Roles: Board Member, Compass Working Capital
Tell us a little about where you grew up?
I grew up on the South Side of Waltham, MA, which was a mostly lower-income working class part of the city. Waltham had been a large player during the industrial revolution and home to many of the early factories – the South Side was where all the workers were housed, which is evident in it still being primarily multifamily rental properties. The home that I grew up in was a four-family building under the Section 8 program. My father was a bad alcoholic and out of the picture by the time I was two years old, so I grew up with my mom and for a short-time my sister and brother who are eight/nine years older than I am.How did that experience shape you as a person/ How did that impact the path that you followed in life?
Growing up in the circumstances I did made it clear to me from an early age that I had no other choice but to create my own opportunities – nothing was going to be handed to me and I couldn’t count on anything other than hard word and determination. I wasn’t going to have the same comforts that other kids had – such as not having the luxury of not working from a young age, not being able to rely on college savings from their parents and even the simple notion of having success and higher education be an expectation rather than an exception. There weren’t other adults I knew as a kid who had college degrees – my sister became one of my early role models going to a local State college and then becoming a police officer.Why is affordable housing important now?
Thinking back to my childhood, the housing assistance we got through Section 8 was a vital lifeline that allowed us to barely stay afloat. My mother was a hard worker and I don’t think there’s a time when I was young that she didn’t work at least 40 hours per week. Even with the housing assistance and me working from the time I was 14, we were perpetually dealing with small amounts of credit card debt and no savings. We didn’t take vacations, we didn’t eat out at restaurants and we didn’t have nice things…yet, an unexpected expense like the car breaking down was still a source of stress because there just wasn’t anything extra left to pay for something like that. In my opinion, there’s no chance of creating a system that allows American families to break the cycle of poverty if housing is perpetually a source of stress. The children who live in public housing already have enough going against them.
There's no chance of creating a system that allows American families to break the cycle of poverty if housing is perpetually a source of stress.
