ABOUT US
A Safe House In The Midst Of Modern Day Slavery
The Black Houses is a for-profit real estate company and 2-year housing program dedicated to creating more young Black multi-family home owners.
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We believe in the proven power of owning and leverage real estate to create Black wealth. We believe that you shouldn't live on your own until you own and we provide an affordable way to live good during a time when wages are depressed and rents are too damn high.
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We use a strategy called House Huddling to help young Black professionals ages 21-25 lower their housing expenses (e.g. rent, utilities, furniture), so that they can save a downpayment faster with our UpPayment Plan, to help them acquire their own multi-family home and achieve to rent freedom faster.
In addition to low rent, residents participate in our $52K Curriculum weekly where they learn Liberation Arts Education such as financial literacy, eating for energy, emotional intelligence, public speaking, tax strategies, leadership skills, and entrepreneurship.
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We currently own properties in Brooklyn, NY, New Orleans, LA, and Oakland, CA and are always looking to expand so that we can help more people get free.
OUR CREATION STORY
Like many people, our real estate journey begins with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book by Robert Kiyosaki. After reading that book during his undergraduate education at UCLA, Jullien Gordon knew that he would not be buying a single family home, like the American Dream suggests, before he bought a multi-family home first.
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Fast forward almost a decade later, Jullien finished his BA at UCLA and MBA and Masters in Education at Stanford University and moved to Brooklyn, New York to work as the Director of Talent Recruitment for Management Leadership For Tomorrow (MLT). After living low and aggressively saving for 6 years, he was able to buy a 3-family home in Bedford Stuyvesant. He achieved rent freedom, meaning that he no longer had a housing expense.
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That led to even more freedom as an entrepreneur, with his time, his ability to help others, and his ability to access and leverage capital. From there, he started investing in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city he fell in love with after visiting several times while traveling all over the country speaking at colleges about what he calls Liberation Arts Education.
Those investments continued to bear fruit and more freedom. After doing AirBnB for quite some time, the laws in some cities changed and he shifted his strategy. Under the name Purpose Properties, he was able to provide quality housing for Black families on Section 8 and Black Millennials and Gen Zers as they sought to gain footing in their early careers.
Most importantly, he was able to provide housing for his mother who dealt with homelessness in Oakland, California after falling on hard times due to alcoholism. In 2000, he witnessed her, a former anesthesiologist, lose the home he grew up in the Trestle Glen area which is now worth $1.7 million when it was last sold for $496,000. The destruction of Black wealth inspired him to create it for himself and others.
Jullien noticed how student debt was preventing his generation from living out their dreams and pursuing their purpose. Their housing expenses and student loans were leaving them with no breathing room to create the lives they desired.
As he was brainstorming ways to help them either earn more income or reduce those top two expenses, he recalled the sober living programs his mother was in as she was getting back on her feet, where adult residents lived to together to reduce expenses.
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They call it clustering, but Jullien coined the term House Huddling. At the time, he had 11 apartments in his portfolio, and he decided to dedicate the available spaces to The Black Houses Movement to help more young Black people achieve freedom faster through multi-family real estate.
OUR CREATION STORY
Like many people, our real estate journey begins with the Rich Dad, Poor Dad book by Robert Kiyosaki. After reading that book during his undergraduate education at UCLA, Jullien Gordon knew that he would not be buying a single family home, like the American Dream suggests, before he bought a multi-family home first.
​
Fast forward almost a decade later, Jullien finished his BA at UCLA and MBA and Masters in Education at Stanford University and moved to Brooklyn, New York to work as the Director of Talent Recruitment for Management Leadership For Tomorrow (MLT). After living low and aggressively saving for 6 years, he was able to buy a 3-family home in Bedford Stuyvesant. He achieved rent freedom, meaning that he no longer had a housing expense.
​
That led to even more freedom as an entrepreneur, with his time, his ability to help others, and his ability to access and leverage capital. From there, he started investing in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city he fell in love with after visiting several times while traveling all over the country speaking at colleges about what he calls Liberation Arts Education.
Those investments continued to bear fruit and more freedom. After doing AirBnB for quite some time, the laws in some cities changed and he shifted his strategy. Under the name Purpose Properties, he was able to provide quality housing for Black families on Section 8 and Black Millennials and Gen Zers as they sought to gain footing in their early careers.
Most importantly, he was able to provide housing for his mother who dealt with homelessness in Oakland, California after falling on hard times due to alcoholism. In 2000, he witnessed her, a former anesthesiologist, lose the home he grew up in the Trestle Glen area which is now worth $1.7 million when it was last sold for $496,000. The destruction of Black wealth inspired him to create it for himself and others.
Jullien noticed how student debt was preventing his generation from living out their dreams and pursuing their purpose. Their housing expenses and student loans were leaving them with no breathing room to create the lives they desired.
As he was brainstorming ways to help them either earn more income or reduce those top two expenses, he recalled the sober living programs his mother was in as she was getting back on her feet, where adult residents lived to together to reduce expenses.
​
They call it clustering, but Jullien coined the term House Huddling. At the time, he had 11 apartments in his portfolio, and he decided to dedicate the available spaces to The Black Houses Movement to help more young Black people achieve freedom faster through multi-family real estate.
OUR FOUNDER
JULLIEN GORDON
Jullien Gordon is a proud father, 6-time author, 5-time TED Talker, serial entrepreneur and real estate investor. His work has been featured on MSNBC, Forbes, Black Enterprise, and Essence.
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He is on a mission to free 300 people like Harriet Tubman. He has already fully freed several people through his coaching and courses, but now he is doing it through real estate. He defines freedom as the ability to be who you were created to be and do what you were created to do.
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Growing up, Jullien had 9 last name—Gordon, Ikharo, Ash, Primas, Shields, Kelly, Hopkins, Chambers, and Brown. These are all the families that helped raise him. The notion that it takes a village to raise a child was Jullien's reality.
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As a result, community building has always been central to his life whether it was The African Men's Collective at UCLA, monthly potluck dinners during his time at The Stanford Graduate School of Business and in Brooklyn, New York, or the national mastermind goal setting groups movement he created through his platform Masterminds.org.
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Entrepreneurship and real estate paved the way for his freedom. After buying his first home—a 3-family apartment building—in Brooklyn, New York in 2013 and experiencing the power of home ownership, he went on to invest in more multifamily real estate in New Orleans and Oakland. Now he is dedicated to helping others become multifamily owners too.
Our Freedom Faculty
We have a team of faculty who give their knowledge and expertise as part of our $52K Curriculum. Every week, someone teaches in-person on online to help our residents unlock a jewel and increase their degrees of freedom. Our faculty include Dr. Boyce Watkins (family banking), Cherita Weatherspoon (purpose), Kierra Jones (personal branding), Stanley Tate (student loans), Chris Kazi Rolle (love & marriage), and many more.
