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Investing

Landing a home.

April 27, 2022

Alex Lofton is on a mission to make the home buying process more accessible and attainable for essential professionals, a group that typically cannot save the equity needed to buy a home. He co-founded Landed to help teachers, healthcare workers, government workers, and other members of the public sector (essential workers) become homeowners through a shared equity, shared appreciation down payment program. Essential professionals are crucial to the existence and vitality of the communities in which they work and Landed allows investors to support and uplift these individuals by contributing to their path towards homeownership.

Alex’s mother was a schoolteacher. His family could not afford to own a home until his grandmother died and left them one. This transfer of intergenerational wealth opened a lot of doors for Alex and his family, allowing them to start building their own wealth. But many people can’t go to “the bank of mom and dad” when they want to buy a home, says Alex. And this prohibits a substantial number of people from ever becoming homeowners, a group that continues to grow as housing prices continue to increase. This is the origin of Landed.

With over 1000 homes purchased and with significant backing, Landed expects to expand nationally and scale quickly, providing more families with the opportunity to fulfill their dream and build a future. Home ownership.

Alex worked as a member of Barack Obama’s field team mobilizing citizens and organizing volunteers throughout that campaign and then served as a regional director at Obama for America. He got his start in real estate at Forest City (now Brookfield properties) where he worked as an MBA summer associate.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:01] Alex Lofton’s Mum was a schoolteacher. That’s who he was thinking of when he founded Landed. Alex is on a mission to help essential professionals build financial security and buy homes in the communities they serve. By essential professionals Alex means schoolteachers like his mom. Firefighters, police and health care professionals. All of those professionals that a city can’t function without, all of whom we take for granted, and many of whom can’t save enough for a down payment on a home. Landed has developed a shared equity down payment product for this target market. Their product might be as essential as the essential workers they serve. With a Series B raise in their back pocket Landed is growing rapidly to put home ownership in the hands of everyone. Please listen in to hear more. If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do, share this podcast and go to rethinkrealestateforgood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies. Hi, Alex. I’m really excited to have you on the show today.

Alex Lofton: [00:02:33] Thanks for having me. Really appreciate you reaching out and connecting.

Eve: [00:02:38] So I reached out because I really want to know what Landed is. You have a company called Landed and I want to know what you do.

Alex: [00:02:47] Well, I’m happy to talk about Landed ad what we do. Landed is on a mission to help essential professionals, think your teacher, your nurse or firefighter buy homes and build financial security in the communities they serve. Recognizing that these folks uphold us every single day and we should do what we can to uphold them, and what we offer is a down payment program, a shared equity, shared appreciation down payment program that helps them get into a home and build wealth and feel rooted in the communities they serve.

Eve: [00:03:21] That’s a very particular need that you’re fulfilling. Can you take me on the journey? What made you decide this was a need worth pursuing?

Alex: [00:03:30] Totally. All roads lead to Landed there’s a lot of them. Some core things are very true about the world we live in. Number one cities and the communities we live in are becoming more and more expensive. And the options for people to be able to afford a roof over their head, especially be able to access homeownership, the pathways that are becoming fewer and fewer and the ways that most people are able to get to being a home buyer and being a homeowner are through having a bank of mom and dad, someone they can go to and help them give up capital to get in. If you don’t have that, you’re kind of screwed. And for me personally and my co-founder personally, we looked around and said, how are we going to be homebuyers someday? We don’t have that option. And so, part of this is very personal. When you look at your personal situation, then you start wondering, well, if we’re wondering now what about the folks who are working in our schools and for our cities, whatnot? What are they going to do if they don’t have a bank of mom and dad? So, some of that is the trends in the market that are that we’re all experiencing are housing being so tight. Another part for me is personal, my mom was a fourth-grade schoolteacher, my dad was a social worker. And I grew up, won the lottery on love and support, but money was always tight. And it wasn’t until Granny died and passed along her home until that’s when things changed for us financially. And so, we were lucky that was intergenerational wealth being transferred. First time that happened to my family. But most people don’t have that access to that, especially people who are kind of in the middle in roles are crucial to thriving community and thriving society, but, yet may not be able to have the fortune my parents had. So, trying to figure out ways to not have it be so granny has to die for everybody to be able to make the decision that they can build a life that they want for them and their families and their community.

Eve: [00:05:14] I can see a TV series coming like Granny has to die. That would be really awful. Okay. You said something really important here about people who are crucial to our society. Can you like just expand on that a little bit? You talked about schoolteachers, so you have a very particular market, right, or target market.

Alex: [00:05:37] Particularly, so the folks that we work with, our customers, are people who are employed by institutions in education, in health care, or in the public sector more broadly. One thing is we all have essential people in our lives, right? That’s not to say that these are the only essential people, but these roles teaching our kids, helping us when we’re sick, helping us in an emergency, and making sure that we have the transportation that we need, the roads, we have all these things that we don’t have, this basic infrastructure. It’s basic infrastructure. The plumbing that we take for granted every single day, then the outlook doesn’t look very great if you don’t have all those things, right. And at the same time, these are roles that while arguably should be paid more, I will be the first to say teachers should be paid more. They oftentimes have salaries that allow them to, say, afford rent to be able to live somewhere, but they may not have enough to do that and save for a down payment. This group is one that is thinking about something like home ownership. They’re oftentimes not at a point of thinking about do I even have a roof over my head? One of the questions like, okay, I have a roof over my head, but do I kind of have a pathway to owning that roof? And so, if that’s where your head is at, one of the core barriers to being able to move from being a renter to an owner is having a down payment, that’s the number one reason why people aren’t able to buy a home is having capital upfront. And there are many tools out there that have been built to be low down payment options for folks. But there are a lot of reasons why those are blockers. Number one, they can get really expensive on a month-to-month basis. You’re borrowing more money or you’re taking out private mortgage insurance or whatever. The month-to-month cost goes up and then all of a sudden you look at your monthly budget and you say, oh my gosh, I can’t afford, then, my car payment. I can’t afford, you know, the food that I’m trying to buy. So, no, I’m not going to be a homeowner. And so, if you can move people to having a larger down payment, then their month to month cost will go down. And so that’s the mechanics that we’re trying to work on.

Eve: [00:07:45] So this is a real equity down payment that you participate in.

Alex: [00:07:48] This is a truly, yeah, true equity is not debt. The idea is how do you get more equity in the transaction on the front end to help make sure homeownership feels on a month-to-month basis more like renting than owning from a dollars’ point of view. And then when you’re able to, as soon as you’re able to, you exit that partnership, that equity partnership, so you can be the full owner of your home. I’ll stop there. I’m happy to go into details now.

Eve: [00:08:13] That’s really interesting. The other thing that you didn’t say is these essential people, they’ve chosen professional lives and careers that, really, are not going to give them a lot of upward mobility. Being an educator or a health care professional or in the public sector, you kind of know what you’re going to be paid going in and it’s never really going to change very much.

Alex: [00:08:31] Well, you’re right. You’re right that either, you know, working in the public sector or the quasi-public sector, because a lot of America isn’t all public that provide these services. But you’re right, you have a little bit more of a predictability of what you’re going to make over time. There’s a challenge with that when you’re what you’re making over time isn’t rising at the cost of everything else. There’s also just the reality that the way that our home ownership system has been designed. You know, I think the romantic story is that you can save hard. Save a little money. Work hard, save a little money, buy that house. Which used to be the case many, many decades ago. But now the way it is, is you really need to have an infusion of cash to get started. And so that falls along the lines of families who’ve been able to build wealth over time in our country that oftentimes falls along race lines, too. And so, a lot of what we found is that this is a product that anybody can use, any essential professional can use. And the folks who oftentimes find it being the most game changing are those who haven’t come from families with wealth. And the difference between black families and white families in this country is something like 35, 40% swing between those families who are black and have been able to pass along intergenerational wealth and those who are white, and they will pass along intergenerational wealth. And this is a replacement for that. This can be someone who comes, this can be something that can come in and try to replace it. So, there’s a lot of layers here as to why, you know, it helps various individuals. But the main point is without some sort of pathway to having a sustained.

Eve: [00:10:03] Yeah. You know, I interviewed someone you probably should meet in Australia. An architect.

Alex: [00:10:07] Oh, interesting.

Eve: [00:10:08] Who’s building condominiums for exactly the same segment of society, because those essential workers are being pushed further and further out from the major cities. They’re just like in our major cities. And when you have a two-hour commute and you’re on a nightshift at a hospital, as a nurse, it’s just impossible, you know? So, he’s tackling it from a physical end.

Alex: [00:10:30] Well, we had the story of an employee at a school in the South Bay of San Francisco near San Jose that drove two and a half hours each way to work and multiple times just chose to sleep in his car during the week because it was a much better choice than trying to go home and come back, right? And he actually had a home two and a half hours away, but his lived experience was much closer to homelessness than it was being able to come home to the place where you can call your own that we all kind of dream of.

Eve: [00:11:04] Which is important at the end of a long day, right?

Alex: [00:11:06] Right.

Eve: [00:11:07] So who are your customers and where are they?

Alex: [00:11:10] Great question. So, our customers span a wide range. We have people who are first time homebuyers much closer to earlier in their career. We have people who are looking to retire and have never owned a home and wanting to do that or have owned a home and maybe even downsized at one point. But then because of the economic realities of their family, kids are moving back in. They need a bigger house and so be able to afford a bigger house because prices have gotten more expensive, they need support to get in. So, we have a wide range of folks, but typically 68% of our home buyers are first time home buyers. They are purchasing properties that are condos, town homes, single family homes, predominantly single family homes, but a whole variety of types of homes. We started our work in the most expensive metropolitan areas in the US, starting in California. So, a lot of our homebuyers in California, in and around San Francisco, L.A., as well as places like Seattle and Portland and Denver. And then as we have expanded the operation, we’ve gone further and further east, even further and further west, we’ll launch in Hawaii, but also on the East Coast, New York and D.C. and very recently are expanding our work to go much more national. But all of those cities are where primarily, where our homebuyers are purchasing. And they tend to be not only your teacher and your nurse, but also everything from a janitor or someone who works in food services, who is employed by that institution, to administrators. What those folks are purchasing is different because depending on their family situation, you know, oftentimes they’re dual income households, but not always. And some of our less expensive markets comparatively to San Francisco, you have more single folks purchasing homes. In the more expensive markets, they tend to need to be double income to be able to afford anything. But depending on where you are or what your financial situation is, will kind of dictate what level of support you choose to take out.

