Who Owns What Community Development Builds?
For decades, community development has gotten increasingly sophisticated at moving capital into neighborhoods. We have tax credits, community development financial institutions, bank lending requirements, impact funds, public subsidies and an entire professional infrastructure built to finance projects.
The scale is enormous. Certified CDFIs alone hold hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, and banks reported roughly $138 billion in community development lending in a single year.
But there is a much harder question hiding behind all of that investment:
Who owns what gets built?
More specifically, how much of the appreciating commercial real estate in our neighborhoods is actually owned by the people who live there?
We went looking for the answer. There isn't one.
There is no national registry, reporting standard or reliable dataset measuring resident ownership of neighborhood commercial real estate. That absence matters. The systems we have built can measure lending, tax credits and institutions with extraordinary precision. Ownership—the thing that actually puts appreciating assets on household balance sheets—is largely invisible.
Our new white paper, Who Owns What Community Development Builds?, examines that gap.
It also challenges the increasingly loose use of the phrase “community ownership.”
Community governance is valuable. Community stewardship is valuable. Community benefit is valuable. But if people in the community do not own an economic interest that can increase in value, we should be careful about calling it ownership.
That distinction matters because ownership is how wealth is built.
There are promising examples. Residents have invested directly in shopping centers, commercial properties and mixed-use projects through models such as Chicago TREND, Portland's Community Investment Trust and Market Creek Plaza. But these remain small compared with the financial machinery supporting community development.
The problem is not simply that residents need more opportunities to invest. The bigger constraint is structural.
Community organizations already own an extraordinary amount of real estate: churches, nonprofit buildings, vacant parcels, storefronts and other properties accumulated over decades. Taken individually, many are difficult to finance or manage efficiently. Taken together, they begin to look like a portfolio.
That leads to a different question:
What if communities did not have to raise enough cash
to buy their way to scale? What if they could
pool assets they already own?
Institutional real estate has used versions of this approach for decades. And in New York, the Joint Ownership Entity has demonstrated that nonprofit community organizations can contribute existing properties into a larger shared portfolio, gaining balance-sheet strength, professional asset management and economies of scale.
We are beginning to test whether that idea can go further—using pooled community assets as the foundation for individual wealth-building ownership.
The attached white paper examines what has been tried, what the numbers actually tell us, what is still missing, and what it would take to build an ownership system alongside the community-development financing system we already have.
Because after billions of dollars of investment, who owns what gets built may be the question that matters most.
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