BTMFBA + programs to lease the properties to local businesses | Philadelphia
This isn't exactly a new point. The first BTMFBA entry referenced the Paris SEMAEST program, which is a community development corporation charged with owning and renting properties and leasing them to local businesses, and less than prevailing rates, as well as supporting new business development.
The series presents entries exploring this, expanding on it, or examples that offer new wrinkles.
-- "BTMFBA: the best way to ward off artist or retail displacement is to buy the building," 2016
-- "From BTMFBA to "community right to buy"," 2024
-- "BTMFBA: maintaining arts spaces in the face of rising real estate values | Seattle, New York City," 2024
-- "New form of BTMFBA in San Francisco," 2023
-- "A wrinkle on BTMFBA: let the city/county own the cultural facility, while you operate it (San Francisco and the Fillmore Heritage Center)," 2021
-- "BTMFBA: Baltimore and the Area 405 Studio," 2021
-- "Revisiting stories: cultural planning and the need for arts-based community development corporations as real estate operators," 2018
-- "BMFBTA revisited: nonprofits and facilities planning and acquisition," 2016
-- "BTMFBA: artists and Los Angeles," 2017
-- "BTMFBA Chronicles: Seattle coffee shop raises money to buy its building," 2018
-- "Dateline Los Angeles: BTMFBA & Transformational Projects Action Planning & arts-related community development corporation as an implementation mechanism to own property," 2018
Many districts were built when suburban shopping malls didn't exist, and local department stores were often anchors in local districts--long before most legacy regionally-based department store groups were merged into and branded as Macy's ("Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia is finally improving").
The article addresses various tensions in the community wrt the improvement of Baltimore Avenue, which is in the University City District BID interest area.
It's a surprise that they've had problems moving forward, given the various successful UCD initiatives in other areas.
Dollar Stroll event, 2022.
And it's not like UCD isn't putting energy into the district, which is also served by trolley transit.
Tensions include:
- discount stores ("The Baltimore Avenue Dollar Stroll is back, turning the West Philly corridor into a rolling block party with $1 deals," BillyPenn) versus more upscale retail
- is more upscale retail gentrification?
- new businesses versus old
- carry outs versus sit down restaurant
- supporting local districts versus chains
- rents are too high--some landlords are asking $55/s.f. in a less successful area.
By contrast, in South Philly the transformation of East Passyunk Avenue was underwritten by the Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corporation, which started purchasing buildings up and down the avenue in the early 2000s, fixed them up, and rented them out at competitive rates. To this day, many of East Passyunk’s hottest properties are still owned by PARC, including the buildings that house restaurants Supérette, Mish Mish, Ember & Ash, and River Twice.
... But there are other models. The Kensington Corridor Trust acquires properties in Kensington and stewards them according to a neighborhood trust model, keeping rents low and giving residents a say in what kinds of businesses open. According to their criteria: “Businesses should have a purpose that does not further denigrate or diminish the neighborhood (such as private developers, alcohol and tobacco sales or smoke shops, check casher businesses, pawn shops, cash for gold shops, smoke/hookah shops, and other extractive businesses that are predatory to the community).”
It's a good contrast of why Baltimore Avenue is "down" despite its advantages of proximity to the University of Pennsylvania and other assets, while the East Passyunk and Kensington Corridors are on an upward trajectory ("Five Years In, Philly’s Kensington Corridor Trust Is Building Momentum," NextCity)--although the Kensington neighborhood has some of the worst drug problems in the US.
Besides investing in real estate, the Passyunk group uses lease revenues on public space improvement and maintenance, such as capturing an empty "triangle" and making it into a pocket park, with a "Singing Fountain." The organization has spent a lot of time "curating the retail and restaurant mix" ("Out Passyunk Avenue leader previews continued revitalization," Philadelphia Gay News).
Both the PARC and KCT have community-led boards, although PARC is more corporate. The KCT has an interesting history. It was formed out of resident response to the plans by a neighborhood focused real estate firm, Shift Capital. People wanted more involvement by the local community and the KCT was created out of that desire.
At the top of Kensington Corridor Trust’s structure is the actual neighborhood trust, also known legally as a perpetual purpose trust. Under the model, the trust is governed by a trust stewardship committee, which in this case consists of nine members elected from residents and local business owners within the trust’s catchment area. The trust entity holds the deeds to the properties in the portfolio, and the trust stewardship committee makes major strategic decisions like setting rents, determining what types of businesses to allow as tenants, or defining the catchment area — ensuring major decisions align with the trust’s overall purpose and goals. Last year the stewardship committee extended the catchment area by one more block along Kensington Avenue.
Many community revitalization organizations have boards primarily made up of members from the "grassroots." One example is the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Boston, written up in the book Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood.
Another is the Gateway Community Development Corporation, focused on the revitalization of the Rhode Island Avenue Corridor as it emanates from Washington, DC into Price George's County. Years ago membership for community members was $5 and it included voting rights and the right to run for the board. Now it's $25 but it includes other benefits.