Eve: [00:13:12] So how many families have you helped so far?

Alex: [00:13:16] With our down payment program we’ve helped over 1000 folks purchase homes, which is very, very exciting. Big milestone and it’s just getting started. We’re right at that sweet spot.

Eve: [00:13:26] That’s even more exciting, right?

Alex: [00:13:28] Yeah, it’s showing that people want it and need it. And it’s been an awesome journey so far. But that’s why now we’re focusing on expanding our operation nationally. A partnership, so, the way that we are able to make this whole thing work and part of the innovation I like is, beyond the actual housing down payment support innovation, is our business model where you can actually think of Landed as two parts. One part is a operating company that is called Landed Inc that is a real estate brokerage. That also has a joint venture mortgage business associated with it. There’s a set of products and value that we’re trying to offer individual consumers, and every time we offer that value in the home it’s purchased, then we receive some revenue.

Eve: [00:14:13] Right. So, you get commissions like any other real estate brokers.

Alex: [00:14:15] Real estate agents or, yeah. So, the more transactions happen, the bigger the business becomes. So that’s the business side. And then on the other piece is our property business, propco, as the industry likes to call it, which is basically an investing business. So, investors who are excited to invest in residential real estate can put their money into this company and we can distribute that money in the form of the down payment support. And then when the home buyer decides to end their contract with Landed, they share back in some of the appreciation of the home back into that fund. And that’s where our investors are able to get their return. So, we are able to balance the interest of the partnership between people who want to invest, and people want to buy homes. And that’s kind of almost a separate entity or operation from us as a business growing. Our interest is just impact, scale. You know, the more folks that use it, the better. So…

Eve: [00:15:11] So who are your investors?

Alex: [00:15:14] Wow, what a great question. I spend a lot of time talking to all sorts of folks.

Eve: [00:15:18] I’m sure you do.

Alex: [00:15:20] We have venture capital investors who invest in the operating company.

Eve: [00:15:23] I heard. And congratulations.

Alex: [00:15:25] Thank you very much. And that helps us grow and scale. But then the investors in our propco is a pretty wide range of folks. It started off focused primarily impact investors, people who are interested in the opportunity to help retain and attract talent to these sectors in our expensive markets. The biggest one that people will know is Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic arm of Facebook founder, and they wanted to see this model take off. Their interest wasn’t to make money off of teachers. Their interest was, hey, is there a sustainable model here that, if proven, could actually take shared equity from being what it has been, which is a very localized tool? Since the seventies, some great programs out there have existed for a long time. Cities have done it like San Francisco. Universities like Stanford have done it for their employees for quite a while, but it’s never been scaled. So how do you actually do that?

Eve: [00:16:24] I was a recipient of a program like that when we moved to Pittsburgh, so.

Alex: [00:16:27] Oh, really?

Eve: [00:16:28] I think the Redevelopment Authority had down payment programs. I mean, there had been tons of them around.

Alex: [00:16:33] Lots of them around.

Eve: [00:16:35] They’re local, right?

Alex: [00:16:36] Yeah, they’re local. As a result, they tend to run out of money because there’s only a limited amount.

Eve: [00:16:41] And they also usually get their money, which, in a very targeted manner. So their money has restrictions on it.

Alex: [00:16:48] Lots more restrictions.

Eve: [00:16:49] Yeah. So that really impacts who can access that.

Alex: [00:16:53] That’s right. And then the reality is, given today’s markets in real estate, if you can’t transact in a quick manner, in a manner that leads the fewest number of hurdles to making the transaction happen, you’re going to your bid isn’t going to be chosen. Your bid is going to be the first one to go out the window. So, part of our goal is to fit into that, but back to the investors. So, there’s a combination of those who are interested on the impact side and then those who want to make money off of real estate for their investors. So, we have organizations that are investing pensioner money that say, hey, my job as a fiduciary is to grow the money, these retirees of other teacher retirees. And we’re going to invest their money into real estate. And this is one of the ways that we’re going to do it is through this shared appreciation program, we have a variety of interests that are investing in the down payment program with the idea that eventually this should sit alongside any proper investment strategy that can help diversify an institution that’s interested in investing in real estate. It could be alongside any other strategy like single family rental strategies that’s existed for a while, where people, institutions buy properties and rent them back out to folks. This is a different way of doing it. Way that I would say is a little more cooperative with the home buyer instead of maybe competing with the home buyer to buy the same property, you’re actually saying, hey, we’re going to help you get into the home, become a home buyer, and then at some point you exit the partnership, you become the full home buyer, and then we’ll share a part of the appreciation between that.

Eve: [00:18:23] So I have to ask a question that’s always on my mind because I’m all about democratizing investment. So, the investors, the propco investors, any everyday folks in that or is that all accredited investors?

Alex: [00:18:36] Yeah, great question. So far, no everyday folks. It’s all accredited investor.

Eve: [00:18:40] You and I have to talk about that.

Alex: [00:18:43] So part of the reason I got really excited, the original, one of the original concepts here is that can we build a market for this type of investment so that if I had an extra five K and I wasn’t an accredited investor, why not share 100 bucks? And I wasn’t an accredited investor, and I wanted to put some money into a fund that was distributing into residential real estate in a way that I felt good about it, helping other people become homebuyers. I’d love to do that. Still, something I hope we can help usher into the world. What I see is we’re just building towards that, building towards something like that. It’s all sequencing. You’ve got to start somewhere, prove it out, build, and it’ll come. And we’re kind of on that path but haven’t quite made it there yet.

Eve: [00:19:25] Because really, you know, then your impact is not just on the people you’re helping with. Yeah.

Alex: [00:19:30] Totally, totally. I mean, I will say to the extent you want to make the argument that because we have partnerships with institutions that are investing retirement money of teachers, you’re helping a similar group.

Eve: [00:19:42] You’re really getting triple bottom line there, I guess.

Alex: [00:19:44] So you’re able to go to both. But I think even being able to put the decision-making power into the consumer to be able to participate in this would be really cool. But again, there’s a lot of economic and regulatory reasons why you have to build towards that thing. You can’t always just jump straight there.

Eve: [00:20:00] I totally get that. Okay. It’s really pretty exciting. So, it’s a complicated model and so I want to know how you landed, no pun intended, on this model.

Alex: [00:20:13] I will say what they really love about our name, is it’s just surprising how many times the word landed comes up in language. Funny story. At the airport, Sea-Tac Airport, you land and it says landed on the board. I’m like, oh, wow. What great advertising right there.

Eve: [00:20:29] Exactly. Exactly.

Alex: [00:20:30] How do we land on this model? Complicated. I mean, that’s part of the thing here. What we’re trying to do is move a what is considered a relatively sophisticated economic model into the hands of more people in the hands of average, everyday people. My story here is I was sitting in intro to finance class at business school, not a place that people usually associate with being inspired. But I can say I was inspired in this class because we were talking about the concept of diversification. And what struck me is that I am an overly educated kid, but I come from a middle-class background, lower middle class background. No one was talking about concepts of diversification, spreading out your money in different places so that you can make sure it grew even if the economy went up and down in different ways. I didn’t have a concept of that. All I knew is that people were trying to get enough put together enough money to try to buy a home if they could even do that. And so the question was like, why? Why is there such a difference in the tools that are available between those who have money and those who don’t? What can we take, some of these tools that people usually are able to use when they have money, make them more accessible to folks so it met them where they were financially. Buying a home, going from a renter to being an owner is an example of where we still have a zero and a one. There’s not much of a gradient between those two things. And so, you go from being solely a consumer to jumping to in the Bay Area, trying to buy over $1,000,000 property. No financial council would ever tell you that’s a good idea to concentrate all your money that fast. So how could we be a part of starting towards building products that move people from a zero to a one in a more gradual manner in a way that stair steps them into ownership and allows them to properly fit their financial situation. But that does mean taking a relatively sophisticated financial tool and moving it into the hands of more folks. That’s also why we’ve cared a lot about doing this right, having a set of values, a company we felt good about that we could stick to finding what’s fair between our homebuyers and our investors, etc., and then doing a lot on making sure that we are taking the best lessons from the past where there were challenges or problems that people face as a result of new financial tools and make sure that those don’t pop up so that people don’t look up one day and be like, Oh, I thought it was a good idea, ended up really screwing me over. And so, a lot of this has been about how do you make sure people know what they’re getting into, educated around it, also encouraged to move on from a program like this when they can financially do it because they don’t want to share appreciation forever. So, all these types of things that we really take a lot of time to make sure this product is truly helpful for consumers because it’s also good for investors. You don’t want a product that blows up in a consumer’s face, it will blow up in the investor’s face. So really making sure that’s done properly has been a focus of ours.

Eve: [00:23:24] I appreciate that. My parents were refugees, so they were in the zero group for a long time and actually real estate was their pathway to the middle-class for sure. But you know, at a time when real estate wasn’t so expensive, I don’t know if that would be true even in Australia nowadays. So, um, so I have to ask is there anyone else working in this space that you know of?

Alex: [00:23:48] There are other people who offer products that are some version of, taking the equity in the home and either breaking it up, sharing it with others, whether it be shared appreciation models, equity takeout models, shared equity, other types of shared equity models. But no one’s really doing it in a way that’s targeted around a specific group of people. Thinking of this as a starting point for a specific group of people to really have a wider set of tools to help them become financially secure. Like I like to think about organizations like USAA and what they did for the military. When I think about the work that we’re doing, you know, they started with an insurance product for a very long time for military families, vets, and then they expanded the set of products that they have to do more, wrap around financial services for that specific group. And that’s more how I like to think about what we’re trying to do. Our down payment program is, is the anchor helping people with the biggest transaction of their life. And if we do that well, we can also introduce other products to them that help them build either before they’re a home buyer or help them build towards being a home buyer or after they’re a home buyer. And that’s different. That’s different that a lot of folks are thinking about it in who are thinking also about shared equity.

Eve: [00:25:00] Yeah, I think it sounds like you’re being successful because you’ve got a very clear niche that actually has a very big return.

Alex: [00:25:08] You know, I think about the down payment program. It’s I mean, I’m a nerd. Help think about this a lot as a product. Of course, I like our product, but I think it’s one thing to be oriented towards I’ve got this product and I have to shove it in everybody’s face. And it’s another one to say this product really enables people to do something in their life. How do we help people do more of that, and be a little less attached to the product and a little bit more attached to the consumer or the outcomes they want to have. And when you focus it in on a particular group of people with a particular role in society, then you can really tailor what you offer to them to the realities of their life. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Eve: [00:25:47] Are there products you’re thinking about?

