Buy Back the Block
Image via @richforever, Instragram.com.
Buy Back the Block
By Neil Heller,
Urban Planner at Neighborhood Workshop in Portland, Oregon, and faculty of the Incremental Development Alliance. Currently sporting a 110-day social-distancing mullet.
Thank you to Brian Reilly for providing important additional detail.
Buy Back the Block
My close friend Tony and I spent our formative teenage years of the 90s in California, him outside of L.A., and me outside of Sacramento. Due to this, we both have history of listening to the popular gangster rap of the time, which we still do at times.
Some time ago, Tony shared Rick Ross’, Buy Back the Block with me because it blends our shared interests in both a music genre and small-scale real estate development. The reason it speaks to us is that it suggests a path to Black Wealth through the use of real estate investing, a vehicle largely used by the White population in the U.S. In Ross’ song, he even suggests an approach that we recommend in our Incremental Development Alliance real estate development educational courses which is to ‘start with a duplex’ – start small and manageable before moving on to bigger more complex projects. Ross even mentions that it is, “time to buy back the block, talkin' one brick at a time”.
“Start with you a duplex, work up to a Hyatt's, maybe a small plaza, I'm looking for a mall.”
Even the structure of the choruses of the song start at the smaller increment of ‘the block’, then grows to buy back the whole neighborhood or, ‘the hood’, then onto buying back ‘the city’.
As a broad concept, the notion of Black communities owning properties and businesses in their own neighborhoods to build Black Wealth is an inspiring and worthy task. For Ross to go even further by suggesting an incremental approach to accomplish this makes his song even more interesting.
We know that this is no easy task for many reasons.
Image of Memphis pop-up shops via Project for Public Spaces.
Investing in Black Communities is Hard
A recent article by Bloomberg City Lab, This Is How Hard It Is to Invest in Black Neighborhoods, outlines some of the obstacles a Black small developer is likely to experience. Chief among these is obtaining financing. Brian Rice, the small developer featured in this article is attempting to implement the incremental approach suggested above by Rick Ross in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I want to turn that into an outdoor pavilion patio-type space. A place for food trucks to set up.”
He pointed out the three accounting firms on the block. He wanted to convert one of the buildings to a place for non-profits and mentoring programs. He planned to use a walkway between two buildings to host pop-up businesses.
Food trucks and pop-up shops are exactly the types of low barrier-to-entry commercial activities a down-market location should be implementing. This approach has proven successful in Memphis during the New Face for an Old Broad event, a weekend where vacant storefronts and empty streets were turned into a lively, artsy active commercial corridor. This live demonstration of the untapped possibilities led to a rebirth of the Broad Avenue Arts District. Property owners who saw the potential were introduced to local entrepreneurs and subsequently worked out arrangements to lease the space long-term.
Unfortunately, our Black small developer in Birmingham is experiencing runaround from banks and devaluations during appraisals which sheds light on a larger dysfunction in our banking system documented in a 2020 report by the U.S. Federal Reserve that “black business owners apply for bank financing at a slightly higher rate than White, Asian American, and Latino or Hispanic business owners, but more than half of applications are turned down — a rate which far exceeds any other demographic group”.
Newark, New Jersey
Despite these potential roadblocks, Newark, New Jersey, a community composed largely of communities of color, is advancing these ideals. The mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka recently released a spoken word music video with Wonda Music entitled, What We Want. In it, a line jumped out at me…
‘We want freedom… ’to be free from losing our land, our block, or community, our homes’.
Inspiringly, the mayor has gone on to operationalize the dream of Rick Ross’s lyrics and his own spoken-word lyrics by supporting what he calls, the ‘home-grown housing developer’. Mayor Baraka considers the homegrown housing developer to be “the American Dream in action”, as it should be for residents from any community. The above piece referencing the home-grown housing developer features the efforts of a Black Newark small developer, Siree Morris, who is currently building 3-family buildings and even a cutting-edge multifamily building built out of reused shipping containers. Newark, like many communities around the country, needs an additional dozen Sirees.
Image of Siree Morris, Developer via newarknj.gov
Fortunately, such an effort is underway.
Also in Newark, Taneshia Nash Laird is leading an effort centered around the renovation of Symphony Hall, a historic Black performing arts theater anchoring the ends of downtown and three surrounding neighborhoods.
Her approach is called, Symphony Works, a Works Progress Administration-style recovery effort that includes both “Culture and Construction” - the “Culture” from her stunning pivots in cultural programming and production in her short 18 months as CEO. The “Construction” component is in dual tracks of Renovation and Reinvestment in the neighborhoods within walking distance.
Her “Construction” approach is rather full spectrum:
Find the existing small-scale developers in the neighborhood and city, including those who have adjacent experience and want to get into the business.
Train these people with an “each one, teach one” approach that mobilizes existing capacity and builds on it.
Work with place-based partners like the Community Development Corporation, Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, the City, and allied agencies to mobilize the redevelopment of both city-owned land bank properties, and private property partners willing to engage in this type of effort.
Then, it gets even more interesting. She’s committed to developing the capacity of multiple place-based Master Development teams (focusing on a few blocks or handful of parcels at a time) to systematically optimize a set of neighborhood and wealth-building outcomes, from building income and wealth for neighborhood-based small-scale developers as well as their capacity to take on more and more complex projects over time.
A local small-scale development project produces outcomes: profit for the local, small-scale developer, wages for the construction crew, a place to live for new owners or rental tenants, some impact on the block where there’s no longer an empty lot or depreciated building. These things are good, but by articulating the widest range of benefit possible from new real estate investment, the teams she enables are proactively challenged to devise ways to build toward even more robust outcomes, each, and every project.
Spurred by the spirit behind Maya Angelou, “do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better”, these Master Developer teams will facilitate the small developers’ outcomes on the first project and learn their way into more and better outcomes on the next as part of an adaptive system.
So far, using this approach, these teams have added to the list of those who could benefit from deliberate neighborhood-strengthening small-scale development to include:
the small-scale rehabbers
the construction crews of trades
eventual owners or tenants, but at a broader range of sales price/rental amounts through a diversity of configurations to serve more household types than the typical new building stock.
Image of Symphony Hall via revitalization.org
The Arts and Quality of Life
Beyond just the scope of benefits from thoughtful real estate developments, her efforts go on to capture the quality of life component that arts & culture can generate. A recent study documented that low-income and communities of color lack access to housing, public transit, and job opportunities but inaccessibility to another amenity supersedes the others - the Arts.
“The Arts Is What Ties People to their Communities", commissioned by the Knight Foundation found that of all of the amenities explored in the survey, only the arts stood out for its potential to enhance both feelings of attachment and concrete actions. They also found that quality of life metrics matter more to low-income people and people of color yet are harder to come by.
By now, and probably needless to say, I am particularly inspired by this endeavor. It is led by a Black woman, with Black staff, in a largely Black neighborhood with the explicit goal of creating Black Wealth and quality of life through thoughtful real estate development and an Arts culture. Combine this effort with the support of the Mayor, the hustle and relationships of Siree and others like him to follow, and supportive organizations like the Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District, I can see a genuine path to Black Wealth and prosperity by buying back the block.
https://nextcity.org/events/detail/how-to-revitalize-a-historic-arts-institution