The Neighborhood Service Districts in SF are a mix of property owners, business owners, and residents. The Green Benefits District there has property owners, residents, and environmental advocates as members. Etc.
Conclusion. Baltimore Avenue's revitalization sputters because it doesn't have a focused community development group committed to buying, rehabilitating, and owning real estate, which it uses to curate and improve the commercial district. Kensington and East Passyunk Avenue are nearby examples.
But Philadelphia has similar examples, such as in the revitalization of the Manayunk district ("Manayunk Canal and the Schuylkill River are connected again after 85 years," Philadelphia Inquirer), East Falls ("East Falls revival may be stirring," 2008, "Town By Town: A lot is happening in East Falls,"2013, PI), Ridge Avenue in Roxborough, etc.
I learned about East Falls at a conference in 2003, where they had just experienced the opening of a restaurant in a former check cashing outlet the year before, and they were giddy, especially in that it had patio dining.
Labels: commercial district revitalization, gentrification, real estate development, urban design/placemaking, urban revitalization
posted by Richard Layman @ 3:30 AM&Permanent Link
7 Comments:
This is a suburban Philadelphia town.
https://www.inquirer.com/business/ambler-restaurants-stores-entertainment-holiday-events-20251019.html
Ambler’s small businesses want to make the borough a destination
“Chestnut Hill, Doylestown, New Hope, and Phoenixville have become towns that you simply go to without a commitment. Unless you live in Ambler, it takes a commitment to drive into town,” DeCastro said. With Ridge Hall, “I wanted to create a destination that would entice people to stay for the day and return sooner rather than later.”
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And Phoenixville
https://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2023/11/commercial-district-activation-issues.html
To Stave Off Gentrification, Kensington Becomes Its Own Landlord
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2026/02/06/kensington-corridor-trust/
It’s all possible because those people — the residents of Kensington’s 19134 zip code, her customers — are Del Valle’s landlord. The new owner of the Sherry’s property is the Kensington Corridor Trust, a first-of-its-kind experiment in collective ownership that launched in 2019 with a mission to preserve intergenerational affordability in a neighborhood staring down displacement and gentrification.
The trust buys up real estate along a small segment of Kensington Avenue — so far, it owns 31 assets worth roughly $10 million, according to executive director Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour — then puts it in the hands of residents, who greenlight incoming businesses. The properties are placed into a perpetual purpose trust, meaning that they’ll be permanently owned by the neighborhood itself, outside of the speculative market. No matter what else happens along the avenue, the trust’s commercial and residential tenants will pay below-market rent and get the same type of support Del Valle received when she took over Sherry’s.
The model is rooted in the premise that “within capitalism, those who amass land amass wealth, and those who amass wealth amass power,” Abizadeh-Barbour says. With that in mind, the trust is a study in returning power to a community and putting faith in its own members to harness that power for good. That sounds awfully idealistic, sure, but the block is — so far, anyway — living proof that this model might just work as a blueprint for self-preservation and growth.
The idea for the trust started not here in Philly but in Rhode Island, with a neighborhood on the west side of Providence called Olneyville — another textile hub whose economy collapsed after World War II, leaving behind dilapidated and deteriorating buildings. In the early 2000s, however, that neighborhood enjoyed a rebound, led by neighbors, nonprofits, and a community development corporation that replaced vacant lots with affordable housing, turned a toxic dump site into a beloved park, and rejuvenated the local elementary school.
As a result of that community-driven renaissance, the historically Latino community saw an influx of white residents and the onset of gentrification. Rents spiked and inequality grew more than 10 percent, according to the Gini index, which measures the distribution of wealth within a community. Low-income residents were pushed into precarity. The neighborhood was transformed, yes, but it wasn’t protected.
For Joseph Margulies, a professor of the practice of government at Cornell University who first began studying Olneyville in 2017 because of its approach to police reform, it was an all-too-familiar story: Residents refuse to accept less than they deserve and fix up their neighborhood, “and then it becomes irresistible to capital,” he says. “And then capital sweeps in and threatens to wash it away.”
In the spring of 2019, Margulies offered an alternative vision in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: the neighborhood trust. By ensuring local ownership and control of assets and the decommodification of property, his model — a blend of community development corporation and community land trust — could both transform and protect a community, he argued. It could help residents restore their neighborhoods and remain in place to benefit from their efforts. It could, the theory goes, help places like Kensington avoid Olneyville’s fate: so many families pushed out just as soon as the sun started shining on them again.
To concentrate its influence, KCT has focused on a four-block stretch of Kensington Avenue, beginning north of Allegheny Avenue. On one October morning, the corridor is convivial. John Zerbe, an artist who runs Vizion Gallery in one of KCT’s 10 commercial properties, is painting a mural with his boombox on high. Asters bloom in a KCT community garden full of native pollinators that replaced derelict buildings and an encampment.
