 Good evening, everyone. I'm thrilled to be welcoming Majora Carter this evening to speak with us as a special lecture initiated by the Core 3 Housing Studios and the GSAP Housing Lab, which are collaborating this semester. I want to thank in particular Mario Gooden for suggesting this conversation. As he noted in proposing this talk, the Core 3 Housing Studios have been working on the design of affordable housing in the South Bronx for several semesters now, where Majora has firsthand experience. Yet Majora's work flips the script on the language of objection that is so often used to describe such communities. And instead she focuses on human capital, their talent and intelligence. Hence, this can also be a strategy for an approach to the design of housing and the representation of the communities where we work. Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation and successful implementation of numerous economic developments, technology and green infrastructure projects, policies and job training and placement systems. Carter combines her corporate consulting practice focused on talent retention and applies it to reducing brain drain in American low status communities. She has firsthand experience pioneering sustainable economic development in one of America's most storied low status communities, the South Bronx. Carter creates vision strategies and developments that transform low status communities into thriving mixed use economic developments. Her approach harnesses capital flows resulting from American urbanization among all ages, races and income levels to help increase wealth building opportunities across demographics left out of this historic financial tide change. Her work produces long-term fiscal benefits for government, residents and leading private real estate developments. Carter advises and partners on transformational real estate developments in the South Bronx and around the country. In 2017, she launched the Boogie Down Grind, a hip hop themed specialty coffee shop and craft beer spot and the first commercial third space in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx since the mid 1980s. This venture also provided a rare opportunity for local families to invest. Her ability to shepherd projects through difficult socioeconomic conflict has garnered a very long list of awards and honorary PhDs including 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs, Silicon Alley 100 by Business Insider, Liberty Medal for Lifetime Achievement by Fox News and other honors from the National Building Museum International Interior Design Association Center for American Progress, as well as her TED Talk, which was one of six to launch their site in 2006. Carter has served on the boards of the US Green Building Council series, the Wilderness Society and the Andrew Goodman Foundation. She's quoted in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture in DC. Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one. Carter was born, raised and continues to live in the South Bronx. She's a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, Wesleyan University and New York University. After establishing Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and Green for All in 2007, among other organizations, she opened this private consulting firm which was named best for the world by B Corp in 2014. While at Sustainable South Bronx, Carter had deployed MIT's first ever mobile fab lab to the South Bronx, where it served as an early iteration of the makerspaces found elsewhere today. The project drew residents and visitors together for guided and creative collaborations. In addition, Majora Carter launched startup box, a groundbreaking tech social enterprise that provided entry-level tech jobs in the South Bronx, operating it from 2014 to 2018. Majora Carter has helped connect tech industry pioneers such as Etsy, Gust, Fresh Direct, Google and Cisco to diverse communities at all levels. We are just really thrilled to have her with us tonight and also thrilled to have her in conversation with Mario Gooden. Welcome, Majora Carter. Hello, thank you so much. That was the long version. But I appreciate you all and thanks for having me. So I'm just gonna share my screen. I'm gonna talk about talent retention, which is usually a phrase that one hears with regard to your corporate retention, businesses that are trying to retain employees. First, you attract them and then you retain them. We're tech companies. We're really big, I guess got very well known for ways to keep their talent like Google in particular with their little, with their ping-pong tables and endless snacks and all that kind of stuff. But it's often not really applied in terms of community development, especially not in American low status communities. And by, I wanna be clear about what low status, we use that phrase as instead of low resourced or low income or disadvantaged, we use those status as a way not to define the actual people that are in the community, but the way the community is perceived both inside and outside of it, but they all have markers of what that actually means. So they're the kind of places where there are more environmental burdens, within a city or a region, more environmental burdens, more health issues, parks and trees are fewer and far between. They're the kind of places where there's more people involved within the justice system or their families are affected by it and high unemployment, but mostly they're the kind of places where inequality is simply assumed and both inside and outside of the