Alex: [00:25:49] Oh, yeah, I’m thinking about all sorts of products, everything. I mean, the reality is when you look at what is holding people back from building wealth, even becoming home buyers mean anything that help manage the process of home buying and then being a homeowner in a way that’s more streamlined and more cost efficient. I mean, there’s so many different pathways there. We’re still at a point where we want, we have a really great down payment product and we’re just getting started. We’re only serving a very small percentage of the people who could potentially serve. The opportunity is still huge to continue to focus on what we already do. But the more, you know, the more customers we have, the more we are hearing from them, about what would be most helpful. So, trying to take that information in and design towards more products.

Eve: [00:26:27] That was going to be my next question. What potential does this hold, this product?

Alex: [00:26:32] I think the shared equity or shared appreciation, I get really excited about it because I see it as a cooperative model between investment capital and individual consumers. And if we get it right, which includes having a supply of housing so that there are things to buy, right? I care a lot about that.

Eve: [00:26:54] That’s the really wrong thing at the moment, right?

Alex: [00:26:56] Yeah.

Eve: [00:26:56] Yeah. I don’t know whether we’re going to be able to fix it.

Alex: [00:26:58] Care a lot about that. We don’t build homes, right? We are helping people buy homes. We need homes to be built in the grand ecosystem of housing we’re big proponents of supply growth, but if we get this right, then there is a pathway for the investment part interest in residential real estate to actually be paired with the individual to help them on their path to growing wealth. And that’s just that’s a win-win on both sides. And that kind of helps to spread out risk, spread out reward, which means more balance. Any natural system that you look at tries to spread out as much as it can so it can balance. And that’s what we want our economy to be doing. So, I think that that’s what’s really exciting at the heart of something like shared equity. It just could be really great for our economy and really great for individuals as well as investors. I think this on the ability to focus on the financial health of our essential professionals and people we rely on every single day who are upholding our communities. I think it has an opportunity to have our communities thrive more. When you have more people who are rooted where they live, whether it be the teacher who lives in the community in which they teach and has a special relationship or a deeper relationship with the place and the people that they are working with every single day, or the policemen on the corner who actually lives in that community. There’s a lot of implications there that are very different than when people are traveling two and a half hours or leaving the profession altogether and you don’t have anybody, right? So, I think there’s a ton of potential here, not to mention it’s a huge market, right? So, if you, if we actually as a business fill the need for the 25% of salaried workers that are your essential professional and in these industries, that’s a huge business opportunity to deliver a whole lot of value to folks.

Eve: [00:28:50] I have one more question for you, and that is what keeps you up at night?

Alex: [00:28:56] Oh, man, I have two answers to that one. One is we need to make sure that this country continues to have a exemplar democracy that allows for organizations of all sorts for profit, nonprofit, public sector alike to thrive and to allow us to continue to have the marketplace of ideas and the marketplace, the literal marketplace of stuff to thrive as a society. And there’s a lot of signs with that that’s being that’s being been under attack for a while and more intensely recently. And so, I think we should all be paying attention to that and do what we can to make sure we still have that as our playing field to work on and live in on the Landed side. You know, I’m so excited. This is such an exciting moment at the company because for a long time we’ve been very restricted. Where we can serve folks. Capital has been much more conservative about where it would go when we certain markets now we have capital partners that are much more interested in going wide saying, hey, this is a need in many, many, many places besides our just our most expensive cities. How do we get it out there? Which is such an opportunity. And it also means national scale as whole another level operation. So just building an organization that can sustain all that is fun and is hard and keeps me up at night. But that’s the good stuff. That’s why we that’s why a start-up people get into start-ups. It’s really, really a fun, fun ride.

Eve: [00:30:20] Well, you’re a rock star and thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

Alex: [00:30:25] I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah. Thanks so much.

Eve: [00:30:34] Alex Lofton is passionate about helping essential professionals in education, health care and government unlock the financial benefits of home ownership. And he’s built a rapidly growing business, Landed, around his passion. Landed is taking off.

Eve: [00:31:03] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Alex Lofton

Reclaiming your Community.

April 6, 2022

Majora Carter’s career as urban revitalization strategist has spanned environment, economy, social mobility, and real estate development. Her work has won major awards in each sector, including a MacArthur ‘genius’ Grant and Peabody Award winning broadcaster.

Majora’s words — “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one” — are inscribed on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. And her new book, called “Reclaiming Your Neighborhood”, the subject of our podcast, takes a next step in her thesis – build where you live,  talent will stay and your neighborhood will prosper.

Born and raised in the South Bronx, Majora has long-focused much of her work there, looking always to make positive change for her community, and in doing so, gained both national and international attention. She believes that talent retention may be the key to turning around low-status neighborhoods. And she’s backed that up with her Boogie Down Ground Hip-Hop coffee spot which she owns and operates with her husband in Hunts Point, around the corner from where she grew up.

Majora is also a lecturer at Princeton University’s Keller Center, serves as editor and senior producer at GROUNDTRUTH, a platform for telling stories of people building community power, and she previously served as associate director of The POINT Community Development Corporation. She founded and ran Sustainable South Bronx and co-founded Green for All.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:07] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:01] My guest today is Majora Carter, my second interview with this powerhouse. Her career as urban revitalization strategist has spanned environment, economy, social mobility and real estate development, and her work has won major awards in each sector, including a MacArthur Genius grant. Majora’s words are inscribed on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture: “Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one.” Her new book called “Reclaiming Your Neighborhood”, the subject of our podcast, takes a next step in her thesis. Build where you live, talent will stay, and your neighborhood will prosper. Look for the book on Amazon, in bookstores or on Majora’s website. There is no way around it. If you are really interested in impact investing, this podcast is a must listen.

Eve: [00:02:19] Hello, Majora. I’m so delighted to have you back on this show.

Majora Carter: [00:02:23] Thanks for having me.

Eve: [00:02:25] It’s been a while, but you’ve just written a book called “Reclaiming Your Community,” and in it you ask how we can address the problem of persistent poverty in low status communities differently. So, I wanted to start by asking you what is a low status community and what does it mean to you?

Majora: [00:02:46] A low status community to me – the way that our company defines it is a place where inequality is assumed by both the people that are in that community and those outside looking in. And so, what that what it looks like and I think that’s easier to describe that way; It’s the kind of places where there are more environmental burdens, where there’s higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, the kind of places where you won’t find diverse options for food. Not many great places to invest your money or you’re charged for it, like through check cashing stores or places like that. And it’s just literally the places where inequality is just understood. And so and they look different. They can be inner cities, they could be Native American reservations, they could be the kind of former booming Rust Belt towns that only white people lived in. But the jobs are long gone.

Eve: [00:03:44] This is a really big and hard question. So why is it difficult to improve the status of a low status neighborhood?

Majora: [00:03:52] Well, like a lot of things, it comes down to who benefits from it. And because if you look at those communities, literally billions of dollars are pumped into them through the philanthropic industrial sector and as well as our government. And it looks different, but it comes in the form of whether there are subsidies to build very low-income housing and homeless shelters, whether it’s the multibillion dollar economic engine that’s our pharmaceutical industry that absolutely does profit off of lifestyle related health conditions from diabetes and obesity and heart conditions. And it’s the, you know, the fact that there’s such low educational attainment but really, we’re not investing in public education within those areas either. And so, again, so it’s always like a problem to be solved. Again, folks, there are definitely industries set up to perpetuate that and actually benefit from them, but the people in those communities are not getting any better.

Eve: [00:04:53] So how does the redevelopment industry impact this cycle?

Majora: [00:04:58] Yeah, so like I think there’s an old saying, “all relationships are about real estate” and I believe it’s true in this regard because real estate development can be used as a transformational tool if we use it that way. I mean, think about it. What we’re doing is literally redefining what constitutes what is happening in those areas. So, when you do it by creating really interesting commercial, industrial, residential development. And so, you can tweak the formula and create benefits for the people that are there or not. Right?

Eve: [00:05:32] Right.

Majora: [00:05:32] And so if we’re thinking about development as a transformational tool and if we know that sort of status quo development, which either content to concentrate poverty and everything and all the ills associated with it from low health outcomes, low educational attainment, you know, higher rates of people being incarcerated. If we know that, then what if we designed those places and developed them in ways that actually promoted the opposite?

Eve: [00:06:01] Right.

Majora: [00:06:01] And that’s when we decided to look at a tool. We literally borrowed a page from the business community that looks at if you are an employer, if you own a business and you train, you hire your staff, that’s your talent and you pour resources into them, whether it’s training or benefits or reasons for them to want to stay. You know, you’re not doing it so that your competitor will hire them away. You’re doing it so that your talent sees you as the place to be. But we don’t do that in American low status communities. We don’t treat our communities that way. And so, what we’re trying to do is apply a talent retention approach to real estate development. Like what do folks that are born and raised in those communities, the talented ones, the ones that are either academically or artistically or any kind of talent, the ones that are literally taught to measure success by how far they get away from those communities, what can we do to keep them there? And so, we ask, what are you looking for in the community that you desire? We ask community members in my hometown in the South Bronx, what’s that? In that classic kind of low status community and people of all income levels, they were looking for kind of things that made them feel good about being in their own community, whether it was good places like cafes, restaurants, great parks, places to play and work. Those are the kind of things that they wanted. And so why aren’t we building those things here in our own community? And that is when we realize that that’s the kind of real estate development we wanted to do. And we labeled it a talent retention, real estate development strategy.

Eve: [00:07:47] You talk about real estate development impacting low status neighborhoods in one of two ways, and the first is displacement gentrification, which we touched on, and the second is poverty maintenance. So, tell me about poverty maintenance.

Majora: [00:08:03] Yeah. So, poverty level economic maintenance as we’ve called it, or PLM, which really sounds gross, but because it kind of is, where again, billions pumped into these communities from government and philanthropic sources, but the economic level of the people in that community does not change. So, subsidies that go to low income, quote unquote, affordable housing developers, which is only for very low income housing and even homeless shelters, lots of money in terms of the health clinics and the multinational pharmaceutical industry that are government subsidized and actually do support lifestyle illnesses according to, whether they are diabetes, obesity. But things related to the quality of life that that happen in communities, low status communities and seeing those type of things, even community centers that are that I think are often just there’s like resources that are poured in specifically to support the bright ones in the community. And so those are the ones that measure success by how far they get away. And those type of things literally pull people outside of our own community to seek greener pastures. But again, the people that remain are usually the ones that remain in poverty. And that is the way that those communities are treated.

