An Army of Normal Folks - Michael Gosman: Buy A Home, Build A Community (Pt 2)

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

When Father Dennis Lewis was assigned to St. Michael’s parish in Milwaukee, he discovered a growing number of Hmong and Laotians seeking refuge from the Vietnam War. Many were subjected to a terrible slumlord and so Father decided to start a homebuying ministry that helped coach them through the process. 33 years later, Acts Housing has helped 4,000 low-income families purchase homes!Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Michael Gosman right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. From iHeart podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. You dig what I do, you have a need, unfortunately you have no sense of humor, that's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser. He was the first, and the original shock shock. That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people. You're as dumb as the rest, I can't take anyone.

I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart. His voice changed media. His death shocked the nation. And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Allen Berg reportedly

was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver. He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody. From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then, over 100 years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases. Using

modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one

who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Inc. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era?

Where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero sense and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech Podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes,

who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder.

Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me, and they're not not gonna describe someone who looks like me and they're not gonna describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival,

presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. Vegas! September 19th and 20th. On your feet! Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, John Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5,

Sammy Hagar, Tate McCragg, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today, AXS.com. Get your tickets today AXS.com. So the city agreed to that deal and you guys went out and let the community know it existed. They started getting people in homes. So now I can't help but think just from the business side of me, all right, great. You can buy the home for a thousand dollars or a dollar. But code's not going to let you move into it until it's right. For sure. So you got to have money to fix it up, which means you got to borrow money,

which many families in these situations can't go to Bank of America and get a loan for this. But you guys came up with the fix for that. That's exactly right. So we never had any aspirations of being in the mortgage lending business. Yeah, these things kind of roll downhill and get big. Yeah, that wasn't on the bingo card when Father Dennis and John Wurm were founding acts. And we still partner very significantly with banks and credit unions to get, provide most of the mortgage financing for our families. But what we saw in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis was that banks were retrenching.

They weren't lending as freely for some good reasons and maybe some not so great reasons. And in particular, they weren't lending to families who were purchasing distressed homes. It's one thing for a bank to lend on a move-in ready home, but a distressed home, a home that's not livable, the bank looks at that as a much bigger risk, right? Well, and in fairness to the bank. It is. It is. I mean, how are you going to lend $50,000 on a place that today is worth literally a

dollar? That's exactly right. And you can't really blame the bank. It doesn't mean they're predatory, but they answer to a board of directors, they answer to shareholders, they answer to whoever's holding the bag. No loan officer can justify that.

So I kind of get why that's a barrier. I think that's right. I think they, and so we quickly realized, and we had good relationships with a lot of local banks, we pushed them to do as much as we could get them to do, and we had good relationships, a lot of local banks, we pushed them to do as much as we could get them to do, and we realized they're not gonna do this. There's no way that they're gonna lend on these homes

at the scale we need. And so we piloted our own loan product. Larius, I wanna get a white tour of that. The idea was sort of a return to common sense underwriting. Let's look at their rental history. Let's make that the most important thing. Are they paying their rent on time every single month? What's their rent? Okay, what's their new mortgage going to be? That's a great indicator of

whether they're going to pay their mortgage, right? Are they paying their rent on time? And I read you guys are actually trying to get them into a mortgage that is actually a little less than what they pay for rent. So they're getting ownership and paying less. That's the best case scenario. And especially in this period where I'm talking about, where we were offering the Axe Lending product,

we had families who were spending $800, $1,000, $1,200 a month in rent, who wound up having a new mortgage payment, including taxes and insurance, that was more like $500 or $600 a month. So just many hundreds of dollars of savings for the lowest income families, working families in our community. But getting those deals done were not easy.

Setting up your own mortgage lending effort, turns out there's a fair amount of compliance requirements that you gotta really pay a lot of attention to. So we had to be very strategic in terms of who our volunteers were. Because we didn't have the money to hire a bunch of folks who were going to spend all their time on regulations. But we had some great lawyers and compliance folks who volunteered for us because they believed in this and thought it could be successful.

And we just started doing loans. I will tell you, when I joined, so I didn't join the organization. I've been on the team now for 13 years. I was a volunteer for a couple of years before that. When I joined the organization, we just had started this lending work and we'd gotten pretty good at lending the money. And so we were doing maybe, you know, 10, 15 of these loans a year, letting families purchase and fix up these homes.

But we weren't really great at getting paid back. And when I was a volunteer, I was like, like, oh that's that's a little bit troubling. Like it would it would be good if we were getting getting monthly payments. People weren't paying their notes? People weren't paying their notes. And so you know as a question of okay well this only works if people are actually paying us back so let's figure out what's going on. And the organization you have to understand we were tiny. You know I was a volunteer for the organization, but there were only six full-time staff members.

And so as a volunteer, they let me dig in a little bit to the lending work, because again, there wasn't someone to do everything. So all right, you got this guy who's volunteering to help out. Let's give him as much as he'll take. And when I dug in, I realized that we weren't invoicing families. They weren't getting any sort of monthly reminder.

Well, that'll do it. Hold it. So that people get why this might be. What before this world, what was your discipline, your occupation? Yeah, so I was practicing law. I was working at a sort of large Milwaukee law firm and was completely

unsatisfied with the practice of law. Where'd you go to law school? University of Chicago. You're smart. How'd you pay to go to that place? It's expensive. Oh, well, that's a whole nother story. I actually, so I started law school and I started law school in 2004. And I And I don't know if you're I don't know

if you're a poker player at all. Actually, I love like that's why you wanted me to ask. I'll be in a place out west in the very southern tip of Nevada playing poker. Fear in about 10 days. Nice. Yeah. Well, so I grew up in a card playing family. I learned cards from my grandfather. Spades and jams. A lot of gin rummy. Meat. A lot of gin rummy.

That is so cool. Me too. A lot of fun. And then a fair amount of poker. And when Texas Hold'em started to get a little popular in the early 2000s, I started reading Texas Hold'em books because I just, I'd always liked poker and I was sort of curious about it. And the game, you know, for anyone who plays poker,

it just exploded in popularity. It just became, it went from being something that most people had never heard of to being something that was televised on TV. And- Chris Moneymaker effect. The Moneymaker effect, exactly. And so I'd read, you know, sort of the poker books, the best books

of the time. I sort of understood them. And what I found very quickly was, and I was playing at fairly low stakes at first, but just having done that little bit of work and also then being able to take what I learned and apply it, it meant in 2004, 2005, 2006, you had a massive edge on almost any game you'd play in. And so I went from playing very low stakes to playing sort of incredibly high stakes, poker cash games. I wasn't a tournament player.