community. So they're the kind of places where you don't think about talent wanting to stay in that neighborhood because the bottom line is communities like the South Bronx and communities like it, whether it's a Native American reservation or low status community, where it was a former all white bustling, Rust Belt town that used to have a lot of industry and now doesn't. So again, it goes across race lines as well, but they're the places inequality is assumed no matter where it is. And so again, those neighborhoods have never had a shortage of talent emerging from them. We've had a problem with retaining it and that's what this presentation is actually about because if you look at the way the South Bronx in particular has gone through historic changes from what using my own family as an example, when my father moved here in the 1940s, there was a thriving walk to work community and then white flight, highway construction, all sorts of financial disinvestment happened and it became the kind of place where arson was more prevalent than community development finance loans. And so we lost 60% of the population and so those thriving walk to work places that literally created things like the manufacturing that happened within our community actually created things like this. So it was replaced by this kind of infrastructure. So if you really stop and just look at it at face value, this is the kind of thing that repels talent, the people that were born and raised in their communities, they're gonna wanna seek greener pastures as opposed to having to deal with this on a daily basis if they can afford to do so in any and have an opportunity to do so in any way. But again, we've never had a shortage of talent emerging from our communities. We are actually doctors and nurses and lawyers and entrepreneurs and we do some really interesting things that are going forward within our communities. And it goes without saying that of course there's talent here. For example, this is Noelle Santos who is also a woman in the Cosé with my Rosé T-shirt. She's there, she's actually started the Lit Bar which is a combination bookstore wine bar. She did an amazing crowdfunding campaign to get it started and is wildly successful and I'm super excited about her. She's from Soundview, I'm here in the Bronx. The gentleman in the bottom middle picture is Christian Navarro. If any of you have younger siblings or faculty, you have kids sort of like that adolescent age, then they probably know this gentleman who plays Tony Romero in the Netflix drama, 13 reasons why. And if you're some kind of a foodie and into celebrity chefs, of course, you know, Marcus Samuelsson, these are the kind of people that come and either hang out. In the case of Christian, his family's born and raised in this community and still comes around which is just fantastic. But what's interesting is that when, but again, if we're led to believe that there's no real reason to stay in our communities, then people will seek out the kind of things that inspire them. And so what's interesting as a developer, we decided to ask people, you know, within our own community, what are they looking for? Because if we listen, you know, to what sort of the nonprofit industrial complex says, and even the way that, you know, our government through its various policies treats communities like the South Bronx, you know, you get this idea that poverty is kind of a cultural attribute. It's not like something that literally happens to people, you know, in their lives and they have to deal with it in that regard. It's almost as if it's like a part of the DNA of a community, which means there's no escaping it. So yeah, we do have a little bit of a caste system here. Boy, I look at it. And so but what we knew considering we could see the sort of migratory trends of where people would go if they had the ability to do so. So we would ask, you know, folks, and in particular, we started asking young kids and the younger students in the community what they thought of the community and what they were looking for in a community that they actually desired. And when we asked them in particular, because this is really important to note about the South Bronx right now, over the past five or six years, we've had more kids graduating and going to college than we've had in the previous 30. So this is, it's a big thing for us and we are really excited about it. So we'd ask them two questions. One of them was, what do you think the community needs now? And they would almost almost to a student say pretty much the exact same thing. They need, we need more homeless shelters, more affordable housing for really poor people because we definitely don't have enough. You know, we need more programs for kids like more community centers. And, you know, that's pretty much what it needed. And so we asked them, you know, given the fact that we knew that they're more, most of them were going to graduate and go to college or at least they weren't tracked to do so. We'd ask them, so when you do that, are you going to come back to the community? And to a person, they were just like, no, why would I do that? I'm going to graduate and go to college and hopefully get a good job. I'm going to live in a place that doesn't have any of the things that I just told you about, why would I want that for myself? And so we thought that was a really interesting, again, we weren't that surprised that they would say that considering those are the markers of poverty and we are led to believe within low status communities that you want to grow