That feeling of renewal is “a precious thing,” Margulies says. It’s also a reflection of the core belief that animated the creation of the neighborhood trust.
“The neighbors aren’t the problem. They’re the solution,” Margulies says. “What they need is a stable price structure and control of the space so they can make the changes they know need to be done.”
To that end, the trust is planning to give 19134 residents the opportunity to profit financially from the success of their own neighborhood, using a model first tested in Atlanta by the Guild, a cooperative focused on community self-determination. There, residents can invest as little as $10 a month in a trust that buys properties and returns surplus rental income to investors. In Kensington, the trust will add community investments to the capital it uses to purchase more properties and expand its presence on the avenue. Abizadeh-Barbour expects investors to receive dividends between four and seven percent.
https://www.theguild.community/
https://medium.com/commonfuture/building-the-guild-dda83891b287
Definitely. In Portland, there’s a strip mall that has a Community Investment Trust, and we initially partnered with them to build a lot of our model off of theirs. But that’s just commercial real estate, and while they have investment rights, they don’t have governance rights or control. For housing, we have the precedent of land trusts and housing cooperatives. So we’re combining those two concepts. And it’s just a huge experiment to see how this idea of community co-creation plays out at each step, from the capital that we’ve raised to the design and architecture of the space. It’s all been a series of experiments that we grow from and try to do better each time.
https://investcit.org/
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-path-to-neighborhood-power/
A Path to Neighborhood Power
Olneyville is a neighborhood on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island. Once home to a thriving textile industry, the economy collapsed after World War II, and in subsequent decades it became one of the most distressed places in the state.
In the 2000s, nonprofits converted a sprawling, toxic dump into a prize-winning park. A community development corporation replaced scores of vacant lots and abandoned buildings with below-market rate housing. School officials remade its local elementary school into a treasured neighborhood anchor. At the same time, these victories that low-income residents and their allies worked so hard to achieve brought the neighborhood to the attention of an entirely new demographic.
The lesson—one repeated time and again across the country—is that America’s current approach to neighborhood well-being can transform places like Olneyville but cannot protect them. This approach distributes meager pools of money from foundations, philanthropies, and anchor institutions like universities and hospitals, as well as very limited public-sector funding, to an eclectic array of chronically underfunded nonprofit organizations that act on behalf of distressed neighborhoods. The entire model is non-confrontational and technocratic, relying heavily on well-intentioned and well-credentialed outsiders to set the priorities, solicit the funding, and manage the work.
But low-income residents in neighborhoods like Olneyville don’t need their lives managed. They need a stream of funding that is adequate and secure, but not controlled by outsiders. They need connections to, and relationships with, people in power. They need a mechanism that decommodifies property so that capital cannot displace longtime residents and businesses. They need a tool that allows people in the neighborhood—rather than an outside organization—to capture increases in the value of land. And they need collective power to help ensure that as capital approaches, public institutions like schools and the police are aligned with the poor rather than the wealthy.
What they need is an innovation that I call a neighborhood trust.
A trust is simply a legal instrument that owns assets for the benefit of some other individual or group. The group could be a family or an organization, but it can also be the residents of a particular place, like a neighborhood. The assets can be anything of value, including land, buildings, cash, businesses, and other things in a neighborhood. These assets are overseen by a group of trustees, who manage and administer the trust pursuant to a set of rules that are established when the trust is created, and can be modified over time to meet the changing needs of the group. The trustees do not own the wealth; the trust owns the wealth for the group’s benefit. But the trustees oversee it according to rules designed to protect, preserve, and increase that wealth. Trustees are chosen or designated when the trust is created, and they can serve indefinitely or for a fixed term.
Many community land trusts (CLTs) have also set their sights too low. As the authors of one study found, the staff and leadership of CLTs often “do not challenge the larger relations, processes, or institutions of society.” Instead they see themselves as making it easier for low- income residents to survive in a neoliberal state that has left them behind. Like nonprofits in Olneyville and elsewhere, many CLTs are service providers rather than neighborhood activists. As laudable as that may be, it is not enough. As the retired pastor at St. Teresa’s Church in Olneyville, Father Raymond Tetrault, a legendary advocate for Latinx residents, understood many years ago, neighborhood residents must own and control their fate. Neighborhoods like Olneyville need a model that replenishes social capital, restores a sense of community, and gives its residents ownership and control of local resources, including but not limited to the land. That is the motivation behind the neighborhood trust.
https://unequalcities.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2019/10/DeFilippis_et_al-2019-Antipode.pdf
Communities Need Neighborhood Trusts
The current approach to community revitalization has helped arrest and even reverse the degradation of American neighborhoods. But it cannot solve the problem without local ownership and control of assets and the decommodification of property
https://ssir.org/articles/entry/communities_need_neighborhood_trusts#
Open access: https://www.academia.edu/38373007/Communities_Need_Neighborhood_Trusts_Stanford_Social_Innovation_Review_pdf
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