Homeownership month: Jody Cahoon Perez’s story
It’s National Homeownership Month, a time to recognize the importance of homeownership. It may look a little different now, but for many, it is still the American Dream and the best path to achieving generational wealth. Today, we share Jody Cahoon Perez’s path to homeownership.
Jody Cahoon Perez grew up in a big country house that her father built on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Northwest Montana.
“My dad made money from hunting and trapping,” she said. “We’d collect antlers and he’d make chandeliers out of those antlers. We sold Christmas trees and firewood.” Her family didn’t have a lot of money, she said,
but they weren’t alone. “No one did.”
When her parents got divorced, Jody and two of her siblings moved with their father to a tribal Low Rent unit subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, while her mother stayed in the family’s home with Jody’s younger siblings. She felt safe and secure, she said, even though she learned later that some of her neighbors had not had that same security.
She spent part of high school and the years after living with different siblings. In Missoula. In Salt Lake City. She always had family to rely on, she said.
When she returned to Pablo, Montana, to attend Salish Kootenai College, Jody met Juan Perez. “It was like we had a spiritual contract,” she recalled. “He was an answer to my mom’s prayers.”
The two lived in student housing, married, and continued to live in student housing together, a benefit of her husband’s job as a site manager at the college. She dreamed of moving back to the country, but the housing was free and they stayed there with their growing family. “I thought we would never get out,” she said. “I couldn’t have a garden. We were basically on top of the neighbors. I’d grown up running barefoot through the woods. My kids didn’t get to experience those things.”
But when her youngest child was 3, Jody Perez went back to work for the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes. And that’s where she came across a class on homeownership, led by the Salish & Kootenai Housing Authority. They connected her to NeighborWorks Great Falls, where she learned more about homeownership – and the steps she would need to get there. Through the NeighborWorks network organization, she enrolled in an Individual Development Account Savings Program.
“They said, ‘We will help you through this.’”
Saving for a home
Jody started putting aside part of every paycheck. When she hit $1,000, she received a $4,000 match. By the time she had $6,180, it was enough to cover a down payment and closing costs.
“I think we had $12 to spare,” she said. “But we were able to buy our first house. I got to paint the walls. We
redid flooring and had our own space. It was a whole different sense of security that I couldn’t even describe, just knowing that this was our space and a sacred spot to raise our family.”
Eight years later, she and her husband bought a home out of foreclosure that was just a mile from her mom’s house. They were finally back in the country, she said. But wherever she was with her family – that was home.
Giving back
The price of housing everywhere has increased over the years. Her first home cost $185,000 in 2011. Now, she says, it’s hard to find anything under $400,000. She’s familiar with the cost of a home – both buying and building – because Jody Cahoon Perez is now the executive director of the Salish & Kootenai Housing Authority, who owns and operates the duplex she lived in with her father and the place where she’d taken her first-time homebuyer education class. She started there in accounting department and worked her way up. Her goal, she said, is to help people the way she was helped, in finding a home.
Homeownership looks different to Indigenous people, she explained. Historically, her Tribe had “moved with the seasons and lived in harmony with the land. To stay in the same spot seems contradictory to the way we’ve lived since time immemorial.”
But these days, people do stay in one spot. And on the reservation, more of those spots are needed. A recent assessment at the Flathead Indian Reservation showed that they were 2,400 housing units short. The housing authority is working to lower those numbers, and just completed building their 50th home a couple of months ago.
“We bought a new fourplex last week,” Perez said. “It’s been quite a ride.”
Her two newest homeowners are both moving into homeownership for the first time, Jody said. When they do, it will open up their current low-rent homes to other families. Her hope is that by sharing her own story, it will inspire others to consider homeownership. “If not for Salish & Kootenai Housing authority and NeighborWorks, it never would have happened,” she said. “And now look at me! I’m making it possible for others.”
