After seven years of living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in Northeast Portland with her four sons, Ja’Nelle Samuels assumed homeownership was impossible.
The 43-year-old single mom and nonprofit manager grew up without housing stability. Her only model for homeownership growing up was her grandmother, who took her in after she left the foster care system.
Two years ago Samuels realized raising her children in a 950-square-foot space, one of the only options she could afford, was taking a toll on her mental health.
“I felt like I was stuck there,” she said.
That changed when she connected with Arrive, a nonprofit dedicated to providing homebuying counseling and lending options to low-income Oregonians. A housing counselor reviewed her credit, mapped out a savings strategy and helped her save enough money over two years to buy her first home. In May, she closed on a home in Northeast Portland’s Madison South neighborhood, where she has a garage and a backyard where the family can grill. Technically it’s a three-bedroom home, but each of her sons has their own room because of the two extra rooms in the finished basement.
“Homeownership means having something I can leave for my children,” Samuels said. “I always worry about if I were to have an untimely passing, where would my children end up? And now I know that they have a home.”
Formerly the Portland Housing Center, Arrive is dedicated to helping marginalized Oregonians achieve homeownership with counseling and lending services. In 2025, it expanded its lending services statewide to support Oregonians living outside the Portland area.
Nonprofit built on addressing racial disparities expands lending services statewide
Arrive was established in the aftermath of a 1990 news series by The Oregonian/OregonLive exposing mortgage lenders’ discriminatory practices of either refusing to lend to people interested in buying homes in low-income North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods, or exploiting and overcharging the ones that did.
But Oregon’s history of racial housing discrimination runs deeper. The Oregon Constitution in 1859 outlawed Black people from living in the state, owning real estate or entering into contracts. Oregon has since repealed its exclusion laws, officially removing racist wording from its constitution in 2002, and two recent state laws aim to help homeowners remove decades-old and unenforceable racist language in home deeds.
“Oregon is a state that was pretty much created as a white utopia,” Arrive Executive Director Dana Fuller Shepherd said.
At the federal level, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 also sought to end housing discrimination, but barriers for people of color seeking homeownership persist. The gap between white and Black homeowners remained the same in 2020 as it was in 1970, just two years after the law’s passage, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Black households in Oregon also had the lowest rate of homeownership with 30% of households owning a home compared to a 67% rate of homeownership among white Oregonians, according to the Oregon Employment Department.
In Oregon, especially in the Portland area, the challenges to accessing homeownership are compounded by decades of displacement from past urban renewal and infrastructure expansion projects such as the Interstate 5 corridor, Rose Quarter and Legacy Emmanuel Hospital, Fuller Shepherd said.
Arrive offers culturally specific counseling to clients to address lingering systemic challenges. Since its establishment, it has guided more than 10,000 Oregonians during the homebuying process.
Oregonians just have to pay a one-time $99 fee to access a housing counselor who will create a personalized plan to buy a home. Once they’ve paid the fee, they can access unlimited finance, homebuying and homeowner classes such as plumbing 101 or estate planning.
Anyone can register for counseling, but there are income limits to certain lending programs, Fuller Shepherd said.
The lending options that got these Oregonians their first homes
Depending on a person’s credit, Fuller Shepherd said she’s seen people pay as much as $500 to buy a home.
“It is definitely a myth that you need 20% down to purchase a home,” she said. “I have purchased several and have never had 20% down.”
One way Arrive helps Oregonians buy a home is by providing Oregon Individual Development Accounts, an incentive program the state established in 1999 that uses the Oregon IDA Tax Credit to guarantee a fund match for low-income Oregonians. Anyone can donate to the program until it reaches the $7.5 million cap.
Samuels used this option to buy her home. She put $100 in her account every month for two years and got it matched from the state program. She also saved money in a separate bank account and used settlement money from a car accident to buy her house.
Another lending service Arrive offers is down payment assistance, a program Fuller Shepherd benefitted from herself in 1998 when she bought her first home in Portland as a 22-year-old. Six years after living in her home, she sold it and made money that helped her become financially secure as an adult.
In Oregon, 55% of down payment assistance from the state goes to people of color, according to the Oregon Department of Housing Community Services.
Arrive’s down payment assistance program also helped 26-year-old Gresham resident Teo Ramirez buy his first home. Ramirez grew up in a low-income household, sometimes experiencing periods of homelessness and couch-surfing alongside his mother and sister before spending his teenage years in Portland’s Home Forward affordable housing units.
He said he decided to pursue homeownership after his landlord attempted illegal rent hikes and eviction notices. Plus, he wanted a dog.
“They just tried to do a lot of illegal stuff, and that’s when I was like, ‘Okay, I’m tired of being a renter,’” he told the Capital Chronicle. “‘I really want to own my own home and I don’t want to have to fight with a landlord.”
He was making $70,000 a year when he signed up for Arrive’s services, which was too much money to qualify for some of its lending resources. However, he still met with a housing counselor who helped create a budgeting plan to grow his $5,000 in savings to $22,000 over the next year. He secured down payment assistance in the form of an additional loan separate from his main mortgage that covered 20% of the cost of the home at a much lower interest rate. His real estate agent also helped him secure a grant for LGBTQ+ homebuyers.
By Memorial Day weekend, he purchased a three-bedroom, one-bathroom home in Gresham, just five minutes away from where he was renting.
“I would tell people to seek advice and resources that will help you in the process,” he said. “Knowledge is the most powerful thing you can have when you’re overcoming something that feels impossible.”
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