she said. Her ancestor was enslaved by birth – meaning both his parents were slaves – and was toiling in the fields himself by the time he was nine years old.
Faribault – the surname adopted from the name of the plantation – was emancipated by 1866, Christensen said. After emancipation, she said her ancestor moved to Hillsborough, N.C. where he bought 50 acres of land while working as a chef at various restaurants.
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Here’s where the magical realism starts. After buying his land, Faribault left a house for each of his eight children. That was the spark leading to subsequent generations of homeowners and transfer of generational wealth – virtues Christensen continues to extol and promote today as part of her work, with an innate understanding of how equity can be transformative in the life of a Black family.
Since Faribault began the tradition, the surname has been altered by some in subsequent generations – from Feribo to Pherribo – but the legacy remains intact. “According to family folklore, he just would buy up properties when they became available, Christensen said in explaining how he came to amass the acreage.
There’s a street named after him in Hillsborough, Faribault Lane, and a chimney from one of his original homes remains standing. A plaque honors the family after Christensen’s great-grandmother, Mary Pherribo, donated land to the city. She, too, was a homeowner, having bought a house for $500, Christensen said, noting some family members still live in the home.
“I’ve always considered homeownership to be a part of your life journey,” she said. “When I talk about role modeling, this is what I mean. My parents were homeowners, my grandparents were homeowners, my uncles. I just presumed that this is the way you live your life – you grow up, you go to college, you buy a house, you get a picket fence and a dog.”
Despite such a legacy, Christensen had her sights set on a career in interior design. “I just kind of happenstance into mortgages,” she said. “I don’t know that you’ll ever meet anyone who’s, like, ‘I went to school to get into mortgages!’ No, we all fell into it in some way. I’m the quintessential mortgage person, I was actually going into interior design.”
It was at the encouragement of a friend after Christensen gave birth that she started thinking about entering the mortgage industry. “She said ‘you’ve got a great brain and would make an awesome underwriter,’” Christensen recalled. “That’s how I fell into it. I took some training courses at the Mortgage Training Institute – which isn’t even open anymore – got some certifications, and started contract processing for a brokerage in Salt Lake City. I built my career from there.”
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Ancestral equity helped inform her newfound career, she agreed. “We don’t even have to go back to Henderson,” she said in tracking the dividends that come with homeownership and its attendant equity. “We can go to my parents. My dad and uncle both went to college. Their parents helped pay for their college education because they had equity from my great-grandmothers’ estate. When Pop died – that’s my grandfather – his house was completely paid off. He left it to my dad and uncle, and they still own the home – it’s one of their rental properties now.”
These experiences have guided a career promoting a greater level of homeownership for minorities amid sobering statistics showing continual inequity. Some 72% of White Americans were homeowners in 2020 – more than 30 percentage points more than for Black families.
“For me, I’ve been able to visually see the transfer of equity creating a positive financial outcome for my personal family,” Christensen said. “We go from enslavement to now. Now, I’m like one of the only people in my family who doesn’t have a Master’s degree. Most of my cousins are dentists and doctors and lawyers and business owners. They are very educated and smart people and financially savvy as well.
“I’ve been able to see it in my own life and, as I’ve aged and started meeting more and more people, I started to quickly realize my personal narrative is an anomaly. The older I’ve gotten the more I’ve seen that. And I think it is quite sad because I had a lot of experiences growing up. In my elementary years, we were very well traveled, we skied every year all over the place. My dad’s been going to Europe to ski since I was a young child. That’s what I grew up with. My mom was an executive for AT&T.”
Her experience yielded an assumption early on: “I just assumed everyone was having the same lived experience,” she said. “And that is not the case. But when you see the dynamic difference between your life and somebody else’s life from your cultural background, why is the disparity there? Every time it’s a lack of wealth, a lack of resources, a lack of money.”
Given such an informed lineage, her father was able to pay for college for Christensen and her sisters, she noted. As a result, neither she nor her siblings have student loan debt. “That is a great advantage in your life moving forward,” she said, “if you don’t have to start your life out with debt by amassing student loan debt just to get an education - therein in of itself you have a step forward. We were able to do that because my father had financial resources to send us to school.”
In her work, Christensen is attempting to change the narrative of others in promoting higher levels of minority homeownership. “A lot of people just presume it is not in their lived reality,” she said. “They think of homeownership as some unattainable thing that’s just never meant for them. I hear this all the time: that’s not for people like me. What’s a person like you? If you have a strong enough credit profile to qualify then homeownership can be for you. A lot of people in the minority community see homeownership as a white person thing. No, it’s for everyone. If we want to change the dynamic of our minority existence, we’ve got to get rid of that mindset.”
While many may not share her remarkable lineage and legacy of homeownership, Christensen insists it’s achievable for many people who may think otherwise. “It’s accessible to all if a), you know about the resources available and b) try! A lot of people won’t even try. I do understand that a lot of this has to do with the financial trauma that our communities of color have experienced; I’m not ignorant to that. But I also think that it’s time now to change the narrative and start moving the dial towards more and more people of color being homeowners and having a stake and a say in their communities.”
Future homeowners might think of it as starting their own legacy for their families, just like Henderson Faribault did in the plains of North Carolina long ago.