And that wound up being how I paid for my law school, for my wife's graduate school. You paid for school at the University of Chicago being an attorney playing poker. Yeah, it wasn't. That is great. Yeah, I got it. And your wife's graduate school.

Yeah, it was an interesting period. I never thought that I would make a living playing cards. I never thought it was going to be a career. But there was a moment where there was that really significant opportunity. I didn't have the vision at that time to realize the difference that that income would make on my life's trajectory, but it's the very rare, I think, like poker success story.

Because if I had not been able to pay for my graduate school, my wife's graduate school with poker, I think I would have felt compelled to stay working at the law firm, even though I was pretty unsatisfied because I had a lot of debt to pay and we were starting a family, we had kids. But because I had that freedom of not having that debt, when I started volunteering for AX and I saw that my work there was making a difference, that the extra effort that they would be able to put forth with another member of the team was significant. I was able to transition into a job that I thought,

you know, could be deeply meaningful and not be as concerned with the fact that, you know, the pay wasn't quite what I was making at the law firm. This is incredible. Did you still play? I play very recreationally now, but I still love the game. And, yeah, I try and play, you know, 10, 15 times a year. Do you know for me, it's really not about the stakes. I want to play right.

I played a lot of chess coming up. Oh, okay. So I see the game the same way. And so it doesn't matter if I'm playing one three or 50 hundred. I want to, I just want to play well. I want to play right. I don't want to get had and I want to, you know, I don't want to be a fish.

So it's more about playing the game than it is about the stakes for me. Is it the same for you by any chance? I'm just curious. Yeah, so I love, and I love playing with people who are trying to win. I think that's really it. If I'm playing with people who all are really trying to win, that's a fun game. That's a fun game to be a part of,

regardless of, regardless of the states. Okay, well, I chase like a squirrel up a tree. It has nothing to do with the story, except I think it's, that's hilarious. That's the greatest thing in the world. I could talk to you about that for four hours, too. All right, so back to where we are. So, which, you're, so you guys start lending money, right?

And because you're an attorney and from University of Chicago and pretty bright and a volunteer at this point, you found out that maybe one of the reasons people are paying their bills is you guys aren't sending them a bill. Right. And you know, this wasn't a brilliant observation, right? And they knew it, right?

They knew they weren't doing it. But the reality was tiny operation, lots of things going on. There wasn't anyone to send out the invoices. So I became the invoice guy, right? So if I get the invoices out, let's see if that makes a difference. And lo and behold, you know, the portfolio went from like being deeply distressed to performing great with the addition of the invoices, right? We just needed to remind people how to pay us. We needed to remind them that we wanted to get repaid. And very quickly, the payments started coming in. So it begs the question. Because if I'm just listening to story,

this is the first thing that's okay. So now you're helping people get the houses to the axe thing, you've got this kind of private public partnership for access to the houses that she you've got this, this mentorship and what to do with the houses to fix them up to get code. I would imagine the code enforcement department knows what you guys are doing and is somewhat helpful. And now you're lending money. What is the what is the default rate? Yeah, so when we started this loan program, there was a lot of naysayers.

A lot of the bankers who saw what we were doing said, you know, this will never work. It's not done that way. You need to focus on credit score. You need to focus, you know, look at these loans differently. And what we found was because of the stability that homeownership offers, because of how affordable these homes are, Families are, they're going to do everything they can to keep these homes. And so we now have been, we've lent more than $15 million over the last decade to families. That's spread out across 200 plus loans that

we've made. And we've had total write-offs in our portfolio of $80,000. That's less than, that's half a percent. Yeah. Look at me do man. That's very good. And it's even better than that because those are the write offs. But typically even on the three loans that we've written off,

we wind up getting some of that money back, right? Because write off just means that we decided that the loan doesn't have a high likelihood of repaying, but typically we're still able to work with the families to figure out a way either upon transfer or if they need to sell the home. And so it's been a remarkably sustainable program. The great thing about, there's two things-

Do you mean the poor people? Poor people who don't pay their bills in bad areas, turns out that actually if you give them access and a chance, they actually will do what they're supposed to do. Is that what you're saying to me? The strength we see every single day in the community is remarkable.

He's probably gonna look this up if you don't know the answer, but I'm curious. Do you have any idea what the default rate is for traditional banking relationships on home loans? Well, so I don't have that answer. That answer is actually a shockingly low number. It's even lower than what our families have done. I just wonder how it compares.

But we did an analysis over the last 30 years looking at all the families who bought homes through Axe and comparing them, the foreclosure rate for the 4,000 alumni we now have, and these aren't all loans we've originated, right? Most of them are loans that banks and credit unions have done. But these borrowers, our borrowers, are the lowest income, sort of, you know, on paper, the least prepared for home ownership as compared to the overall market. And we've seen that the foreclosure rate that our families have experienced is about 50% lower than what's been experienced overall in the market. So for prime borrowers...

You look it up. Oh, because you queued that for me. So for prime borrowers it's one to two percent, for FHA loans it's three to six percent, and for subprime mortgages it's ten percent plus. What is what is what foreclosure what's the what is that that's foreclosure saying default rates so and I what I shared was a little bit I short I shared write-offs right so what I would say well and that's a different yeah that is what I would say is and and this is maybe important for people to understand, our portfolio performing well does not mean that we get paid on time every month from every single

borrower. Or so. In any given month, we might have between 3% to 7% of our borrowers who are going to miss a payment because these are the lowest income families who own homes. And if they are in a car accident, if they've got a death in the family, if they lose a job, sometimes there's not enough savings for them to meet all their obligations that month. The beauty of us having the relationship we have

with these families is that they let us know when they're having these challenges and we work with them, right? So we need to get repaid on this loan, but if we need to reduce the monthly payment on the loan for a few months, because we understand challenge they're dealing with, to help them get to the other side of that and then move those payments to the end of the loan, that actually doesn't cost us very much. But it is a huge investment in our vision for what these communities can be.

And it can be the difference between a family maintaining their home, which our families, through our program, we haven't needed to foreclose on even one family who we've lent money to. So the sustainability of it's been really significant. And it's well worth, you know, for our vision, the last thing we want to do is foreclose. So long as it's a hardworking family that's trying to make things right, we're going to go on that journey with them, right, and figure out how to make sure that they can maintain that home. Where do you, how do you establish interest rates?