Eve: [00:09:31] Right.

Majora: [00:09:32] Whether it’s by the philanthropic and our government interest, it’s like we play to that in terms of like creating more low-income housing, more health clinics and opportunities to support people that are chronically suffering from lifestyle health conditions. And through that, we are not seeing the kind of transition from people who are actually creating more healthy opportunities for them, for themselves in those communities. And we’re seeing more and more money pumped into those things. And thus, we’re seeing the concentration of more and more poverty and all the things associated with it, whether it’s low educational attainment, higher rates of folks involved in the justice system, poor health outcomes, and more reasons for more people to want to leave those communities. So again, poverty level, economic maintenance, somebody is doing well, but not the people that are in those communities.

Eve: [00:10:27] So, you know, I think actually in the built environment, what you’re talking about is perpetuated by the affordable building types that we see, because you can really drive through a neighborhood and you can see you can point out affordable housing very clearly. And that, I think, is a very visible manifestation of that Poverty Maintenance or PLM, as you called it.

Majora: [00:10:49] Yeah. The architecture of poverty is, you know, you know it when you see it.

Eve: [00:10:55] Yes.

Majora: [00:10:55] It’s kind of like pornography. It’s like you know it when you see it.

Eve: [00:10:59] Yes, it’s true.

Majora: [00:11:01] Yeah, it may look different in a rural or urban or a suburban context, but everybody knows.

Eve: [00:11:07] That’s right. So, you know, you’ve already touched on this, but you write about how third spaces are key to talent retention in low status community economics. And so what is a third space?

Majora: [00:11:21] So, third spaces are these urban planning parlance for places that are neither work nor home. Right? And it’s just this third space where community can happen. And to us, community is not just a place, it’s an activity. Right? It is literally an action verb, but you do need places to do it. And so, if you don’t and so if you’re in general, if you’re in a low status community, the kind of places, the kind of third spaces that are in those communities are generally not the kind of places where people feel like they’re vibrant and they’re working to support the kind of goals and aspirations for their lives. It’s like, I think about some of the places in my neighborhood in the South Bronx where the largest places were communal real estate was either the waiting rooms at health clinics or pharmacies and also community centers where most people do not go and hang out or don’t want to be seen in. Right. Or for long anyway. And it’s just like, you know, in terms of cafes or cool places to hang out, very few. And so that’s when we realize we’re creating this this architecture or the architecture that’s here is literally creating this sort of like talent repulsion experience for people who are feeling like, I know I’ve got something good to offer because I don’t – Low status communities have never had a shortage of amazing people coming from them. Right. But I do have a problem with them staying. I mean, even America loves the Cinderella story of like somebody being born into some kind of hardscrabble community and they have to pull themselves up and then they go out and make something great of themselves. They’re coming from these communities. Why can’t we make something of ourselves here?

Eve: [00:13:13] Yeah.

Majora: [00:13:14] And that’s both the challenge, but also the joy of realizing that it’s not just this thing that this this miracle that needs to happen, it’s something that we can do because we already have the tools and the keys to our own recovery within our own communities.

Eve: [00:13:33] So, you know, I visited you in the Bronx and there’s not a lot of third places there. But you created a coffee shop, and didn’t you tell me that it was voted, what was it voted, number one?

Majora: [00:13:44] We were voted the best cafe in New York in 2021.

Eve: [00:13:49] Can you believe that? That’s awesome.

Majora: [00:13:51] Yes, I can. Yes, I absolutely can. And it’s because we but it was by time out in New York and it was because we were, and yes, we do have great specialty coffee. I’m sorry. Do you hear that.

Eve: [00:14:09] The dog? Yes.

Majora: [00:14:09] Yes, I’m sorry.

Eve: [00:14:10] Everyone will have to deal with the dog on this podcast.

Majora: [00:14:13] I know.

Eve: [00:14:14] Is my life, right?

Majora: [00:14:15] He’s like really upset because my husband just walked out and he’s like, “don’t go” anyway. I’ll Start over. But yes, we were voted best cafe in New York City in 2021 by “Time Out New York magazine.” And I like to think it wasn’t just because we’ve got great coffee and tea and an awesome local craft beer and wine and sangria, but and really awesome community vibes. But it really was the vibes part because what we did was really instil within our community that our cafe was simply a vessel in which to hold all the great hopes and dreams and aspirations of our community and then gave it a platform to show it. We absolutely took advantage of having to do much of our work outdoors because of COVID, and suddenly we became this, this wasn’t just encased within the four walls of our cafe, but we took it outside and people were doing things like open mics and even credit repair workshops and art exhibits, and basically it was just such a liberating way for people to see how beautiful their community was. And because it was literally like spilling out onto the sidewalk for everybody to see. And I feel like that is the reason why we won that award. You know, not, you know, again, we do have really good stuff there, but it was mostly that we created this this environment that allowed people to see how beautiful their community was and participate in it.

Eve: [00:15:54] So you tested this thesis out. Do you know of any people who stayed in the community because of this third place? So, what’s next? How do you – that’s a big block you’re on, by the way. And yes, that’s going to take quite a lot of work to transform into a community asset, shall we say.

Majora: [00:16:12] Yes. Well, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere. I mean, some environmentalists would say, what’s the best time to plant a tree? You know, 20 years ago. What’s the next best time? Today. And so that’s where you start. And you have to start somewhere. And by creating examples and showing them what it does do is give people that are open to it an opportunity to say, well, if they could do something, why can’t I?

Eve: [00:16:37] Yes.

Majora: [00:16:37] And that is exactly what we’ve seen, like our little cafe has, actually, because it’s just allows people to connect together. We’ve seen everything from people being able to buy homes from one another. We’ve seen people start new businesses and locate them within the community. We’ve seen people develop their own capacity to see themselves as a different person, but the same one, but being able to do it within their own community. I’ve been incredibly excited by seeing folks realize that looking around and going, Wait, there’s people like me here. Why do I feel like I need to to escape when I could build something right here? So, yes. And what’s also super exciting is that I’ve also seen folks from around the country intuitively do this. And writing this book was simply a way to help other folks see that this may be mostly my story and how I got to the point where it’s like reclaiming my community was something that I want to see everybody to do because I feel like we have to do something to sort of repair the social fabric of our country. And we should start in the places that are most impacted by some of the specious problems that whether it’s systemic racism and classism have actually created in this country, but really created low status communities that are not helping us as a as a country evolve into the greatness that it could be.

Eve: [00:18:11] So I know you’re also working on a second third space, which I’ve had the good fortune to visit.

Majora: [00:18:16] Yes.

Eve: [00:18:17] A beautiful old railway building. Tell us about that. What’s going on there? It’s not far away. It’s like less than half a block away from your coffee shop, right?

Majora: [00:18:28] My world is really small at this point. I mean, the coffee shop is literally a three-minute walk away. The other project that you’re referring to is even a minute walk away from where I live.

Eve: [00:18:41] Yes, yeah, yeah.

Majora: [00:18:43] It’s a historic rail station designed by Cass Gilbert, America’s first starchitect, as they call them, Cass Gilbert, who designed also the Woolworth Building and the US Supreme Court building. It was quite the dandy in his day in the early part of the 20th century, and so we had this beautiful aesthetic. And so, this old rail station is about 4000 square feet, and so we’re transforming it into an event hall. So, my husband James and I actually literally did the initial demolition ourselves. Fortunately, we got other people to help us to finish it up, and it’s super exciting because the idea that we can take a space and by its nature as an event hall, it’s literally being filled by other people to do all sorts of things. And so we’re hoping to see it used as an amazing music venue, which actually sort of hearkens back to literally right across the street from where the rail station is, used to be a place where vaudeville excuse me, vaudeville, you know, Latin music as well is like it was like a musical and theater place where people would come right across the we want to bring some of that back as well. You know, and it’s also really interesting for me because that rail station is the reason why my family decided to settle there. My father was from down south, a big old black man who was a Pullman porter, and he bought our house for cash because back in the 1940s, there weren’t a whole lot of banks giving money to black men for mortgages. So, he actually won 15,000 in a horse race in California, put it in a satchel, literally cash, put it in a satchel, brought it back to New York. You found an Italian family that would sell to him, and he bought it.

Eve: [00:20:38] Which, in itself, was unusual, right?

Majora: [00:20:41] Literally, yeah. And he didn’t feel comfortable staying in the house for a couple of years, so he just rented it to them because it was the neighborhood was all white, but he bought that house because there was talk that they were going to reactivate that particular rail station and that was actually his line. So he was just like, Oh. Two blocks from my house. That’s what I want!

Eve: [00:21:01] He understood the power of transit, right?

Majora: [00:21:04] Exactly. Unfortunately, they never reopened it for transit, but he did have the conductor to slow down the train so he could hop off and climb out to his house.

Eve: [00:21:12] Oh, that’s great.

Majora: [00:21:13] Yeah, so that was pretty funny.

Eve: [00:21:16] Right? So, you know, I have to go back to the words that you’re quote that’s on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. And you said, “Nobody should have to move out of the neighborhood to live in a better one.” And it really sounds like you just got tired of waiting around for someone to fix yours.

Majora: [00:21:34] Yes. In a nutshell, it was just like, you know, I mean, it was a little deeper than that, actually, because it really did come from this place where, you know, because I was one of those kids who measured success by how far she got away. I was told from very early on that I was a smart kid and that I was going to grow up and be somebody. And of course, I believed that I was just like I was really smart. I was reading when I was three. I was like, I’m getting out of here, especially when my brother was killed. And, you know, and I did watch, you know, because of financial disinvestment. All, so many of the buildings in my neighborhood were burned down. And I watched a lot of it. And there was a there was some trauma associated, I think, with like seeing and feeling these things, experiencing these things. So, yeah, I was like, education’s going to be my ticket out. And it was until I ended up back here only because I was broke and I needed a cheap place to stay when I went to graduate school. And that’s the only reason why I came back. And it did. It felt like such a horrifying defeat to be this kid with like I had a bunch of letters behind my name. I went to good schools, and then all of a sudden, I’m like back home and mommy and daddy’s house in the South Bronx. Hard and, but what was amazing was discovering that that education and distance actually was a blessing because like that’s when I saw when the city and state were building this huge waste facility on our waterfront, and we already handled an enormous amount of it. I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, it’s because we just this is history repeating itself. We are a poor community of color, politically vulnerable, and this is what happens. And all I could think was I mean, first was shame when I understood it and I was like, oh, like I just wanted to run away. And I did. And you know what? No one blamed me. But now I see it like, literally, with like eyes completely wide open, and I wanted to do something about it. And yeah, like, I wanted nice things in my own doggone community. Absolutely. For me and for everybody else.