up and get away from them. You measure success by how far you get away from them. So of course we didn't think it was unreasonable, you know, to assume that these young students would say the same exact thing. So again, we saw that there was a link, you know, between poverty, you know, and neighborhood preservation at least within the way that the nonprofit world and, you know, government policies looked at our communities, almost as if poverty was equated with neighborhood preservation. Like let's make life a little easier for these poor people since that's all they're ever going to be. But we decided to go straight to people within the community and ask them, you know, we can say it's poverty, a cultural attribute because that's really policy wonky and you don't say that outside of academia, but you absolutely can ask them, so what are you looking for in your neighborhood? And interestingly enough, they just wanted the same type of things that anybody would want, middle class or not. As a matter of fact, these were the type of things that they were leaving their own community to experience on some level. And but what none of them said they wanted were the things that were readily available, you know, within their community, everything from like the presence, the proliferation of health clinics and pharmacies and community centers, you know, to the numbers of people that don't pick up after their dogs, litter or homeless shelters, nobody said they wanted anything like that as they were thinking about the community that inspired them. But what's interesting is that we, so we're led to believe that there's no real value in our community. And I absolutely feel know that because just because we don't see, may not be able to see the value in our community or are led to believe that there's no value there, doesn't mean that there isn't and certainly doesn't mean that predatory speculators are not gonna try to bank on that, you know, as a way to kind of come and really help people take a, you know, get rid of the homes that they, that actually could be helping them create wealth and generational wealth for their families because they've been led to believe that, you know, quicker money is actually more important because we don't have a whole lot of the kind of programs that are all about, you know, financial literacy and wealth creation within the nonprofit world and communities like this. So these are literally the type of, solicitations that I've received, you know, in the mail or just like, you know, slipped under my door in my home in Hunts Point. They've also gotten my cell phone, so I get at least one or two call from speculators every single week, you know, assuming that I don't know the value of my own home because we'll absolutely believe and we know this to be true that gentrification doesn't happen just when you start seeing, you know, the presence of, you know, two coffee shops or doggy daycares, you know, in the community. And I just want to be real clear within the South Bronx, the first specialty coffee shop we've had anywhere in this community, as far as I know, started by a black woman, local me. And the first doggy daycare we've ever had was started by a queer Latino couple also from the South Bronx. So I'm just saying, just putting it out there, you know, that we like these things too. So anyway, so I don't think gentrification starts when you start seeing things like that happen within a community and that was formerly all, you know, of color, it happens when we start believing that there's no real value in our own communities. And that's why stuff like this can happen as quickly as it does. Like for example, the home ownership rate in the South Bronx fell over the past like 15 or 20 years from 20%, now it's less than 7%. And it's most of it's going into holding companies and predatory speculation like this. So we've got to deal with that and recognize that's an issue. But I do believe that there's some folks who are actually getting it, that we shouldn't be hemorrhaging what could essentially be, you know, part of the home, our ability to generate wealth within our own communities and family by actually holding onto properties. This is when we see these type of, you know, placards that are up in the neighborhood, we'll just take them down because I think that it's abusive, you know, especially when so many folks don't, have not been given an opportunity to understand the value of their own homes. So we just take it down and maybe we're wrong, but I don't care. And, but when we posted that, we do that. We, this was one of my favorite comments from someone down in Baltimore when we get mail offering to purchase our property, I have my children call them back, explaining that this is their inheritance and it's not for sale, I think that's brilliant. But seeing more of this type of thing happening, you know, but you know the neighborhoods, you know, where it happens. And so these are, oh, so this is also really important that this now, for the first time in American history, the type of land that's looking really attractive, you know, to folks as old as baby boomers and as young as millennials are the re-urbanized or re-urbanizing parts of the urban core. So those are the places that are changing and becoming gentrified. But the bottom line is re-urbanization also means that there's not, we really are not meeting the type, the level of supply that is needed to meet the demand for the type of housing in the kind of neighborhoods that everybody, millennials, baby boomers and the people that are