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News & Media 

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March 7 2023

East Baltimore’s The Cube, created by and for Black mom entrepreneurs, set itself apart with on-site babysitting services. Its founders’ aim: To help women get stuff done – and build generational wealth.

© The Bottom Line 2023

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The emerging solidarity economy: A primer on community ownership of real estate

July 19, 2021

Residents in South Los Angeles’ Crenshaw neighborhood are in the midst of a battle against developers—seeking to block the sale of the 41-acre Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza Mall to institutional investors that would turn the property into luxury housing and threaten to displace the city’s last majority-Black community. It’s a story that could occur in any hot-market city in the nation, except for one key detail: the Crenshaw community is equipped with over $28 million in donations and another $30 million in pledged impact financing to back up their efforts. Black organizers raised this money to purchase and develop the prime commercial real estate into mixed-income housing, worker-owned cooperatives, and new green space for community benefit. They are grounding their efforts in a larger “solidarity economy” movement

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Study Finds Deep Racial Disparities in Way Baltimore Allocates Public Construction Dollars 

December 12, 2017

Over the past five years, the budget allocated an average of $15 million for projects in Baltimore neighborhoods where more than 75 percent of residents are white.

© The Baltimore Sun  2017

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I used to think we needed to leave the hood. Now I think we need to buy it.

April 23, 2019

 

As kids, we were told to make it out of the hood. The hood is basically the worst place in the world, responsible for all of the trauma and pain that comes with being black. We aren’t taught about the systems that create that pain, the racist cops, the black sellouts.....

© D. Watkins 2019

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March 6 2023

Glacomo Bologna

“If you own real estate, it’s something. It’s better than nothing. I don’t care if I own 2%, I can say it’s mine. … I could pass it down to my son,” Thompson said. “Saying that I own something [has] me feeling so good, because I never owned nothing.”

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How a diverse coalition in Portland, Ore. is centering racial equity in a large-scale development project

July 12, 2021

It’s been over a year since calls for anti-racist urban policies echoed in cities around the country. It was in this context—in the middle of a starkly inequitable pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and white supremacist counterprotests in Portland, Ore.—that a broad-based coalition of residents, activists, nonprofit leaders, public officials, and a private developer crafted an unprecedented community benefits agreement (CBA) for a 32-acre redevelopment project north of downtown.

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Black wealth in America Hardly Exists

March 19, 2019

Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in areas that suffered from prolonged disinvestment, it also results in rising rents, home and property values

© NCRC 2019

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Why the racial wealth gap. Institute on Assets and Social Policy and the Workers Lab

April 2019 

Working people in the U.S. have not seen a wage increase that matches the increased cost of housing, food, and transportation since the 1970’s. For Black and Brown working people, the impact of wage stagnation and inequality has proven to be a significant barrier to living lives of opportunity and mobility

© Laura Sullivan 2019

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Cooperatives and Community Land Trusts: Natural Partners?

August 10, 2021

The first ever presidential visit to the South Bronx took America’s chief executive to a multi-unit cooperative, a radical break from the nation’s housing norms that became a symbol of hope during the depths of the urban crisis.

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"The Black Butterfly"

Racial Segregation and Investment Patterns in Baltimore

February 5, 2019

Baltimore is the 30th-largest US city by population and is a study in contrasts. It has a low average income compared with other wealthy Northeast cities, has nine colleges and universities, and is a magnet for people pursuing higher education but has undergone decades of population loss.

© Urban Institute 2019

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African-American 

Co-ops and Collective Courage

May 2018

“Collective Courage,” is about the forgotten history of cooperative economics in African American communities. It begins by expanding the definition of cooperatives to include the development of mutual aid societies.

© LaDonna Sanders-Redmond 2018

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