So our interest rates are actually set based on sort of the prime rate. We charge a 50 basis point premium over the prime rate. A half point. A half point. So it's, it's, you know, depending on who you ask, these families can't get credit sort of anywhere else. I was gonna say, they can't get credit that cheap anywhere. This is, this is, you know, you could think of it

as a reduced rate, but we think it's important that we charge a 50 basis point premium or a half a percent premium over what the banks offer, only because if families can access a banking relationship, if they can get a mortgage from a bank or credit union, that's great, you know, we want them to be full participants in the market, and so we're not trying to be like, we don't want to be a bank. You're not competing with the bank.

We're not competing with the banks. But if there's good loans that the banks, for a myriad of reasons, aren't able or aren't willing to do, we want to be able to do those. And we want to be able to do so sustainably. And that's also really important. Long-term, our lending program is designed to be a self-sustaining program. It doesn't require philanthropy in order for us to do this work. And we think that's really important because there's lots of things that require philanthropy and aspects of our program that require philanthropy.

And we're going to ask for those funds and we're grateful when partners in the community support us in that way. But it's really important that if we've got an offering that doesn't require, doesn't need giving, well then why would we not make it self-sustaining? It's going to be able to do more without needing sort of the community to step up in that way. That's also a selling point when you go up and ask for philanthropy. Because if you go to somebody and say, we want these donations, but let me tell you, the people that you're helping, they're meeting you halfway. Absolutely. So it's not just a giveaway. It's not a handout. It's actually it's a legitimate

help up because the people that you're You're hard-earned dollars you're donating to are meeting you halfway because they're in the game with you That's that that feels like an easier sell when you're out trying to raise money, too Yeah, we have you know, we've got our organizations Collectively now have around a 15 million dollar budget on an annual basis and about three and a half million of that is philanthropy You know the rest comes from you know, non philanthropic sources earned income and we think it's really important to have a sustainable an organization as we can. That's just everything about this makes so much for bill I got the write-off rates so

for prime borrowers it's 0.01 percent to 0.1 percent. FHA and VA loans is 0.5 percent to 2 percent and subprime pre-2008 it was 10 to 25 percent. Actually, yeah so we're you're right in there. Yeah so we're right in line with the FHA the FHA and VA loans yeah okay but the point is yeah you're right in line with FHA on default but you're making loans that they wouldn't that the FHA would never make correct freaking unbelievable. We'll be right back. From iHeart podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. You dig what I do. You have a need. Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor. That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser.

He was the first, and the original shock shock. That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people. You're as dumb as the rest. That's, I can't take anyone. I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart. His voice changed media, his death shocked the nation. And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Allen Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.

He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody. From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Paul Holes A murder happens, the case goes cold. Then, over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. Kate Winkler Dawson And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist and historian. Paul Holes On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases.

Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. It's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him?

Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes, but there's a company dedicated to a future

where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Add free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button.

Remember the movie pass era, where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero sense and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech Podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject

of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe shirt, they're watching Black Panther.

And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like. They're not going to describe someone who looks like me and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival presented by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas. September 19th and 20th. Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen,

Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, John Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today, AXS.com. ["The Offspring"] Okay, so you get this partnership with the city so that you can find these places and after 30, 60 days they're done. Then you've got the mentorship on how to fix it up and now you got the loan to fix it up.

And we touched on it earlier, but you also found out that having an in-house real estate brokerage helps. So you guys went and did that. Yeah, that was a big key to our success was the reality was when our families, you know, these Hmong families or over time as we helped more African-American, Hispanic families through the program, they often struggled to find the right real estate representation Because of their low pre-approval amount they might not be able to find an agent that really wanted to work with them or an agent that was comfortable doing the work of Finding the affordable homes these you know often were homes that were there were the dollar homes

They were twenty five thousand fifty thousand dollars an agent making living selling a dollar home not a big commission on those You know seven percent of a dollar seven cents. That's not much and and so typically the agents who are working in that part of the market They're representing investors, right? Because the investors will buy a ton of properties and you know They'll have some some rate that they're charging that hasn't make sense And so we give an opportunity for members of the community that were agents that really wanted to work with families to become a member of our team, be a part of the mission, and focus on helping families find homes they could truly afford without having that mean

that the commission was so low that you couldn't give them good service. So that's been a big part of what we've done. We typically have a handful of agents that are actually under our umbrella where our own real estate brokerage, and that's been a key ingredient to helping families be successful. And there's also the trust component.

Once a family starts working with us and they're getting prepared to become a homeowner, throughout the journey, they know you've got a team here that wants to help you. And it's not just that you're home buyer coach, who you're working with now, but we're going to add a realtor to your team. We're going to add a home rehab coach to your team

if you need it. We're going to connect you to lenders, whether that's a bank or credit union, or maybe it's a lender in-house. And so it gives them confidence knowing that throughout the whole process, they've got a partner that wants them to be successful and isn't just focused

on sort of, you know, what's the largest profit I can generate from working with this one family. So you said, was it Cha? Bliya Cha. Yeah. All right. She retired in 2017 after 24 years and you said she helped 800 families behind. I think that's right, which is just,

I mean, it's sort of stunning to think that that number of families is possible. But then I think for the Hispanic group, you found Rios or somebody named Rios or another type agent, right? It's been critical to our success that we have agents who represent the communities that we serve.

And so we've had a lot of success over time, whether it's in the Hispanic community or the African-American community, finding really good people who care about their communities and see real estate and helping families achieve home ownership as something that can be important. And we've been able to have them on the team,

have them earn a nice living and have them just have this incredible impact that I know I'm just so proud of what they've been able to achieve. So Hilaria Rios is the name I was thinking coming up with. The thing is, if I'm remembering all this right, is Cha helped in that Washington Park area around the church, but then there was on the south side of Milwaukee, a heavy Hispanic area, and then this Hilario Rios started doing for her community

what Cha did for her community, and now all of a sudden Axis is expanding beyond what the priest originally thought for his community around this church to the whole city. That's exactly right. After a decade or so of success, there was a moment where the organization sort of took stock of itself and said, well, this is great that we're doing such a good job serving this refugee population. It's been wonderful for the neighborhood. It's been good for families. What about the rest of the families who live in our community? What about the Hispanic population, mostly on Milwaukee's near South Side, growing population?