Eve: [00:23:51] Yes. Yeah. I don’t know what to say next because I know how hard it’s been for you. It’s an amazing it’s an amazing journey that you’ve taken. I just want to say that. So, you also talked to me about the Jumpstart program in Philly, which I actually I interviewed Ken Weinstein, who launched the program in our second podcast season. If anyone wants to listen, it’s an amazing program. Tell me about it and why you why you love it so much.

Majora: [00:24:23] Wow. Yes. So, I was actually getting an award in Philadelphia, and it was the Edward Bacon Award who was actually it is Kevin Bacon’s father. And but he was like this amazing urban planner in Philly, and everybody loved him. Yeah.

Eve: [00:24:42] Yeah, yeah.

Majora: [00:24:43] And so I was getting this award and like part of it, and it’s like a really big thing over there. And so, part of it was that I got to hang out with some, some notable people in Philly, and I was like, okay, cool. And I sat in on this roundtable with graduates from this program called Jumpstart Germantown. And they were all, almost all black folks younger than me. And they were all talking about, like, the deals that they were doing. And I was just like. What? This many in a major American city talking about real estate deals and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. And I was amazed. And so, but Jumpstart Germantown literally was a way to get folks from communities just like mine to be more involved in residential real estate development in Philadelphia, in Germantown. And so, the way that it was done, Ken Weinstein was literally, was getting inundated with, because he’s really a nice affable guy, and folks were just like, how do you do this? And he’s just like, oh, I can tell you. And he’d give them that information, and then he realized this is too much. And then he got his friends like help, created a training that gave people just enough information so that they could actually get out on their own. And then the best thing that he did was create a fund. So, where he gave the first couple of loans to those folks to do their first few deals.

Eve: [00:26:13] I remember him saying he realized that no matter what he taught them, if they couldn’t get the financing, it was useless.

Majora: [00:26:18] Exactly.

Eve: [00:26:19] And they couldn’t get the financing.

Majora: [00:26:20] No, no, no.

Eve: [00:26:22] What a guy. Yeah.

Majora: [00:26:24] So I was just like. Wait. What? And I totally flipped out and actually decided, I mean, I literally went to Philly for the next four weeks to just to take that class. And I’d love at some point to be able to start a project like that here in New York. And I actually encourage everybody to consider it in other places, too. But again, what we saw there was an incredible example. It wasn’t like a non-profit kind of like, “Oh, we’re here to help the poor people.” It was more like, “Nah, we’re going to help you compete” in this capitalist system that we’re in so that you can actually reclaim your own doggone community. And I was blown away.

Eve: [00:27:05] Pretty fabulous. And he’s franchised it, right? So, there have been a number of different neighborhoods and cities that are now have jumpstart programs.

Majora: [00:27:13] Yes, quite a few at this point.

Eve: [00:27:15] If I weren’t so busy, I would start one.

Majora: [00:27:17] I know.

Eve: [00:27:18] Pretty it’s pretty fabulous. But requires a little bit of resources. I want to ask one other big question and that is what does meaningful community engagement look like, especially when it comes to redevelopment of an area? What should it look like?

Majora: [00:27:37] Yeah. For us, meaningful community engagement means that it’s actually driven, at least in part, by listening to what the community’s hopes and dreams and aspirations actually are. And by no means assuming that you know what they are before you start. Because if you do, basically what we’ll do is what we see the non-profit industrial complex and even our government telling us what needs to happen in those communities. And that’s the same kind of status quo development that actually concentrates poverty. And what we did, we literally created surveys and did focus groups, and we even had an advisory board built from very informal leaders within our community that allow folks to give them reasons to think about. Yeah, what does it look like? What does a great community look like for me? And they were really specific about what those things were, and we knew it because they would talk about the things that they would leave the community to experience. And when we realized like honestly, where somebody’s hardest is, where they spend their money, and if you weren’t spending it in your community, what were you spending it on? And could we actually create the same kind of experience in our community that make people that just to give people a second look. And it has been hard because there’s such low expectations applied to low status communities and after a while people even internalize them. And that’s why it’s difficult to do that, which is why I’m so glad that I’ve actually gotten there’s company now. I mean, being the first one in to do something as crazy as like a really high-end specialty coffee shop in a place that hasn’t had anything like that in decades. It was exhausting. But at the same time.

Eve: [00:29:35] You got a lot of pushback early on from the neighbors, right?

Majora: [00:29:38] I got some pushback. I didn’t get a lot. What I got was they were very loud, but I think it was basically rooted in fear.

Eve: [00:29:46] I agree. I was going to say the same thing. I think change is very difficult for most people. And.

Majora: [00:29:52] Yeah.

Eve: [00:29:53] And they’re worried about being left out, you know, and, and they usually are left out, let’s be honest about it. So, you know, that was really why I asked that question. Like, how do we make people feel like part of something?

Majora: [00:30:08] Right, and their people are left out because the folks that are doing most of the development never had any intention of letting them in in the first place. I mean, if you think about the kind of development that happens in poverty level economic maintenance, I mean, there isn’t a place for most of the people in our community to even participate at all. I mean, there’s this thing, like, oh, we do community engagement and outreach, which means you get people together for some kind of little visioning thing and some ridiculous highly paid consultant gets like post-its up on a wall. And then you say, you did it. What did you do? I mean, it’s just like this is ridiculous. The kind of development that happens in low status communities was never intended to include people from those communities, except as recipients of like whatever they’re putting out, which we know concentrates poverty, and everything associated with it.

Eve: [00:31:04] Or gentrified it. Right. But either way, they’re left out. Yeah.

Majora: [00:31:09] Yeah, totally. And so, they know that. And that’s why I’ve been advocating as much as I can and also literally putting myself in that role of developer because I’m like, I’m already trying to create more opportunities for folks like we’ve done revenue shares for the cafe. We, we set it up so that people from our community can actively use it in a way that meets their goals and dreams and aspirations. I do that and I’m not a non-profit of not like I do that on my own. We’re absolutely looking to develop more opportunities for crowdfunding investment projects, for people within our community, for the other projects that we’re doing, because we want them to feel like they actually have an investment in their own community. And the only way to do that –

Eve: [00:32:01] I’ll help you bring them to Small Change. That’d be so cool, I’ll be waiting.

Majora: [00:32:02] I’m pretty, I would love that. I would love that. So, it is different when people do the development from our own communities because we are sensitive to what we haven’t had and what we do need and what our dreams are, because we bothered to ask and I’ve also experienced it, you know, I was that little girl who was just like, there’s nothing in this neighborhood. And it makes me feel like I’ve got a stain attached to me because of the way people think about my community. And, and I don’t want that on anybody. Like, I also don’t want them to feel like they’ve got to leave in order to believe that that they’re of any value.

Eve: [00:32:48] Awesome. So final question. If you were to change one thing about real estate development in the US to make better cities for everyone, what would that be? Maybe that’s unfair, you can say two or three.

Majora: [00:33:04] Yes, I’m going to say a few things. I’m sure. So, oh, gosh. If I could change the way real estate development happens in order to support more people doing it. I mean, I’m not exactly sure how to do this, but I know that the cost of doing it just literally is physically doing it is just so high. And I just wish that the cost of construction could go down. Don’t ask me how to do that.

Eve: [00:33:30] Oh God, yeah, everyone I think wishes that.

Majora: [00:33:33] But it’s just insane. And then sort of like the barriers to entry I wish would be a lot more equitable. I mean, I remember my very first deal where and it was just to do a small rehab know our mortgage broker literally made me write a letter because she looked at me, looked at my community and literally said, you know, I have a story in the book. She was like. Why did you want another house? Or another property? You already have one. And I was like, do?

Eve: [00:34:09] Because this is called wealth creation. This is called Building My Future, right?

Majora: [00:34:14] Yes. And but she, to her, it was just like, why would a black woman want to do that? Especially from a neighborhood like that. And so, she made me write a letter to the underwriters explaining to them that I was a fine, upstanding individual. That does nice things for her community. And I was like, I know she doesn’t ask any white men about this, but you know what? I wrote the letter. So, this was me. And I had great credit, property in mind, a willing seller, a free development loan, already pre-approved. I mean, it was just like and that’s a small example. You know, I hear about them all the time, you know, access to capital, how hard it can be.

Eve: [00:34:58] Yeah. So do I, I think the access to capital is completely inequitable.

Majora: [00:35:02] Yeah, exactly. And those are the main two things. But also, I think the other one is making sure that people in low status communities see themselves as rightful developers of their own community. Because that is one of the hardest things where I think even some of the challengers that I get is more like, who do you think you are? And these are people from communities like mine within the social justice industrial complex who are just like, “You shouldn’t do that.” And it’s just like, why should that? It does like because again, such low expectations of folks in our communities like here, I’m being challenged because I’m actually saying, no, I can do better than what’s actually happening here. Yeah. And I get it coming and going sometimes. But there are more people who see the value of it and who are actually thinking about how they can do it themselves.

Eve: [00:35:59] Well, thank you, Marjora. I love you to death. And I think this is fantastic. And I can’t wait to visit again.

Majora: [00:36:08] I know.

Eve: [00:36:09] Hang out in that coffee shop.

Majora: [00:36:11] Yes. Yes. Oh, my gosh. It’s so super exciting. And wait till you see the rail station within the next few weeks. We’re getting it ready for a pretty big event. Ted X the Bronx is

Eve: [00:36:25] Fabulous!

Majora: [00:36:26] Doing their event there. Yeah,

Eve: [00:36:27] That’s really fabulous.

Majora: [00:36:29] You know, we’re phasing it in.

Eve: [00:36:31] I have to come back again soon.

Majora: [00:36:33] You’re going to love it.

Eve: [00:36:34] Cool. Okay. Bye.

Majora: [00:36:35] Thank you. All right. Take care. Bye bye.

Eve: [00:36:44] That was Majora Carter. I’m repeating myself, but I’m still in awe. Majora is uncompromising about her mission. She lives and works in Hunts Point in the South Bronx, one of America’s lowest status communities, just two blocks from the house she grew up in. When it became clear that no coffee shop operator wanted to operate out of her space in the neighborhood. She created her own business to achieve a goal. Now that is putting your money where your mouth is.

