Program Success 29 November 2021
Buy the Block
The third and quite possibly most important of the example initiatives is a now seven-year-old movement gaining momentum throughout Black America ’ s cities and suburban populations . This movement ’ s participants range from the new rich Black athletes , entertainers , media moguls , and high-tech entrepreneurs to the Black working-class poor . The movement is known simply as “ Buy The Block ,” or BTB .
The initial BTB model was founded by entrepreneur and real estate investor Lynn P . Smith in Cincinnati in 2013 . Smith created an African American - owned real estate crowdfunding portal that allows people to invest in local real estate in amounts as low as a few hundred dollars . The idea is scalable from the single house or lot in an urban neighborhood up to the creation of a new city . A recent high-profile example of BTB is a mixed-use commercial project launched by the late Nipsey Hussle in South Central Los Angeles .
An even more pointed recent example is the initiative of a phenomenally successful (“ mainstream ”) African American developer , Donahue Peebles , based in Miami . Peebles launched a $ 500 million fund from his vast equity capital sources that will provide equity capital to minorityowned real estate developers whose focus is on affordable and workforce housing and related commercial uses . The initiative will leverage thousands of new houses and apartments at combined costs and values exceeding billions of dollars .
Equitable Urbanism
Today it is increasingly becoming common knowledge that the brutal 1921 white race riot that destroyed Greenwood and a dozen other large Black building and wealth-creation undertakings in Tulsa , Oklahoma , served to snuff out Black large-scale building ambitions and culture over nearly the ensuing 50 years .
The Urban Renewal and New Urbanism movements of the 1960s to 2020 have been beset by systemically racist policies that blocked any further city-building Black-led initiatives . The period of 2020 to 2040 offers an opportunity to achieve full redress from the prior 52 years of continuing suppression of Black wealth creation : Equitable Urbanism .
The only path to achieving truly Equitable Urbanism is through a fully mobilized Black America that actually leads or plays meaningful partnering roles in an urban main street Marshall Plan rebuilding effort . Equitable Urbanism can incorporate and build on the old New Urbanism ’ s big core architectural idea .
There is no need to reinvent that wheel . In rebuilding urban space with the required millions of units of affordable housing and 21st-century physical and cyber infrastructure , Equitable Urbanism must be the indispensable framework used to evaluate any attempts to answer the question I posed : Who will be the builders and wealth-creation beneficiaries ?