They also are having trouble accessing homeownership. Milwaukee, the largest, has a large black population. That community has not had the same opportunities for home ownership that other families have had. How do we make sure that there's a pathway that's meaningful for them towards home ownership? And through these key hires of real estate agents, we began making inroads in those communities and really proud- Community real estate agents. Exactly.

From the community that knows the market, that knows the neighborhoods and can connect the neighborhoods to the community. And candidly, if I'm a Hispanic person in the South side of Milwaukee, I'm going to connect with and trust a Hillary Rios a whole lot more than I am a white guy named Bill Courtney. So the connection to the families is integral because this agent is this from them is them. Right? I mean, is that not it makes it makes a huge difference in terms of building trust. And that's something that you know, we've taken very seriously. And a huge part of the

recipe is that our agents aren't seen as other. They're from and of the communities that they're serving. And they also just then build great networks. They come to us already having a network in their community, and that grows over time. You have someone like Belia who helps 800 families purchase

homes. Think about how many of those deals, the vast majority of them, they wind up being referrals from these past families who've been through the program. People look at a new homeowner and they say, how did you do this? And they say, we hope they say, it was really hard work, but I was able to do it. You can do it too. By the way, there's this group, Axe Housing, they could probably help.

They can put you in the right direction. They can help support you on the journey. And let me let you talk someone who looks just like you named Cha. Exactly, let me make that connection. How, once again, this really isn't rocket surgery. It all just makes so much fundamental sense. Okay, so that's the beginning from the end of the Vietnam War and refugees

coming to Milwaukee and the priest and the housing and the community and all these things going up. So now let's get to you. All this is set up. And so tell me about Axe. Once you decided I've played enough poker that I don't have to be an attorney anymore and I think I can do something really meaningful with my life. Yeah, well I was really just so impressed with what the team had done and so there were seven employees.

I became I think the eighth employee. They brought me on in the assistant director role so I was sort of, you know, a little bit of everything. My job included answering the door because I was usually the only one in the office. I was doing our fundraising. I was doing our marketing and I was running our loan fund. So those were my sort of my responsibilities. When you said, you know, I put myself through the University of Chicago and got a law degree.

I mean, a law degree from the University of Chicago is meaningful. I mean, you're humble and everything else, but I'm going to say it. I mean, that's top 10 boss daddy stuff right there. What did in your in your wife got her degree or you said her graduate degree and what in NBA, I guess? No, no. So my wife's a teacher. So she has multiple graduate degrees in English and in education. I bet your children are really dumb coming from a dad who about like... But anyway, so what does she say when University of Chicago guy who's obviously a tactician, so you, because you're good at poker, so you read the room well, says,

you know, I know you married a lawyer from the University of Chicago and all this, but I'm gonna go work for this thing called Axe and probably take a massive pay cut. What was her reaction? Well, I married exceptionally well. So my wife is a teacher, she loves being a teacher, she spent most of her career in urban education and

she had found before I did a career that she found great meaning in and she saw how how important that was. So she was only encouraging of me pursuing this and you know just speaks to the importance of having shared values with the person you're going to spend your life with in terms of her support for that transition. And I should say, one of the great things about Milwaukee is you don't need the most massive income ever to make it a great place to live, right? So we lived in New York City for the better part of seven years, you know, making this sort of transition if I was in that sort of environment, I think would have been extremely difficult would have required massive sacrifice. I feel like

in a city like Milwaukee, it's sort of the best of both worlds, where if you earn a good income, and you've got two people who are working, you can do well enough. And you can. And if you love the work you do, and you find that there's meaning in it, it's really tough to imagine doing something else. Yeah, we say almost every show, the magic happens when somebody's passion and abilities intersect at opportunity. Sounds like that's exactly what happened with you. Mm-hmm.

All right, so you joined as assistant director two years later to become the president and CEO of this thing. You're clearly passionate about it and on fire for it. Tell me some things you've been able to do at Axe since you joined. Give me some success metrics. Yeah. You know, and any other stories that I know that you know I'm going to want to hear about Axe now. Well, so the thing you became the grand poobah. The thing I'm most proud of is so when I took

over as as CEO, I replaced this legendary guy, Carl Quindale, he'd been the executive director there for six or seven years, something like that, maybe eight years. unbelievably smart. And he knew everything about every aspect of our business. He was this guy who could do anything in the world. And he chose to devote his energy to Axe for that eight year period, just remarkable. But he'd sort of shown a vision of leadership

that I wasn't gonna be able to, I was never gonna be the best person at every single thing Axe did. This is a guy who knew everything about rehab, he knew everything about home construction, he knew everything about the real estate market, and here I'm coming from law school and these different, I had different talents. He apparently didn't know anything about invoicing, you know, law school and these different, you know, I had different talents.

He apparently didn't know anything about invoicing, but no, it had. So when I became the CEO is with an understanding from the board, hey, we're going to need to build a world class team, because the only way that we're going to be able to do a lot more is if we have someone leading each of these important functions, who is the expert, because I can't be the expert in everything. If we're trying to make me the expert in everything, we're not going to be as successful as we need to be. And so I'm just truly proud

at how we've been able to grow our team and bring in people who are better, more knowledgeable, who can add value that I couldn't possibly add. And the result is sort of magic in terms of how our program has evolved, how we've been able to offer better and more services, and how we've been able to set families up for success at a scale that wasn't imaginable when I joined the organization.

Well, tell me. What does that look like? Give me some numbers. Well, every single year now, we're helping more than 300 families purchase homes. 300 a year. 300. Again, 300 families getting off the rental rolls, ultimately in slumlords, and now we're

talking monks, Hispanics, African Americans, and I assume even white, low-end white, blue-collar folks across the spectrum. Anyone with challenges to homeownership who wants to pursue homeownership, we want to support. Right now, more than half of our graduates, more than half of our purchasers are black families, but we serve the whole community, anyone who needs the support. So yeah, more than 300 a year. We just celebrated our 4,000th homeowner through the program. So we have 4,000 families who now own homes who previously were renting. And 300 dilapidated properties on the tax rolls fixing up blight in communities.