Eve: [00:37:27] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of Majora Carter

Foreclosure free.

February 9, 2022

John Green is a developer and investor who sees opportunity in a real estate market that innovates. With well over a decade of experience in real estate and finance, he co-founded Blackstar Stability (“BSS”) modeled on two proven programs that were created and operated by John and his co-founders. These programs began at the state-level and were scaled to the national level using both public and private funding. BSS is built using the lessons learned from running the program amid the 2007 Global Financial Crisis and is designed from the ground up using a double-bottom line business model that creates compelling risk-adjusted returns for investors while generating significant benefits for low-income and middle-income families and communities.

Their business model started after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) back in 2007. They started with a state-funded program designed to keep families in their homes following the housing market downturn and recession. The program helped families with substantial negative equity and focused on loan modifications to re-adjust the principal balance and monthly payment on their loans. Their state-funded program was a great success. They successfully helped hundreds of families stay in their homes despite initially being underwater. So they went national by leveraging private capital, still targeting low-income, moderate income, and minority communities that were slow to reach full recovery following the Great Recession.

A co-founding principal of Blackstar Real Estate Partners, John Green directs firm-wide strategic planning, and leads the investment management efforts. John has over 18 years of real estate and finance experience, and has managed approximately $5 billion in commercial, multifamily residential and mixed-use properties in greater Washington, D.C.; New York City; Baltimore; San Francisco; and other major metropolitan areas within the United States. For the decade prior to founding Blackstar, he served as Managing Director for MacFarlane Partners, a San Francisco based real estate private equity firm. In that role, John led all investment and asset management activities in the East Coast markets, which included acquisitions, dispositions, and financing of property investments. He also oversaw the development process of projects undertaken by the firm and its joint-venture partners. Overall, he was responsible for managing a portfolio consisting of over 2.75 million sf of commercial space, 7,500 apartment units, 400,000 sf of retail, 1,000 hotel keys, and over 10 million sf of potential development. Prior to joining MacFarlane Partners, John worked in the real estate development group of The Community Builders; and as an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs & Co. He also managed the business development efforts at Viacom Inc.

John earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and MPA from Harvard Kennedy School. He also holds a BS degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Read the podcast transcript here

Eve Picker: [00:00:09] Hi there. Thanks for joining me on Rethink Real Estate. For Good. I’m Eve Picker and I’m on a mission to make real estate work for everyone. I love real estate. Real estate makes places good or bad, rich or poor, beautiful or not. In this show, I’m interviewing the disruptors, those creative thinkers and doers that are shrugging off the status quo, in order to build better for everyone. If you haven’t already, check out all of my podcasts at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, or you can find them at your favorite podcast station. You’ll find lots worth listening to, I’m sure.

Eve: [00:01:06] John Green is working on a very big idea with well over a decade of experience in real estate and finance, John has co-founded Black Star Stability, a program that uses a double bottom line business model to create compelling risk adjusted returns for investors while generating significant benefits for low income and middle-income families and communities. The program’s roots go back to the 2007 recession, when John ran a program which helped families with substantial negative equity and focused on loan modifications to readjust the principal balance and monthly payment on their loans. It was a great success, so they went national by leveraging private capital, still targeting low income, moderate income and minority communities that were slow to reach full recovery following the Great Recession. And minority communities that were slow to reach full recovery. This is social impact with a capital I.

Eve: [00:02:18] If you’d like to join me in my quest to rethink real estate, there are two simple things you can do. Share this podcast and go to RethinkRealEstateForGood.co, where you can subscribe to be the first to hear about my podcasts, blog posts and other goodies.

Eve: [00:02:48] Hi, John, thanks so much for joining me today, I’m really looking forward to talking with you.

John Green: [00:02:53] Oh, excited to talk. Thanks so much for having me.

Eve: [00:02:5] Good. So, you’ve had a pretty solid career in real estate, but now you’re focusing on one very specific sector of the market and that is assisting families facing foreclosure, if I understand it correctly. Why did you launch Blackstar Stability, which is the name of your company?

John: [00:03:13] We’ve launched Blackstar Stability, really to focus on what we consider high impact single family strategies, and in particular, we try to expand equitable ownership of affordable single-family properties. And we do that in some ways that we think are creative and unique. In particular we focus on strategies that attack predatory lending practices. And so, it’s just a surprisingly large and robust and consistent market that seems to present lots of opportunities to demonstrate that there are better ways of interacting with families and people. That you can create fair opportunities to finance properties that are not extractive, and so we’re happy to demonstrate market driven, scalable solutions toward that end.

Eve: [00:04:03] What pointed you in that direction? What made it important to you?

John: [00:04:09] Yeah. So, it’s issues of housing affordability and community building are ones that have always been of interest. You know, they’re issues that I’ve focused a lot of my time and attention on during grad school and the team that I put together, I would say, are folks who have had that as a common thread throughout their careers in various capacities. My Chief Investment Officer, Erik Sten, was a former housing commissioner for the city of Portland for more than 12 years and led an organization that focused on issues of homelessness, housing affordability, issues like that. My head of investments, Toks Ladejobi, and I worked together for more than a decade at a company called Macfarlane Partners. It’s a unique real estate private equity company based in the Bay Area that does primarily commercial real estate investment, but just has a uniquely strong appetite for public private partnerships. And this more complicated, thorny projects that result in robust community

Eve: [00:05:13] And something good, right?

John: [00:05:15] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And so, I focus on finding ways to use the various levers in the market to create outcomes that are pro-social. And so with Blackstar, we wanted to leverage a lot of those things that we have been doing with various sorts of large scale real estate and find ways to tap into this market. And housing affordability is at crisis levels in this country, and we see the single-family market, in particular the sort of small balance segment of the single-family market, as as a unique component that can serve as a big part of the solution. And so, for us, starting Blackstar Stability in this particular strategy, we thought a very creative way of being able to tackle those issues.

Eve: [00:05:59] So you started the company a while back. It sounds like it’s morphed into something slightly different. So you started it with government funds. Is that correct?

John: [00:06:09] No. Blackstar Stability has been all privately financed, but we structure our offerings as funds, at least to this point we have, and so the seed funding for the platform that we have right now is actually from catalytic funds, from an organization called Living Cities, which is a consortium of large financial institutions and foundations that are oriented around issues that help to address the racial equity gap. And so, you know, that became the sort of capital that helped launch this most recent platform that we’re executing.

Eve: [00:06:45] Interesting. And so how does it work, the program that you’ve put in place?

John: [00:06:50] What we do, in essence, is by large pools of single-family properties that are encumbered by generally predatory forms of seller financing. In particular, a pretty unique product called Contracts for Deed, which is a huge industry here in the United States, more than $200 billion industry and extraordinarily problematic. It’s existed for more than 100 years. We buy properties that are encumbered by those CFDs, we call them for short or similar sorts of problematic seller financing and generally at pretty significant discounts. And then we work with the families that occupy those homes to convert that form of seller financing into a more traditional mortgage. But we are resetting the terms of the debt pretty significantly. We’re reducing interest rates. We are, to the extent of properties underwater, reducing the principal balance, and we are extinguishing a lot of penalties and arrearages that generally have been applied in some, often predatory manner.

Eve: [00:07:53] And they grow really fast, with high interest rates. I know that’s awful.

John: [00:07:57] High interest rates and also, you know, just the sort of standards of practice in this space really mirror the sort of behavior that you would associate with payday lenders. So that sort. You know, it’s where the penalties are really an intentional part of the revenue stream in this space. And so, we reset the terms of the debt as we’re originating those mortgages, we’re generally taking performing pools of those CFDs and converting them into performing pools of mortgages. We hold in season them for a period of time to demonstrate payment performance and then sell them into the secondary market and recycle the capital. So, the focus is on completing a transaction that transfers title to these families. Because these CFDs are structured in a way where the sellers remain, the owners of the properties until the very last payments made. But the buyers take on not only possession, but all of the responsibilities of ownership, right? So, maintenance, insurance, taxes, those sorts of things and meet their obligations, so

Eve: [00:08:59] Do they realize what they’ve taken on, like how often are the owners simply unaware of what that contract meant?

John: [00:09:07] Yeah, generally not. Ta-Nehisi Coates had a great quote about it. He characterized these contracts as ones that combine all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of rentals and provides the benefits of neither. Generally, these families do not realize what they have. They think that they own the property and so they think and behave the way the typical owner would. So, they’re investing sweat equity and real capital into improving these places. And in a lot of cases, they’re accepting deferred maintenance obligations. So, they realize that they need to improve a property and they don’t realize that not only do they not own it, but that if they are delinquent, even once, that they could lose everything. And lose it in a process that’s much more aggressive than the sort of foreclosure process that you would associate the mortgage, right? It’s a process called forfeiture. And what happens is it’s essentially a breach of contract. And just think a very aggressive form of eviction.

Eve: [00:10:09] Wow. And so, you must have seen that accelerate during the pandemic when people lost their jobs, right?

John: [00:10:16] You know, we saw a really big acceleration of it actually after the global financial crisis. And I think we had a really big fear that it would accelerate a lot during the pandemic. We don’t have a lot of evidence at the moment that specifically underscores whether there’s been a big shift in the velocity of it after the pandemic. Part of what makes it hard to make those judgments is, it’s a market that’s intentionally shrouded in darkness. It’s relatively opaque because it’s largely unregulated at the federal level. It’s subject mostly to a patchwork of state level regs, and the states are inconsistent about requiring things as fundamental as recording those contracts. And even where they are required by law, it tends to be very poorly enforced. There was a study that was done a few years ago in Texas, which is one of the states that actually does require by-law to record these contracts. What that research effort found was that more than two thirds of the contracts that the research team was able to identify were not recorded, despite the fact that they’re required by law in Texas. So, nationally, the stats tend to be very inconsistent, and the best source of information for them historically had been the American Housing Survey, which is part of the U.S. Census. But all the questions related to these CFDs were pulled in two thousand nine.

Eve: [00:11:36] Why? Why were they pulled?

John: [00:11:39] Not entirely clear to me. It’s a fragmented market where the information tends to be hard to, especially nationally.

Eve: [00:11:48] Purposefully hard. So, you know, you talked about, what was it $100 billion market? More?

John: [00:11:53] No, we think it’s more than $200 billion industry. It’s more than five percent of all single family that’s not occupied by renters in the U.S.

Eve: [00:12:03] That’s what I was wondering what, how many homes are we talking about?

