Invest York Road

Invest York Road (IYR) is an organization based in the York Road corridor in north Baltimore City that is designed to return power to the community, drive transformative redevelopment, and build community wealth.

The IYR service area includes 24 neighborhoods on both sides of York Road from 39th Street to the Baltimore County line. Stretching through the heart of north Baltimore City, the corridor consists of many residential areas, some local shops, churches, and schools. Residents of the York Road corridor have a powerful vision for the future of their community, but that vision has been obstructed by absentee commercial property owners who have little to no connection to the neighborhoods in which they own property. Many of these absentee landlords have allowed their properties to blight or rented them to problem businesses that attract criminal activity or otherwise diminish local quality of life.

These neighborhoods struggle with commercial vacancies, a lack of diverse community-focused retail, and property owners unresponsive to community needs, as well as a persistent racial wealth and income gap. Communities east of York Road are 90% Black, and decades of economic exclusion, such as redlining, have resulted in associated challenges. Core neighborhoods have a median household income of $47,150, with 19.3% of households below the poverty line. The IYR service area is one of the city's lowest-ranked communities in capital investment, and it has only 7.6 businesses per 1,000 residents, significantly lower than the citywide average of 21.5. The Equity Analysis of Baltimore City's Capital Improvement Plan reveals a decrease in per capita investments in the area over recent years, further highlighting the pressing need for our intervention.

Commercial vacancies are increasing year-over-year, and commercial uses that local residents feel were already over-represented in the corridor (e.g., liquor stores and drug treatment facilities) are increasing as a percent of total commercial tenants.

The IYR service area faces a number of challenges, and IYR was created to address two of the most significant: A stagnant commercial real estate development market, and the persistent exclusion of historically marginalized communities (i.e., people of color) from accessible wealth-building opportunities.

Invest York Road (IYR) holds two co-equal goals at the core of its work: Drive positive redevelopment in the community, and provide wealth-building opportunities for historically marginalized members of our service area. The innovative model IYR has developed to pursue these goals combines two primary activities:

1. The purchase and renovation of commercial real estate properties

2. The transfer of those properties into community ownership using investment campaigns through which local residents can make small-dollar investments to purchase shares in (and receive dividends from) a community commercial real estate portfolio

IYR focuses on increasing community investment while addressing inequality and closing the racial wealth gap. Our innovative community-ownership strategy empowers traditionally marginalized communities by increasing access to wealth-building opportunities. We aim to lead a healthy and inclusive redevelopment that will revitalize and stabilize these neighborhoods, create new job opportunities, increase local business activity, foster community safety, and create a more prosperous and economically vibrant area for all.

We believe community investment and community ownership are the proper tools to create this change, because they create:

1. Community Empowerment

   1. For decades, residents of the York Road area have been unable to fulfill their vision for a thriving commercial corridor, because of the persistence of absentee commercial landlords who allow their properties to decay, sit vacant, or be rented to businesses that reduce quality of life. By bringing commercial properties into community ownership, IYR gives power back to community members to shape the place where they live.

   2. Also in support of this community empowerment effort is IYR’s free financial and investment education program. This program equips local residents to take control of their finances and make informed decisions about participating in investment opportunities like IYR.

2. Local Economic Benefit

   1. By creating a pathway for community members to invest in their place, IYR is keeping investment money in the community that would otherwise flow outwards into Wall Street investment vehicles to non-local entities. Keeping investment dollars local means more local businesses, more local jobs, and a healthier local economy that benefits from multiplier effects and reduced economic leakage.

   2. Channeling these investment dollars locally makes IYR a potentially transformative driver of economic growth and local redevelopment.

3. Access to Wealth-Building Opportunities

   1. Real estate is one of the most dependable and commonly used pathways for building wealth in the United States. Unfortunately, many Americans - particularly people of color - have been denied the opportunity to access this opportunity. Predatory zoning practices, red-lining, discriminatory behavior across the housing and real estate industries, and other general economic factors have made wealth-building through home ownership extremely difficult for people of color.

   2. Building wealth through commercial real estate investment has been similarly difficult in many communities, with an additional barrier being the large amounts of capital generally required to participate. IYR uses community investment and community ownership to eliminate that barrier, making participation in commercial real estate investing available to almost anyone. Fractional investing and ownership allow almost anyone in the community to participate and gain access to dividend income and ownership of an asset with the potential to appreciate in value.