Well, Michael, did you say, I just want to clarify before I keep going down that train, I think 4,000 total and 1,000 were from the tax rolls. Yeah, so 4, so okay four thousand total a thousand foreclosures I got it all of the thousand foreclosures I'm it's probably fifty fifty between tax foreclosures and bank foreclosures. Okay still yeah 25% are crappy, but even if they're even if they're not foreclosures, there's still houses probably that need attention in a lot of places.

Yeah, they're houses that typically haven't gotten a lot of love. We're helping families typically buy the most affordable homes in the market, so this is the bottom of the market we're operating in. And the belief is that transitioning a home from renting to owning benefits that family and benefits the block. Whether it's a modest amount of work that goes into the home or a massive amount of work that goes into the home, homeowners, they take care of their properties in a way landlords don't.

They're more concerned about putting flowers out, right? They're more concerned about connecting with their neighbors, all those things. And the stability of homeownership that we've seen is really remarkable. So I mentioned before, foreclosure rates for families through our program are about half of what otherwise has been experienced in the neighborhoods we work in. And what I think is really important, and it's not talked about a lot, when people look at the cost of homeownership versus the cost of rent, first of all, they often look at that as what is it right now? If I bought a home now, what's the cost going rent. First of all, they often look at that as what is it right now? If I

bought a home now, what's the cost going to be? What's my monthly cost going to be? And what's the cost of rent? And in many cases through our program, immediately there's a cost savings, but there's also times, especially as the market has improved, homes are more expensive where families are spending somewhat more to own than to rent. But the rent keeps going up every single year. I was going to say that fixed, on a fixed rate, over 15, 30, 20 years, it stays the same. Rent goes up, so it may be a little more now, but in five years, it's going to be less

than what you're eventually going to be paying. And that's what you're saying. That's exactly right. That's so true. And homeownership offers you're saying. That's exactly right. That's so true. And homeownership offers a couple things. You know, it offers some great things for the family in terms of the living opportunity, in terms of the structure.

But financially, it offers a couple things. One that people don't talk about anywhere near enough is the forced savings of homeownership. The fact that every month when you pay your mortgage, you're paying some of that payment is principal, right? When you make your mortgage, you're paying some of that payment as principal, right? When you make your rent payment, that money's gone. But the contributions you're making to your principal, the pay down of your principal, that's now equity. And we're working in communities that often, you know, when they start working with us,

these families do not have a positive, they don't have a positive net worth. And every single month when they make that mortgage payment, they now all of a sudden are building equity in their home. Now, appreciation is also wonderful, right? And so when homes go up in value, that's tremendous. And that adds to that equity. We now are at a point with our alumni homeowners, those that still own their homes, that group collectively has achieved and built $143 million in equity in the homes that they own. $143 million. Real wealth. And the difference that that can make in terms of their ability to overcome challenges, their ability to invest in themselves, their ability to provide for their kids' education. It's really significant that those are funds that can be drawn on.

Or if you don't need to draw on it, which is great, we have a lot of families who are passing these homes down, right? I was about to say, and for the first time ever at these, in this demographic, is second generational access and opportunity that breaks that proverbial generational decline. That's exactly right. And, and we think it's fascinating how clear this is to the families in our program. When we say, we

always ask them as part of our coaching, why are you pursuing homeownership? Because then that's something their coach is going to remind them of throughout the journey. When things get hard, we want to remind them of why did they say they were pursuing homeownership. One thing they always often say, first thing they say is freedom, the freedom to be able to paint my house the color I want the freedom to be able to do what I want to do. No one's gonna tell me so long as

I'm paying my mortgage and paying my taxes, no one's going to tell me what I can and can't do. No one's gonna tell me I need to leave. So freedom is a really big one. But the number two thing we hear from families purchasing Home Star Program is, I want something to pass down. I want something that's mine,

that my family's gonna long-term benefit from. And so that's something that's really important and something that now, you know, 4,000 families who are graduates of our program are able to do for their, for their kids. We'll be right back. From iHeart podcasts, before social media, before the internet, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. You dig what I do.

You have a need. Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor. That's why you can't ever enjoy this show. And that's why you're a loser. He was the first and the original shock shock. That scratchy and reverent kind of way of talking to people. You're as dumb as the rest. That's I can't take anyone.

I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart. His voice changed media. His death shocked the nation. And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Allen Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver. He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody.

From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then, over 100 years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases.

Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life.

So how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Inc. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One,

Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause, but. Remember the movie pass era? Where you could watch all the movies you wanted

for just $9? It made zero sense and I could not stop thinking about it. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the tech podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes,

who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us. When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black Founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a Tech Founder looks like.

They're not going to describe someone who looks like me, and they're not going to describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas.

Vegas! September 19th and 20th. On your feet! Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, John Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, The Offspring,

Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today, AXS.com get your tickets today AXS.com. Agency and legacy is what you just said. And I don't know a human being on earth that doesn't want to have agency in what they're doing and a legacy left behind. And you know, on Maslov's hierarchy of needs.

I mean, you're starting to bring these folks up the pyramid. You really are. You're giving them self-actualization. You're giving them fulfillment, but you're not giving it to them. You're helping them achieve it. That's exactly right. We're not giving them anything, but we're helping to make the market work for them. We're helping them understand how to navigate these complex systems.

And then they're doing the remarkable work of getting it done and then being not only successful homeowners, but leaders in their communities. So let's discuss a little bit the state of housing in American today and your new announcement. Great. So one of the big challenges that we faced in Milwaukee, and this is a challenge that it's not a Milwaukee challenge, it's a lot of communities throughout the country have seen this, is that single-family homes have become an asset class. Right? It used to be... Say that again.

Single-family clones have become an attractive asset class. Okay. What do you mean? Private equity funds have realized that in a lot of these markets, homes are relatively affordable, rents are relatively high, and that buying up large swaths of communities and having a rental program, you know, is something that they believe can be financially viable, can be successful, and they're able to attract a lot of equity, a lot of investors who want

to be a part of that. Yeah. That's why 40% of Memphians rent, because so many of these homes in these neighborhoods are bought up candidly by people out of New York and Boston and Chicago. You would be shocked how many homes in Memphis are owned by people who've never set foot in Memphis. And then they've got some kind of management,

like rental management group that goes around and slaps paint on them, fixes them up, and then clucks around. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, that doesn't build any community. Yeah, it's not. Listen, our communities need great landlords. Not everyone is going to own or want to own at any given time.