John: [00:12:07] Yeah, we’ve seen stats that suggest more than four million families. We’ve seen stats that say over nine, but more of them seem to be, you know, in the sort of the estimates and the plus minus four million family range.

Eve: [00:12:20] Wow. Ok, so how many homeowners have you impacted so far?

John: [00:12:26] We have a portfolio that’s relatively modest at this point. It’s about 200 properties that we are working with those families, and we’ve converted more than a quarter of those into mortgages. But we’re in the process of raising a fund to actively execute on this strategy. So, the portfolio that we have was basically the proof of concept and we are raising a fund to be able to do more of that activity.

Eve: [00:12:52] Okay. And then, like, you know, where are these homes? Is there any type of demographic or is it just anywhere, anyone who signed a contract like this?

John: [00:13:04] Yeah, you tend to see the most in places where the consumer regulations are weakest at the state level and where there are high concentrations of properties that are low value. Think less than $100,000. And so, geographically, we see that overweighted in the Midwest and the South, especially the Southeast and you know, that’s reflected in the portfolio that we have now. You know, again, our portfolio now is roughly 200 properties, you know? Over time, we’ll serve thousands. But in our pipeline right now we have more than a thousand units in pipeline, and it generally reflects that as well.

Eve: [00:13:37] And what about racially? Is it?

John: [00:13:41] Yeah, it is an issue that disproportionately affects black and brown communities. The Hispanic and Black populations are consistently overrepresented with respect to this, and it stands to reason. This is a relic of the redlining era and there are some very direct lines. At one point, this was the predominant form of housing finance for black people in America. And so there are some studies that really, really focus on that. You know, essentially, if you think about what gives oxygen to a product like this to exist, it is primarily the lack of access to traditional mortgages, right? And so in that vacuum, products like this have the capacity to thrive. So, when families were frozen out of the traditional mortgage markets, their means of housing finance, you know, reverts to something like this. Duke University did a study just a couple of years ago. It was focused on the city of Chicago during the housing boom from the 50s, during the 50s and 60s and what they found was fascinating. It was that somewhere between 75 and 95 percent of all transactions involving black buyers were financed with a CFD.

Eve: [00:14:51] Oh!

John: [00:14:53] Or something similar. And that somewhere between three and four billion dollars was expropriated from their hands into profiteers. And the practice is just absolutely malignant. You know, it’s in the same communities that mortgages wouldn’t be offered to families. Loans were extended to investors who then, in turn, went and sold these properties on, on a contract. But the contract buyers’ rights are basically subordinate to everyone else’s. And so if the owner of the property, despite being paid by the contract buyer, didn’t pay the mortgage that they had taken out on the property or the loan in whatever form if they didn’t pay taxes. All of those rights were senior and superior to the rights of the contract buyer. So even if you never missed a payment as a buyer, you could be kicked out of your home because of the actions of the seller. The seller doesn’t actually have to even provide a clean title to the family until the very last payment’s made and less than one in five of these transactions ever resulted in the families taking ownership.

Eve: [00:16:08] It’s actually completely heartbreaking. By the time you talk to these families, what shape are they in? They must be like battle scarred.

John: [00:16:18] Depends on whether something’s gone wrong, and it depends on how much they realize they’ve been had, right? When we look at these, there’s kind of four categories of problems we tend to observe, you know. So, first is that sort of illusion of ownership that I mentioned, right? That, you know, most don’t realize until too late that they don’t already own the home. The second is that these tend to happen at above market prices. Right? So, in our portfolio, the properties we purchased averaged roughly 10 percent interest rates. In our pipeline, the rates get as high as 18 to 20 percent. So predatory usurious sorts of range of rates, but they also tend to happen at prices that are well in excess of the property value, right? So, we have a pretty clear line of sight into kind of when these transactions were struck. So, in the portfolio that we purchased, a lot of those were REO that were purchased, you know, after the housing crisis. A lot of Fannie and Freddie product in particular. And so, what you would see was that a lot of those properties were purchased at rock bottom prices. They were marked up three to five X. And with no improvements being made to them, they were sold one to two quarters later at these huge markups. That would be a fantastic profit for anyone if it had any bearing on the actual value of the property, but they didn’t.

John: [00:17:42] So, you know, the way that it works from a buyer’s perspective feels pretty rational, right? It’s, they’re not focused on the comparison to mortgage interest rates or to the comparable property values. They’re not looking at comps, they’re not looking at mortgages, they’re looking at the monthly cost. And they’re comparing it to how much rent otherwise costs in their neighborhood. They make what feels like a rational decision. I’ll pay about what I’m paying for rent, or maybe a little more for the prospect of becoming a homeowner. Right? And I think I can afford that. And so I’ll sign up for this deal that doesn’t require a huge down payment and is pretty painless, and they don’t realize that you don’t have to pay much more than your rent to have a deal that’s not a that’s not a fair deal. It’s a very, very much a one-sided deal. So, just quickly, the other issues, you know, the obligations travel without the benefits, right? So, most of these families have no rights to sell or transfer their property. And it’s a mixed bag as to whether they can even deduct the interest from their taxes the way you would a traditional mortgage.

John: [00:18:56] Meanwhile, as I said, they’re responsible for maintenance, insurance, taxes, all that sort of thing. And then lastly, they’re just very few consumer protections. It’s just essentially unregulated at the federal level. The states are inconsistent, so there are very few property disclosures, no truth in lending standards. None of the typical process you associate with home buying. So, no appraisals, no home inspections. So, this very vulnerable population that generally is less experienced and less sophisticated about the home purchase process is exposed to just a very much one-sided transaction. And that sort of power imbalance and the asymmetric information all inures to the benefit of these sellers. And many of these sellers kind of characterize themselves as, you know, white knights who are intending to make the home buying process easy. But, you know, they set up a process that condemns these families to failure. It just, they’re built to fail. And in many cases to create a cycle of having the families responsible for fixing up any problems with the home, with paying exorbitantly while they’re there, very quickly covering the seller’s basis and then to the extent that they turn out, they just quickly replace them with another family.

Eve: [00:20:16] Yeah, I mean, it’s clearly a very good deal for them. It’s pretty shocking that it’s poorly regulated. So, with around four million homes like this in the country, what dent in that do you hope to make?

John: [00:20:28] Yeah, I think, you know, more than anything, this fund will be the first and what we hope will be a series of funds that have increasing impact and scale, you know, toward the issue. But I think one of the most important things we can do is demonstrate that there’s a better way to finance these and to solve for this, and that you don’t have to charge 18 and 20 percent, that you don’t have to charge 10 percent to finance these properties. And I think we have just a general thesis that the risk is being mispriced by the market for these families and for these borrowers. And so that if the more that we can unveil the, you know, the reality, provide the data that supports that, provide the sort of track record that supports that there’s an approach that’s scalable and market driven, we hope that we can invite the sort of activity that helps to collectively solve for that issue, but also that helps to support policy, that provides some common sense measures to better protect the consumers involved.

Eve: [00:21:24] That’s going to be the heavy lift, probably, right? The policy?

John: [00:21:29] Yeah, no, absolutely. I think there are a lot of folks who are spying the issue and have thoughts about it. You know, there’s a sensitivity to the issue that folks are mindful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, right? Non-profits and other institutions use these CFDs. I would say, you know, there are a lot of benign actors that use this to create pathways to ownership, using the same flexibility and very loose regulations to be able to provide a well-intentioned opportunity to families. But much more often, that flexibility is abused at much larger scale. And so there’s a desire to be able to find ways to preserve the benefits of it to have that capacity, while finding ways to eliminate the worst of what a bad faith actor might do.

Eve: [00:22:23] So you have investors, it sounds like institutional investors in this thing that you’re building. What are your investors looking for in terms of return? What can you give them?

John: [00:22:33] Our investors, I would say not necessarily institutional. Institutional through a different lens, right? So the sort of strategies that we executed previously with the company that I was with before the, you know, a very traditional institutional manager where pension funds, insurance companies, reinsurers, those sorts of things. That’s not the investor profile that we have today. We have, I would say, a mission-oriented coalition of investors that’s a combination of family offices, some foundations, some large financial institutions, but generally through their social impact arms or community development arms that are more than, as opposed to being concessionary in terms of their return expectations, they have more impact oriented-goals in tandem with their return expectations. And they have a bit more patience with their capital. In terms of the returns, you know, generally speaking, you’re thinking low double digit net returns.

Eve: [00:23:37] Which is pretty nice for anyone doing anything, let alone someone doing something that’s impactful and important.

John: [00:23:45] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I think, you know, our argument is that these are compelling risk-adjusted returns by any objective measure and that the impact-oriented nature of what we do is just, it’s inherent in the action. You know, I think there are a lot of impact strategies that have the capacity to generate impact. But you know, it’s, you don’t find out, you don’t figure out until much later whether or not you’ve accomplished that. I think, you know, for us, you know, kind of the very nature of what we do, if we’re successful at generating return, it will be because we’re accomplishing what we’ve said. And so, you know, I think our investors find that, you know, important as well. It’s, the strategy is unique, if only in that, whereas most affordable strategies today tend to focus on multifamily and rental, ours are focused on single family and ownership. And each of those are, you know, tricky to solve for various reasons.

Eve: [00:24:42] So what’s the really long-term goal?

John: [00:24:46] I think the long-term goal from our perspective is to build a better mousetrap for small-balance mortgage lending. And I think, you know, what we have is a unique way of driving activity using the activity with the CFDs to better understand the dynamics of that market, to work with an audience that uniquely demands it and to be able to provide solutions that hopefully not only solve the issue for them but help pre-empt the issue from occurring at all. You know, if you look nationally, less than 30 percent of all properties that are $70,000 or less are financed with the traditional mortgage. And the reason for that is simple. It’s the fixed costs of originating a mortgage are essentially the same for $50,000 mortgage as a $500,000 mortgage. And so [???] tends not to produce many of the former. And so that leaves a huge gap that provides the air space for a product like CFDs to continue to thrive. So, I think one of the most effective ways for us to be able to preserve naturally occurring affordable housing in this country, and for us to be able to promote the sort of reinvestment in that sort of product, is to give families the capacity to be able to finance those transactions in a fair and equitable manner. And so, you know, for us to be able to become an increasingly important player in helping to facilitate that, you know, really is the the long game for Blackstar.

Eve: [00:26:21] Okay. So, I’m going to shift gears a bit. I just want to talk to you generally as a Black developer, what challenges you’ve faced over the years?

John: [00:26:32] Sure. The real estate industry is…

Eve: [00:26:36] Homogenous?

