When someone spends a dollar, where does it go? The answer depends entirely on who they spent it with. If you bought something from a business, does that business buy its supplies locally or from somewhere else? When the business owner takes your money home with them, are they going around their corner to their apartment or driving out to the suburbs?
These complex dynamics of how local capital circulates can vary tremendously between wealthier neighborhoods and lower-income areas. The communities where NCRC members work have typically been starved of capital for generations in systematic fashion through the discriminatory mortgage lending practice known as redlining.
Although the causes of this privation are complex, some potential solutions to it are simple. If deprived neighborhoods want to keep their dollars in their communities, they have to find ways to spend their money at places that share that connectedness.
One way a local group in Pierce County, Washington is doing that is through the creation of a Black developers’ collective.
“We support each other by hiring local Black contractors and Black businesses to ensure the Black dollar stays in the community for up to one week,” said Jessie Baines, president of the Pierce County Community Land Trust (PCCLT).
Baines, in collaboration with Hulk Construction LLC, created the Black Developers Group in 2023 with Regas Sager (the Greater Christ Temple Church), Bishop Thomas Davis (Bethel Christian Church), Michael Hopkins (TAC Build LLC) and Kerry Williams (Universal Family Connection). Baines said the goal of the Black Developers Group is to support Black developers, businesses and entrepreneurs in the real estate market across the Greater Puget Sound area.
“We believe by empowering our members to work together and with access to capital we can begin to shift this paradigm,” Baines said, adding that the group has four core programmatic priorities: mentorship, joint ventures, advocacy and building access to capital. Baines stated that the group has several development projects in the works that benefit from the expertise that BDG member entities bring.
Currently, the collective members have over 240 homeownership and rental development projects in the South Puget Sound waiting to be fully funded. The group is working with local community development financial institutions to raise the necessary funding to develop a loan guarantee pool for potential recipients. Through the initiatives of BDG, they hope that collective Black wealth in the area will grow stronger, creating lasting wealth for many generations to come.
Kristi Eaton is a Contributing Writer.
Photo courtesy of the Pierce County Community Land Trust.