But it's our firm belief that typically great landlords, they typically come from the community. They have some relationship to the place. When you talk about these outfits that own thousands and thousands of homes throughout the country, that are based in other places, the likelihood that they care about something other than just sort of getting every last dollar out of this home,

it is pretty low. So that's the asset class. That's the asset class. All of a sudden, it's not just competing against maybe a local landlord who might want to buy another property. It's competing against these enormous private equity outfits that want to buy up these homes. And so increasingly what we saw over the last handful of years was, you know, we're doing this hard work.

The families are doing this hard work. We'll have 2000 families a year that start our program that say, I want to be a homeowner. Can I start home by our education? And we've got a great way of getting them started. They work with a coach and then they do incredibly hard work of getting ready. Sometimes that takes years depending on how much work they have to do. And when they're ready, we see them losing consistently in the market because the best deals are going to these private

equity and other investors who are making cash, no contingency offers. Our families are often offering more money. It's not that they can't compete on price, but they need an inspection contingency because there's no way we're going to let them buy a home without knowing what work it might need. They need a financing contingency because they don't have enough money to pay cash for these properties And so increasingly all the best deals are getting snapped up by the investors Leaving the our families our alumni who've done all this hard work

Sort of with the dregs who actually live in the city and you live as a community gather kids go there and spend their money there You're it's It's inverted. It is. And so we felt like we were letting our community down. What we've always told families, the promise is if you do the hard work of preparing for home ownership, we're going to help you find a good home that you can afford that meets your needs. And over the last several years, we found at times that we felt like the families were doing their part of the equation. And because of this, these investors coming in from all over the country, we weren't actually holding up our end of the bargain because the only homes available to them weren't really

the homes that were good deals. And so we spent a couple of years, we worked in partnership with some other local groups that cared about this, cared about this work. We talked to a number of philanthropies and supporters who believed in us. And we were able to launch two and a half years ago a program where we're actually now a large buyer of these homes in the city. So we're competing with these private equity groups. We're buying portfolios of homes, we're buying homes for cash, but unlike these investor groups that you know are based wherever they're based and are focused just on on a financial profit, we're focused 100% on converting these homes into owner occupancy and making them good affordable home

ownership opportunities for graduates of homebuyer education. And... You're blocking them out. And we're competing. We're doing well. So this year, our goal from inception was we wanted to be able to sell at least 100 of these homes every single year to families who graduate homebuyer education. So 100 times, what's the average price of a home in your group probably? The ones that we're selling, the average price right now is $125,000. Well then that's $12 million.

Yeah, so it's a big investment, big investment in the purchase and the rehab of these homes that you need. We've been successful at raising most of the philanthropy we need, so we've got a revolving fund that lets us do this purchase and rehab activity. We've raised just about $10 million actually to do that work. And this year, two and a half years into launching this initiative, we're confident that we're actually gonna sell

a hundred of these homes to families who are graduates of our program. And the thing I'm really proud of is that not only are we doing it, but it's very sustainable. And so the way this model works is, we're able to buy the home, rehab the home, sell the home at an affordable price.

But there's enough profit, and I'll put that in quotes, that we're able to cover all of our staffing costs of doing this effort. I was about to say, there's enough coverage. Enough coverage. That when you sell it, that sale goes to the kitty to buy more homes. Exactly. So we're hoping and we believe we can grow this fund, this fund beyond $10 million, just through the operating of the fund,

not with needing additional philanthropy, but because we approach this work in a smart way, this is a, we're a nonprofit, but this is a business. We're trying to do it in a strategic and thoughtful way. And the result is a really good product for families and a sustainable program that we believe every single year now will contribute at least 100 new owner occupants in the communities we operate. So we're

really we're excited about that. I have done two years of shows now and I have loved all my guests and everything else. This is one of the most sensible, everybody wins ideas except for maybe New York slumlords that buy houses. Maybe they don't like it. But everybody else, I'm beside myself thinking about what this need, why I want to put this in my city so bad and everybody else should do. Where are you expanding to?

You got to be scaling. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And what I'll say is it has been really cool to see that the work we do, it resonates and it resonates across things that normally separate us. And I think at a time when there's so much division, it's awesome to be working in a space where, you know, we have people with different political beliefs, different religious beliefs, all different sorts of beliefs you might have. It is not controversial that giving families the chance to own the homes they live in is a good thing for them a good thing for the community. And so it means that we get to have a lot of

partners and and that's a fun space to be in. We've been really cautious about about growing beyond our current geographies. So we operate in the city of Milwaukee. That's where we've done this work for 30 years. And then we have starting with the priest and war exactly wouldn't wouldn't be here without them. And then and have a starting with the priest and warm exactly wouldn't wouldn't be here without him. And then and then seven years ago, we opened an office in Beloit, Wisconsin, which is a small a smaller city on the border with the state of

Illinois. How far is that from about an hour and 15 minutes? Why there? We wanted an opportunity to see in a community where we had no name recognition, no awareness, if we could replicate the success of our work in Milwaukee. But we wanted it to be drivable. And we wanted to have the support of the local community. We needed the churches to want us. We needed the neighborhood groups to want us. We needed government to want to partner with us. And we needed philanthropic partners that would support the initiative. And Beloit's an amazing city. It was pretty incredible to see how quickly things came together

there. Starting with a philanthropist who was very excited about the work, but quickly then spreading to government, doing a lot of work in community with neighborhood groups to make sure that we would be seen not as an interloper, but as a group that could really help address one of the community's big challenges. And it's been incredible sort of bringing our work there. It's been exciting. It has been a huge challenge. We have learned so much trying to, you know, it's one thing to do something well in one place, and it is a different thing to all of a sudden, you know, open up an office somewhere where you're brand new, hire new people, try and do this work the same way. And pretty often you realize, well, most of what we do works well somewhere else, and there's some things that are very different.