John: [00:26:39] To say the least. It is incredible that it should be the, by far the largest asset class globally, how homogenous it is. You know, the EEOC in the U.S. had done some studies over time looking at the executive ranks of real estate leadership. You know, what’s incredible is from 2010 to 2015, the stats got worse. It went from bad to worse. It was senior executives and leadership in real estate companies went from about three percent in 2010 to about two percent in 2015. It’s just dramatically underrepresented. And so, you don’t see people of color populating the ranks of leadership. You don’t see it among the people who are allocating capital, and you certainly see a huge underrepresentation of people who are accessing that capital. And so, it has some of the ripple effects that we were talking about before. You don’t see the same level of investment into a lot of these communities. You don’t see the sort of thoughtful, continuous rebuilding and reinvestment that’s required to allow participation. And that has very direct implications into the lack of opportunity to generate multiple multigenerational wealth, to be able to close the wealth gap that has persisted and grown to extraordinary levels in this country. And you see that across, you know, essentially every role within the industry. You see the deficit of contractors of of practical trades, you see the deficit in the bonding capacity of those folks. So, this sort of asymmetry of both the roles that allow for the execution and the building of wealth, as well as the ones that control them, to be problematic at every level. You see that in a place like Washington, D.C., where I reside, that is a majority minority city. yet in that same study by the EEOC, the respondents who were characterized, self-reporting race, who were the leadership of real estate companies were ninety-six percent white. You certainly see a huge disparity in terms of gender as well.

Eve: [00:29:08] Oh, I should. I should note here that I was the only female developer in Pittsburgh for quite a few years, which is completely, I mean, I’m white, so, it’s just the whole thing is completely shocking.

John: [00:29:22] It is incredible but unsurprising. And that’s what’s unfortunate. And so, I’m encouraged that there seems to be more acknowledgement of that today and that there does seem to be at least a desire to do something about it.

Eve: [00:29:36] So the developers we work with on Small Change who are, you know, minorities have said to me that the hardest thing for them is access to capital. And out of all of those things that you listed, access to capital is still the most difficult. And I think that’s because of what they look like. And you know, I had a really interesting conversation with someone I interviewed who is actually helping support to minority developers purchase a building. And he said they couldn’t get a bank to talk to them until he submitted the prospectus to the bank without their photographs. So, while redlining is not supposed to be happening, you know, how do we even begin to address this?

John: [00:30:23] Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I think, you know, part of it goes to holding accountable the allocation of capital and ensuring that the composition of the organizations who are allocating capital represent more diverse interests, are more diverse themselves and are held to task and actually measured by virtue, amongst other performance indicators, of how they’re how they’re performing on that. Ultimately, if you look at the organizations that we consider institutional investment, they represent very diverse coalitions of people, right? If you look at pension funds and the composition of the workforce that those pensions represent, they’re diverse. There’s not this gender imbalance. There’s not this, the same sort of racial disparity. And in many cases, it’s, you know, may cut the other way, right? But you don’t see those interests being reflected in the communities necessarily, being invested in, and certainly not to the composition of the sort of managers and people with the lived experience that may better reflect. So, I think first holding those huge institutions that tend to be the primary source of capital for the largest of real estate execution, and then those firms that they are allocating capital to that are making individual deal- and manager-level investments, right, that those allocators themselves be more diverse and representative in their various ways, and that opportunities that they invest in, you know, reflect some level of diversity.

Eve: [00:31:59] I’m listening to you, but I’m completely overwhelmed at the prospect of actually getting there. It’s a very, very big problem. Do you think over the last three years that capital has begun to flow more to BIPOC communities, or to people who don’t look like a white male? There’s no other way to say it.

John: [00:32:24] Yeah, you know, what’s interesting is I think there are some trends that encourage me, although I’m careful not to overstate them, right? I think there has been this sort of increasing trend toward a democratization of capital in various forms, right? You know, the ascent of family offices really means that the sort of latitude of individual or smaller non-institutional investors that still control very significant capital to be able to invest in opportunities and managers with standards that sometimes allow for more flexible considerations around emerging managers, or to be able to directly influence the diversity of the candidates that they’re considering or the sorts of strategies that they’re supporting. That trend has been happening for organizations like yours, Eve, that help to provide for crowdfunding and for communities and smaller individuals that otherwise wouldn’t be able to access opportunities to be able to do it. And I think that, increasingly, the focus even amongst large institutions toward ESG-related goals, and that those institutions themselves are being held accountable, and that by extension, they are holding their managers more accountable, you know, certainly help to improve those trends. I think this sort of social reckoning that was initiated following the death of George Floyd and this sort of more public acknowledgement that the disparities exist, because before there really wasn’t even that, and this sort of acceptance that something needs to be done about it, encourages me that there will be at least more focus on it. I think that time will tell, but a lot of the rhetoric hasn’t necessarily met the reality to this point. And I think that, you know, we have to find ways to establish enduring solutions, you know, ones that create a real pipeline of talent, a real pipeline that will be more continuous in terms of that sort of access to capital.

John: [00:34:30] That it’s not just a feature of a small moment that’s quickly extinguished, but something that you know, provides more tectonic and secular change that, you know, changes the way that we think and act. There’s so much tumult and change that’s wrought by everything going on in the world right now. That the pandemic has helped to accelerate things like remote working trends and people’s willingness to move away for however long from, you know, from city centers and from having to live as close to work as they did and changing the sorts of places that people are choosing to spend their time, that some of these things may affect the way that opportunities will unfold over the next decade. And you know what’s wrought by that or lots of opportunities to think about how we’re going to affect the built environment and the way that we, the ways that we live, work and play together. And so, I think there’ll be tremendous opportunity for the folks who are able to be a part of figuring out and executing on that. At the same time, technology is having an increasing role in the way that real estate strategies are executed. And so that just provides avenues for a different sort of cast of characters to influence and to benefit economically. So, I’m encouraged that at the same time, some of these considerations around how access to capital and who the leadership is comprised by are happening, that some of these, you know, big, important. Market moving changes or otherwise happening because there are a lot of opportunities that’ll abound.

Eve: [00:36:07] It really does feel a little bit like the rise of the rest, doesn’t it?

John: [00:36:11] In some ways, absolutely so.

Eve: [00:36:15] So, yeah. So, also one last thing. You are one of a cohort in a renowned accelerated program called the Turner Housing Lab. And I’m just wondering what you’re hoping to get out of the program and how it’s going.

John: [00:36:32] The program is actually nearing its end now, unfortunately for our cohort, but it has been a fantastic experience. Michelle Boyd and the team there at the Turner Center, as well as all of the members of our cohort, have just been fantastic to interact with. I think, you know, for us, it’s really helped to provide access to a lot of perspective. There are just so many innovative housing strategies that are always being conceived that to have this, you know, to be a part and have access to the sort of hub of that sort of activity, the conversations that are constantly going on, has been phenomenal. You know, the nature of what we do is simple at the highest level, but in the practical execution of it, just incredibly complex for a number of reasons. So, to have access to resources like that to help you know, detangle and consider some of the thornier areas has been fantastic. And then, even though the members of our cohort all have very different strategies, the challenges that we face are not as distinct, right? So, to find the sort of common threads and to be able to benefit from one another’s perspective and to challenge your own thinking about the way that you execute your own business or that you consider your market or to recognize some of your own biases, you know, and how they may influence the way you attack opportunity, has just been tremendous. And so, you know, the advisors that have been involved, the, you know, the resources at the center and the peer learnings from our cohort members have all been fantastic.

Eve: [00:38:15] It’s amazing to me how an absolute crisis around housing has just created this abundance of creativity because there are, as you said, so many solutions emerging, physical and programmatic and lending and in every corner of our society, so that gives me hope that together we can crack the problem. I’m not sure, but maybe, right?

John: [00:38:44] Absolutely. If we can’t crack it, we’ll put a big dent in it, for sure.

Eve: [00:38:48] Okay, so one final question what’s next for you?

John: [00:38:53] Prospects for Blackstar, so, in 2022, we are very much focused on growth. We have been fortunate in having pretty significant success and momentum so far in our fundraise. And so, we’re, in just a few weeks, we’ll be closing our second round, which will take us about halfway toward our $100 million fundraising goal. So, we’re hoping to close out our fund in 2022. We have a big pipeline, as I mentioned, more than a thousand units, so we’ll be busy closing and executing and operating. We’re expanding our lending relationships and so, lots of wood to chop. So, you know, what’s next for Blackstar is a big focus on growing the platform, on executing on the strategy and on finding ways to better serve the families that we support.

Eve: [00:39:43] I can’t wait to see how it goes.

John: [00:39:46] Thank you so much. We definitely appreciate it.

Eve: [00:39:59] And that’s how John planned to change the equation for so many people losing control of their homes and their lives.

Eve: [00:40:16] You can find out more about this episode or others you might have missed on the show notes page at our website RethinkRealEstateForGood.co. There’s lots to listen to there. A special thanks to David Allardice for his excellent editing of this podcast and original music, and thanks to you for spending your time with me today. We’ll talk again soon, but for now, this is Eve Picker signing off to go make some change.

Image courtesy of John Green,

On loving a challenge.

February 7, 2022

Nick Perold is a curious guy. On his podcast show, Curiosity in Progress, he asks these questions — What if we did things differently? What would it look like? How might it change life for the better? Nick believes that progress is fueled by these questions, and so are his guests.

In this episode Nick interviews Eve Picker, a pretty curious person herself. She’s the founder of Small Change, the first equity crowdfunding platform for impact investing in real estate. And she hosts her own podcast show, Rethink Real Estate (for good). Eve loves cities and challenges. If you want to learn more, you’re going to have to listen in!

Image courtesy of Curiosity In Progress

Bisnow reports.

December 8, 2021

Bisnow is one of the the world’s leading B2B platforms serving the commercial real estate industry. From events and news to branded content and recruiting solutions. Bisnow reaches millions of readers and hosts hundreds of real estate events each year in over 50 local markets.

Eve Picker is interviewed by Bisnow host, Miriam Hall in Episode 5 of Bisnow Reports, a podcast examining every facet of the international commercial real estate industry – from the murky future of retail and office to real estate’s reckoning with diversity to the effects of climate change on the built world, and so much more.

Learn about the emerging investment crowdfunding industry, democratizing real estate investment, and Small Change, the real estate crowdfunding platform Eve founded, and the shift towards a more equitable real estate industry.

Image courtesy of Bisnow Reports

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