   3. Furthermore, by intentionally designing its investments and setting the terms appropriately (e.g., by guaranteeing against loss or offering different returns to different investors), IYR has the potential to use its offerings to address historic wealth gaps and other economic inequities.

IYR has been developed against a backdrop of a nationwide movement to develop community-owned commercial real estate models, and we have learned a lot from our peer organizations around the country, such as the East Portland Community Investment Trust in Oregon, The Kensington Corridor Trust in Philadelphia, and others. We are deeply grateful for the knowledge and experience they have shared with us throughout the development of IYR. As we innovate the next generation of this model in Baltimore, we are committed to paying it back and paying it forward, by documenting our process, successes, and failures, and making the documents and resources we generate as a part of this journey available for replication and adaptation in other communities.

This moment is especially exciting and important for IYR and our service area. We are in the process of closing on our first property and will begin the construction process to renovate it in the next few months.

The building we are buying was the previous home of an important neighborhood anchor business, a cherished Black-owned restaurant that was a crucial community hub. This restaurant was one of the few businesses in our service area with a clientele that included a full range of socio-economic, racial, age, and geographic diversity. It was a vital community institution that had to close during the pandemic shutdowns and was never able to reopen, because a failed renovation by the building owner left the space unusable.

Over the next 3-6 months, the IYR team has two major undertakings on its plate: Put everything in place for a full renovation of the property, and conduct a community investment campaign to provide an accessible wealth-building opportunity to the community. This grant would provide us with much-needed support to elevate our capacity for these two huge undertakings.

Invest York Road (IYR) began in 2019 out of community frustration with absentee commercial property owners in the corridor who hinder the prospect of transformational change by allowing their properties to blight or renting them to businesses that diminish the quality of life of area residents. With an interest in shaping the corridor's future, increasing economic mobility, and addressing long-standing racial divides, neighbors came together and created IYR to transform York Road into a more vibrant, inclusive corridor with amenities and services that boost quality of life for all.

After extensive consultation with expert professionals and research of similar projects elsewhere in the country, York Road community members developed a concept for implementing a community-owned commercial real estate program tailored specifically to the needs of this Baltimore community. We then undertook an extended design and refinement process in collaboration with the broader community to determine the details of the organizational structure, ensure local control, make plans for managing governance and power relationships, and set the terms of our community investment offering.

The result of this process is an innovative community-led and community-governed approach to participatory investment in commercial real estate that aggregates small-dollar crowdfunds alongside other capital. IYR is purchasing properties, bringing them into community ownership, rehabbing them as needed, and leasing them to businesses that align with community goals, all while holding the properties in perpetuity and working to pay dividends to community investors out of net operating revenue. Our approach demonstrates the potential for activating a new source of capital for community development while providing a more equitable and sustainable model that can be adopted in other communities.

In addition to building a new organization and a customized community ownership model, IYR also offers a free community financial and investment education program. To equip community members for long-term savings and a community investment opportunity that will serve as a living laboratory for how wealth can be maximized and passed through to succeeding generations, we provide attendees access to fundamental skills and knowledge in personal finance. We designed the content and materials specifically to serve lower-income and lower-wealth members of our community, whom IYR is intended to serve. Since launching this educational program in 2021, over 525 people have participated.

In the same spirit of preparation, IYR leadership has educated itself in commercial real estate development. IYR was one of three organizations nationwide selected to participate in an intensive commercial real estate training program called Buy Back the Block, which was run by the Brookings Institution. The program provided our team with a solid foundation in the theory and practice of commercial real estate development.

All of our organizational development and training work has paid off, as we have identified our first property for acquisition, raised the funds to purchase it, and are preparing to renovate it and reactivate it with a beloved local Black-owned restaurant (that has been closed since the pandemic shutdowns of 2020-2021) as the tenant. We have engaged a commercial real estate broker to support our work and hired an experienced development consultant to serve as our full-spectrum owner's representative for the project.

A grant of $20,000 would be put to use immediately in support of both our community investment campaign and the management of the redevelopment project over the next 3-6 months. Success on these fronts will foster sustainable, positive change in the community and set the stage for further collaborative projects that prioritize equity and community-centered development.

Our team is in place, and this additional capital would be used immediately to get this project to the finish line.