MAS and Architizer have teamed up once again to bring you Pitching the City 2015, a signature anchoring event of the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY Festival. Offering a platform for fresh urban ideas, five innovative projects, diverse in scope and scale, will be pitched to both an esteemed panel of experts, who will offer advice on how these ideas may move on to become realities, and a live audience, who will vote to determine the winner. In anticipation of the event at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on Friday, May 29, we are pleased to present a closer look at the five finalists.
Pitch: NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative
Names:Interim Steering Committee and Facilitation Team: Mark Scott, BlackLandMatters; Paula Z. Segal, 596 Acres; and Caroline Woolard, NYCTBD and OurGoods
As every New Yorker knows, real estate here comes at a premium. Cooperatives, small businesses, and community-based organizations need pathways to permanent, affordable workspace outside of the boom-and-bust of the real estate market. The NYC REIC is creating a coherent infrastructure to support the space needs of institutions that are key to making New York City unique and livable.
The NYC REIC will finance the transformation of vacant publicly owned buildings for community, commercial, and manufacturing spaces; it will also provide financing to organizations that are currently renting from private owners to purchase their spaces and secure their institutions.
All of the spaces that the NYC REIC finances will be transformed into permanently affordable space. The goal is to invest in a resilient city by creating a symbiotic and expanding network of community-serving enterprises and residents benefiting from living in a city where those enterprises are secure.
Photos courtesy ART21/New York Close Up.
What was the initial inspiration for your project?
Caroline Woolard: Paula and I read about the Northeast Investment Cooperative in Minneapolis and created an online survey to gauge interest in the possibility of bringing this model to NYC.
Mark Scott has been working on a grassroots version of the NYC REIC for some time and can explain this, as well …
Mark Scott: Our grassroots version — Duende Community Enterprise Group (DCEG) — started about four years ago. With the economy the way it was and the banks making bad loans to disadvantaged communities, but making most of their profit here, we felt that there was a structural limit to the extent that black Brooklynites, specifically, could accumulate and transfer wealth through land ownership in the face of bad lending, speculative private development, and gentrification. This was really relevant because of the long history of land ownership that blacks have in Brooklyn, going back to the mid-1800s and then the development of community associations that have come out of these types of mobilizations (i.e. Weeksville).
So, we looked at that history and others and found group-based economic models were the only answer: informal village banking (“grameen”), cooperatives, and accumulating savings and credit associations are all indigenous to many cultures, both locally and internationally, as ways to partner and pool resources to fight systemic barriers to entry.
Paula Z. Segal: I founded 596 Acres to help New Yorkers access public property. Our project has helped 32 neighborhoods organize independently to create open space resources out of abandoned public assets. It’s exciting to apply that experience in this new context to continue building long-term community-serving spaces.
CW: In 2008, a few friends and I got an eight-year lease on an 8,000-square-foot space and rented it out to artists, designers, journalists, and very small businesses. We started it as a way for us to all have cheap rent, but it became an intellectual and emotional home, a community of sorts. Next summer, eight years later, we will have paid our landlord over $960,000 in rent and be priced out of our neighborhood. And we did all the work! We made the space beautiful. We pay the real estate taxes, it’s a triple-net lease.
So I started thinking: there must be another way for us to pool our money to stay put. There are 8,000-square-foot commercial spaces out there for $960,000, and we have a track record of paying that over time. But credit unions and banks won’t lend $960,000 to a group like us. That’s why the investment cooperative is so exciting. Even if it doesn’t invest in groups like mine, I know that we can stabilize a few great groups. That gives me hope for NYC.
Pitching the City brings together people from a range of professions and disciplines — how has your background informed your involvement with this project?
CW: Our backgrounds are in art, design, urban planning, finance, architecture, and grassroots organizing. This early-phase initiative is currently facilitated by myself, Caroline Woolard of OurGoods.org and TradeSchool.coop, Paula Z. Segal, Esq., of 596Acres, Mark Scott of Mark Scott, duendenatural, David Glick, an architect, and Devin McDougall, an attorney. We are working with Ted DeBarbieri of Brooklyn Law Clinic’s Center for Business Entrepreneurship, Risa Shoup of Fourth Arts Block, and Paul Parkhill of Spaceworks and incorporating other experts into our organizing as we grow.
MS: My own background is in information management and it’s been invaluable in helping put structured processes and engagement models to work toward long-term goals of making real, measurable, repeatable, and predictive actions.
What steps have you taken toward realizing your project, and what do you anticipate will be the biggest challenge that you’ll face?
CW: By March 2015, New Yorkers had responded to our survey and pledged to invest over $1.2 million, so we knew we were on to something. We called a public gathering to share the idea and begin collecting member dues. On April 28, over 350 people attended this evening of teaching and learning and over 200 people joined the cooperative. We ran out of forms and couldn’t take more members. The NYC REIC was formed. Mark and several other members of DCEG joined the NYC REIC then.
MS: Some of our biggest challenges will be around scalability. Since such a huge portion of NYC’s communities have been disenfranchised from decisions about land management and stewardship, we will need to partner and provide education about sustainable practices ecologically, socially, and economically to be successful.
PZS: Our first membership meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, May 28, 2015. We are an early-phase, unincorporated association, and we are looking to be incubated by an existing organization with expertise in real estate finance, urban planning, and/or economic justice.
Where do you hope your project will be in 10 years?
CW: Imagine permanently affordable space for businesses, cultural groups, and community-based organizations all over the city. Imagine the Cooper Square Land Trust and Fourth Arts Block in every neighborhood. Watching the success of real estate investment cooperatives around the world, we want NYC to become a model for civic crowdfunding and affordable commercial space.
MS: I imagine this growing into a national network of cooperative local investment funds! A little pie-in-the-sky — but hey, this is about big ideas, right?
Stay tuned for all of the Pitching the City 2015 Finalist Q&As and don’t forget to RSVP to the free event in New York City on Friday, May 29!
