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Portfolio company Antler's My Home Pathway is addressing the fact that the homeownership rate for blacks is currently about 44% vs. around 74% for whites, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. But that gap isn’t just huge. It’s also a major contributor to racial economic disparities.
That’s why Castleigh Johnson launched fintech startup My Home Pathway last year. The goal: to help improve credit scores, so Black households can get a mortgage, while also gaining the financial literacy needed to thrive after they’ve bought and moved into that home. “We’re out here to crush the home ownership gap in a sustainable way,” he says. It was during his time as a bank examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the financial crisis that Johnson started thinking he had to do more to address racial wealth disparities in the U.S. Studying the data, Johnson, who also held senior roles with Goldman Sachs, AIG and other companies, saw how alarmingly disproportionate the impact of the crisis was on people of color. But effecting real change and doing so at anything faster than a snail’s pace required stepping outside of traditional institutions. “With a smaller company, you can move like a speed boat,” he says.
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