IndigenousNetwork was able to attend a briefing from American Community Media focused on a rare piece of practical good news in a grim housing climate. Moderator Sandy Close introduced the California Housing Finance Agency’s California Dream For All shared appreciation loan as a program aimed at first-generation homebuyers, with an application window opening February 24 and closing March 16, 2026. Close framed it as “good news you can use,” calling the program “a bright spot” at a time when “housing costs soar” and “portability worries grow,” particularly for families in long underserved ethnic minority and immigrant communities.
For Indigenous communities, the framing lands in a familiar place. Housing is not only a market story. It is an ongoing consequence of land dispossession, discriminatory lending, and the uneven geography of opportunity that pushes people farther from jobs, schools, and care. California has the nation’s largest Native population, and it also has one of the most severe homelessness crises. Tribal housing authorities, urban Indian organizations, and Native-led mutual aid groups have been carrying the immediate burden, often while federal and state systems move slowly. Against that backdrop, the Dream For All program is not a complete solution, but it is a lever that can matter for families who are mortgage-ready and still shut out by the down payment.
Eric Johnson, an information officer with CalHFA’s marketing and communications division, offered the agency’s pitch in plain terms. CalHFA, he said, has been supporting first-time homebuyers for decades, and the Dream For All program is designed to close the gap between steady income and the up-front cash that many households cannot accumulate. “What we found in California is there are thousands and thousands of people who have the good credit score, who have a steady job and steady income, but they haven’t been able to save up enough money for that down payment,” Johnson said. Under the program, CalHFA can provide up to 20 percent of the home’s value toward down payment assistance, structured as a shared appreciation loan that is repaid when the home is sold, along with a share of the home’s appreciation. The program, Johnson said, is meant to plant “the seed for intergenerational wealth,” a phrase that can sound abstract until a family has something tangible to pass down.
Johnson also acknowledged what many communities already know from experience, that this is not simply a matter of motivation or personal discipline. “Different races, ethnicities have been essentially frozen out of home ownership in the United States and in California,” he said, adding a statistic that he said “really gets me,” that the Black homeownership rate is lower than it was in 1968 when the Fair Housing Act passed. Even when access exists on paper, fear and mistrust can still keep people away. During the Q and A, Johnson responded to a question about whether people feel safe applying in the current political climate, and he pointed to trust as the central issue. “So much of it is trust,” he said, urging prospective borrowers to work with counselors and lenders who can guide them through the process.
Shanta Clark, a senior loan consultant and CalHFA program educator with New American Funding, sharpened the point by describing what she sees in Los Angeles every day. Clark, who works with HUD-approved housing agencies and community partners, told the briefing that the core barrier is not the monthly payment. It is the down payment. “We can afford a payment, no doubt about it. We pay rent, no doubt about it,” Clark said. She described renters paying $3,500 or $4,000 per month and still being told homeownership is out of reach, not because they cannot sustain payments, but because they cannot produce five or six figures in savings. Clark’s remarks echo what Native housing advocates have been saying for years: the crisis is not only homelessness at its most visible edge, but the constant churn of rent burden, overcrowding, and forced moves that keep families from stabilizing.
For Indigenous families, that churn is often intensified by the pressures of multi-generational responsibility. Clark described buyers supporting relatives, dealing with job instability, or recovering from past financial shocks. She also emphasized the long arc of repair, especially for communities that have experienced dispossession in more modern forms, including predatory lending and the loss of family homes. “A lot of them that did have homes, or their grandparents, their home were snatched from them,” Clark said, arguing that many people were never taught they had options to prevent foreclosure after a death in the family. Her point was not sentimental. It was procedural. People do not use systems they do not understand, and many of those systems were never built to be navigable for everyone.
Imelda Manzo, a broker and owner of Premier One Realtors who works largely with Latino clients in Riverside County, connected the Dream For All program to the geography of displacement. Manzo said she frequently works with families who live in Los Angeles, Orange County, or San Diego and look inland because prices nearer to their work and community are unattainable. “There’s less in LA County, in my opinion, and that is the reason why they commute to Riverside County,” Manzo said. When families cannot or will not move farther out, she added, many end up in multi-generational households. In Indigenous reporting, that reality shows up across regions, from urban apartments where extended family shares rent to reservation communities where overcrowding is a direct product of housing shortages. In both contexts, the public conversation often mislabels multi-generational living as cultural preference, when it is frequently a financial necessity.
Willie Lee, a homeownership program director at the Shalom Center in Los Angeles who spoke on behalf of Asian communities, described another barrier that translates across Indigenous and immigrant populations: the technical language of the mortgage process. Concepts like debt-to-income ratios, escrow, and the fine print of a shared appreciation loan can feel impenetrable even for people who speak conversational English. Lee argued that down payment assistance without counseling is not enough, and he described housing counseling as a stabilizing infrastructure that includes foreclosure prevention, default counseling, and referrals to other assistance programs. The message, repeated in different ways across the panel, was that the pipeline to ownership is built from education and support, not simply a single grant or loan product.
The most direct testimony came from Tiffany DuVernay-Smith, a Dream For All beneficiary and a public advocate who said she works at a government agency serving the unhoused community. DuVernay-Smith described herself as “from homeless to homeowner,” and she spoke candidly about ignoring early program emails because she could not imagine herself as the target audience. “I am identifying with all the barriers. And it still happened for me,” she said at the outset. Her account was practical rather than inspirational, with details about falling in and out of eligibility, improving credit over time, and searching for homes in a market that often pushes buyers far from their jobs. When asked how she found a home in Los Angeles, she said simply, “I was looking on Zillow, and I found this particular house on Zillow.” Her core message was blunt. “The answer’s always no until you ask,” she said. “You have to apply.”
That sentence, stripped of motivational framing, still carries weight in Indian Country and in urban Native communities, where people are often forced to navigate systems that are inconsistent, underfunded, or indifferent. At the same time, the program’s limits were clear in the briefing itself. Johnson conceded that helping 1,000 to 2,000 buyers is a “drop in the bucket” in a state of nearly 40 million people. Even so, he argued that each voucher changes a family’s trajectory. “Every single one of those 1,000 people, it’s changing not only that person’s life, their family’s life, their kids’ lives, their grandchildren’s lives,” he said.
In Indigenous news, housing is rarely treated as a single policy announcement. It is a continuum that includes treaty-era dispossession, redlining, today’s rent spikes, and the growing reality that many Native people live off-reservation, often in cities where the safety net is thin. The Dream For All program will not address the full scale of the crisis, and it does not replace the urgent need for tribal housing investment, tenant protections, and sustained funding for homelessness services. But the briefing offered a reminder that state programs can still be designed to meet people where they are, and that targeted tools, paired with trusted counselors, can open a door that has been closed for generations. In a moment when many families feel forced to choose between stability and proximity to their communities, the most useful takeaway may be the simplest one: start early, find a counselor you trust, and do not assume the system has already decided you do not belong in it.