And so we've learned a lot about how we need to approach attracting families to the program. It's very different in Beloit than it is in Milwaukee. Michael, is Beloit, is that where they had a forward plant closure or a GM plant closure? That region had some challenges, right? Yeah, so Jamesville, which is a... Right nearby, right? Right nearby, yeah. So it's a community that has a sort of a thriving history, definitely with sort of deindustrialization, fell in very hard times. Beloit is a remarkable place,

extremely resilient. There's a philanthropist who's from Beloit is a remarkable place, extremely resilient. There's a philanthropist who's from Beloit, Diane Hendrix, who has made a major commitment to the city. And so she's part of the reason that Beloit right now is a remarkable place, great place to visit. They've got a brand new minor league baseball stadium. They've got new hotels. They have extremely low unemployment, and they have

actually a big challenge around enough affordable housing because it's become a really attractive place for people to live and work and play. But we've learned a lot through that expansion, and one of the things we learned was that it can be a distraction. And so while I am very excited about what we've done in Beloit and we are in a really good place in that community now and we're going to continue to grow and do more in the city of Beloit, there are times where we were asking ourselves, you know, is this work that we're doing in Beloit detracting from our ability to serve what was our primary market, Milwaukee, right? And so this is how we think about expansion now. We believe we owe it

to the rest of the country to take some of the things we've learned and share them. And we're committed to that. That doesn't necessarily mean we're opening up offices all over the country. It might mean that certain of the things we do, we can provide to other communities that have key partners that are already doing maybe other aspects of the work we do, we can provide to other communities that have key partners that are already doing maybe other aspects of the work. It might mean that we train and develop individuals who are excited to sort of start things that look something like what we do, but then we let them sort of, you know, run with it and flourish and develop new ways to build on the strategy.

So we're not, we haven't sort of made that call yet in terms of exactly what a larger expansion looks like for us. Yeah, what does scale look like for us? And a big part of that reason is, you know, I mentioned the effort to buy, rehab, and sell 100 homes a year. That was a big lift. We also are right now in the process

of massively expanding our lending function. So we had been doing two to three dozen loans a year through our affiliate, Axe Lending. Our four-year plan has us scaling that to 200 loans a year. So we're sort of massively expanding the services we can provide to the two communities that we have committed to, Milwaukee and Beloit. But I have to tell you, now that we are proving that the Axe-Holmes model works so well, now that we are expanding our lending model that has been long-term sustainable, it has us thinking much more intentionally about, okay, how do we take these key pieces

and how do we make sure that if there's other cities that could benefit from them, we have a compelling way to share them that can set them up for success. Mim-Fist. Barbecue, music, cool downtown is right for this my friend. I'm bringing you back Michael. If people want to hear more about this website, where do they go? It's something that people can find out more?

Absolutely. So if you go to our website, which is a CTS housing dot org, all sorts of information about our program, our annual report, that sort of stuff. I do want to caution your listeners, you know, we are providing services now to families who live in the communities where we're located. So occasionally when we're fortunate enough to get some national exposure like this, we'll start to get someone who's an aspiring homeowner

in California or in Texas. Get help from there. And unfortunately, we don't have the capacity to do that yet. But who knows what the future might hold. We'll be right back. From I Heart Podcasts, before social media, before the Internet, before Cable News, there was Alan Berg. You dig what I do. You have a need. Unfortunately, you have no sense of humor. That's why you can't ever enjoy this show, and that's why you're a loser."

He was the first and the original shock shock. That scratchy, irreverent kind of way of talking to people. You're as dumb as the rest. I can't take anyone. I don't agree with you all the time. I don't want you to. I hope that you pick me apart. His voice changed media. His death shocked the nation. And it makes me so angry that he got himself killed because he had a big mouth. KOA morning talk show host Alan Berg reportedly was shot and killed tonight in downtown Denver.

He pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. This guy aggravated everybody. From iHeart Podcasts, this is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. Listen on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then, over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator.

And I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases. Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him?

Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future

where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops call this Taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself

to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season One, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes one, two, and three on May 21st, and episodes four, five, and six on June 4th. Ad free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember the movie pass era where you could watch all the movies you wanted for just $9? It made zero sense and I could not stop thinking about it.

I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech Podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet. On this new season, I'm talking to the innovators who are left out of the tech headlines, like the visionary behind MoviePass, Black founder Stacey Spikes, who was pushed out of MoviePass, the company that he founded. His story is wild, and it's currently the subject of a juicy new HBO documentary. We dive into how culture connects us.

When you go to France, or you go to England, or you go to Hong Kong, those kids are wearing Jordans, they're wearing Kobe shirt, they're wearing Kobe's shirt, they're watching Black Panther. And the challenges of being a Black founder. Close your eyes and tell me what a tech founder looks like.

They're not gonna describe someone who looks like me and they're not gonna describe someone who looks like you. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. So listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival presented by Capital One is coming back to Las Vegas.

September 19th and 20th. On your feet! Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams, Ed Sheeran, Fade, Chlorilla, Jelly Roll, John Fogarty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today, AXS.com. ["AXS.com"] Dude, I cannot. I just, this is, it's a sweet spot for me.

Again, I love all the stories, but ironically enough, a very dear friend of mine who I've known since high school, who I played football against, who coached football with me, who played at the University of Alabama, was our Shelby County assessor at one time, which is a publicly, but he had run for office in one. And through a couple of conversations over copy, more than a couple, many conversations over wine and beer and coffee with him, I learned from him the drag it is on the county and the community to have all of these blighted properties hanging around. And I learned what the drag it is on city revenue not to have these properties producing property tax dollars and how destructive it

is to communities and the people that live in them. And it has been on my mind for 15 years. And then this story and you come along and it's the answer to something I've been thinking about for 10 or 15 years and bothered by, legitimately bothered by. I mean, tell me this. I'm just curious, do schools improve in these neighborhoods too? I mean, I would think that even the school system gets better. I can't remember who the guest was. Oh, I think it was from Charlotte. But one of the things he taught us was one of the problems with elementary education

was transiency. 100%. Because if a kid moves in the middle of their school year in first, second, and third grade constantly because they're being put out or have to change rent or whatever, when the kid goes to the new school mid-year, they're having to go all the way back and catch up. And if you do that two or three times by sixth grade,

you're just behind. And then I have another friend who has a thing called coaching for literacy. And his metrics say that if you're not reading on grade level by third grade, that you are three times more likely to be unemployed by the age of 21 than you are if you are reading on third grade. So if you know that poverty and unemployment in large part can be predicated by whether or not you read on grade level by third grade and then you also know that transiency among renters almost guarantee that the children involved in those transients are not going to lead on grade

level by third grade. You can therefore, because if A equals B and B equals C, A equals C, say that unemployment and poverty has a lot to do with being transient when you're third grade and before as a result of your parents. So given that, if instead of renting and moving and having transient children who end up being unemployed by the age of 21 because of the school and because of the reading things, if those families own a house and aren't transient, the children will be better two decades from now and the schools will be better because they're not dealing with kids in and out of one time. Now, am I stretching? No, I think that's very well said. The average tenure of homeownership through our program

