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:

The purchase and renovation of commercial real estate properties
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:

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.
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.
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.