is 14 years. That's how long the typical family owns the home that they buy through us. And that stability of home, I mean, there's myriad research, whether it's the impact that has on education, the impact that has on health, the impact that has on actually violence reduction, all these things are related. And I don't mean to suggest that if we just solve home ownership, we fix everything. But it is one of those key building blocks that if you can address it in a significant way, it makes the education, it makes educating easier, it makes the job of the police easier, it makes the jobs of our hospital systems easier. And so that's one of the reasons I think we've been able to attract a real strong coalition around around this work. Axe everybody. Axe in Milwaukee, Wisconsin has a lot figured out. And I'm praying that

you guys remain. Your growth is you can just see your systematic growth since the beginning to now. And I just have to believe with a guy with a brain as big as yours and a passion as big as yours that you're going gonna figure out how to scale it. Dude, I just, I so bad want you to come back to Memphis and talk to people here. I absolutely believe in what you're doing. And most importantly, I can't thank you enough for sharing your story with us.

Well, thank you. It's been a real honor. I would certainly love to come back. And do you have a second for one digression? Please. One, because we had something happen this week that was really special. And I think we could find an interesting...

Good. I was going to say, close us with a cool story. So you transitioned well for us. So we had an event earlier this week. It was celebrating our 4,000th alumni homeowner. And it was a cool event. The mayor came out. He proclaimed it Axe Housing Day, the mayor of the city of Milwaukee. It was really, really fun. But we had a problem, which was, you know, we had press there and it was sort of a big event for us. And we had this amazing, charismatic alumnus of the program who bought a house about 18 months previous who was going to be speaking. And 45 minutes before this event starts, she gets called into work. So we're not in the business of telling our alumni homeowners

that they need to put their jobs in jeopardy. So she needs to go to work. OK, we get that. We have a little pissing her employer now for giving her a pass. I know, right? I know, I know. So we're scrambling a little bit,

because it's not every day we've got events with the mayor and we got press there. And we were hosting this event in the near west side of Milwaukee in a challenged neighborhood, but a neighborhood that's got some good momentum. And the venue we were hosting the event at had this caterer, she runs Fruition, which is a cafe and a catering company. And she was putting out the beautiful breakfast spread for us, and she hears what's going on,

and she tells one of my colleagues, do you know, I actually, I bought my house through Axe like 10 years ago, so I don't know. And she owns the catering company? She owns the cafe, she owns the catering company. So I don't know if I could be helpful, but you know, if there's something I can do to help, I'd like to help, right? And so it turns out, and this is the way, and I bet Memphis is the same way. So it turns out

once our vice president of programs gets there, they'd gone to high school together. So they knew each other. They went to John Marshall High School in Milwaukee, and she wound up being the speaker at our event talking about how she bought her home. It was a home that was taken through tax foreclosure. She'd been renting it. The home got, the landlord lost it. She was renting it from the city. She got introduced to Axe. She never thought that she would be a homeowner before, you know, she didn't have, she thought she'd have a homeowner, she said, when she had a husband. Right now, she didn't, she, you know, she wasn't married. She had a kid. She didn't think she could do it. But she's clearly an incredible person. She put in the hard work.

She worked with our team. She got ready. She purchased the home. She fixed it up. The home is just a few blocks from the venue where she now owns the catering business, right? And she was able to talk so passionately about the stability that homeownership has offered her and her son.

And it was so cool because I know these things are happening sort of academically and sometimes families will share their testimony, but this was like in the wild, right? This wasn't a planned thing. This is just this incredible entrepreneur and that we are this footnote in her story and hopefully, where the services and the support we could offer her could sort of help her take those next steps. Who knows where she's gonna be, you know,

where her business is gonna be, where she's gonna be, but it's amazing that we get to partner with families like that, and as those numbers grow, you know, from the early days when it was dozens of families a year and now it's hundreds of families a year, how can we create more of that opportunity in Milwaukee and Beloit and in communities across the country so that more families can experience sort of the empowerment and the joy and the

stability that can come from homeownership? Amen. Michael, I love what you do. I love what you guys have and thank you so much for sharing it. And the last time I'm going to say it, promise me you're going to come back. Will do. Thank you so much. This has been a joy. It's been a real treat.

And thank you for joining us this week. If Michael Gossman has inspired you in general, or better yet, to take action by possibly exploring Axe Housing's model for you community, donating to them or something else entirely. Let me know. I really do wanna hear about it. You can write me anytime at bill at normalfolks.us

and I promise you, I will read it and I will respond. If you enjoyed this episode share it with friends and on social subscribe to the podcast rate and review it. Join the army at normalfolks.us consider becoming a premium member there. Any and all these things that will help us grow pro, an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do what you can. From iHeart Podcast, before social media, before cable news, there was Alan Berg. He was the first and the original shock chock. That scratchy reverent kind of way, talking to people and telling them that you're an idiot and I'm going to hang up on you.

This is Live Wire, the loud life and shocking murder of Alan Berg. And he pointed to the Denver phone book and said, well, there are probably two million suspects. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A Body, A Suspect, and 100 Years of Silence. Buried Bones is a podcast about the forgotten crimes history tried to leave behind. A common misperception about serial predators is that every single time they commit a crime, they commit it the same way. The past is a way of talking,

if you know what to listen for. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our iHeartRadio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, is coming back to Las Vegas. September 19th and 20th.

Streaming live only on Hulu. Ladies and gentlemen. Brian Adams and Sharon. Fade, Glorilla, Jelly Roll, John Fogerty, Lil Wayne, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey, Maroon 5, Sammy Hagar, Tate McCrae, The Offspring, Tim McGraw. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Get your tickets today, AXS.com. Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember MoviePass?

All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks? I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told, starting with Stacey Spikes, the Black founder of MoviePass, who got pushed out of the company he built. Everybody's trying to knock you down and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it. And then boom, it's everywhere. And that was that moment. Listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. If a baby is giggling in the back seat, they're probably happy.

If a baby is crying in the back seat, they're probably hungry. But if a baby is sleeping in the back seat, will you remember they're even there? When you're distracted, stressed, or not usually the one who drives them, the chances of forgetting them in the back seat are much higher. It can happen to anyone. Parked cars get hot fast and can be deadly. So get in the habit of checking the backseat when you leave. The message from NHTSA and the Ad Council.

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