already in those communities want, which is a short, you know, there's, you know, access to good transportation, a mix of incomes, you know, there's proximity to shops and restaurants and offices. And granted, you know, right now in most of these areas, it is the shorter commute because there's more transit options, you know, in inner cities like the South Bronx, but we don't have the mix of income and we don't have the type of mix of shops and restaurants. But again, as the neighborhood changes, that's what happens. But what we want to say is actually, how do we create more opportunities to actually increase the supply of housing so that we can actually welcome new people, but also take care of the ones that are already here as well. But what we see now before the neighborhoods start to change are the kind of things that you would see in any low status community. These are some pictures of, you know, some are a little bit older, but basically the same things that you'll find, you won't find a diverse array of lots of healthy and affordable produce and different kinds of dining options. They're all pretty much the same, you know, fast food and greasy spoons and things like that. You know, there's, you know, you can find ways to spend your money, you know, through various types of small businesses around, but in general, the quality is often not very good, you know, and they're the kind of places that make many folks feel like they need to shop to spend their dollars elsewhere, you know, because of the quality that's inherent there. Bargain's a plenty, you know, we have dollar stores upon dollar stores and it's almost always our only retail option. In Hunts Point, there's literally three dollar stores within three blocks and it is our main retail option. There's, we do have lots of money flowing through our communities. You know, there's the multi-billion economic generator that is the pharmaceutical industries, which interestingly enough makes an enormous amount of money off of lifestyle and infrastruct, lifestyle conditions like diabetes and obesity, heart conditions, which we are well aware are even more prevalent within American low status community. So they're doing quite well. There's also, you know, ways to get self-medicated. We see as many of these types of places as well, lots and lots of liquor stores, like there's just an overabundance of them if you ask us. If you wanna actually grow your money, you know, create opportunities to save it, you know, learn about investing, things like that, you're not gonna find them in not, certainly not in a place like the South Bronx, you know, so, but you will find check cashing stores and payday loan places and rent to centers and pawn shops, you know, again, things that literally extract money from you even before you get, before it gets into your pocket. So you're not building, you know, financial capital, you're just basically giving it away to somebody else. Last, but definitely not least, we have an enormous amount of very highly subsidized, affordable housing developments, you know, within low status communities and, you know, some public, some private, but basically what you have when you have all of these things put together, because I don't want folks to think like, oh my gosh, you really can't stand poor communities. That's absolutely not true. What I can't stand and what really I've literally have now been spending my life working toward is helping people understand that concentrated poverty and when you mix all of these things together, that's what you get. And when you continue to concentrate poverty, what you get is actually lower educational attainment. Statistically, lower educational attainment, higher rates of, you know, health related conditions, higher rates of poverty, higher rates of unemployment, higher rates of people being involved with the criminal justice system, either someone in the family or specifically or the families that's attached to those people and you have an impact on all of those things. And so again, it exacerbates concentrated poverty, exacerbates all of the social issues that everybody says that we're trying to avoid. You know, you'll even find in fact that there's a displacement of poor people. First, definitely by other poor people, there's a constant, you know, moving in and out of them in that regard, you know, whether it's homeless shelters into affordable housing and the kind of policies that just create that kind of vicious cycle happen in communities where poverty is concentrated. So we believe that there needs to be a much more economic, you know, a push toward economic diversity in terms of housing types, housing quality, you know, and the level of income, mix of income within our communities as well and also mix of business development. And so that those things really do influence our approach to real estate development, which we just call a talent retention strategy. First, we believe that the most important things within our community are the people that were born and raised here, period. And we want to give them reasons to reinvest not just with their dollars, but also emotionally as well because we realized that even though we were led to believe like the bright talented ones from our community are led to believe that they need to grow up and get out of here. I was one of them, so I know what it's like, you know, when someone tells you, it's like you're gonna grow up and be somebody, really what that means is you're gonna measure success by how far you get away from the community. You know, you know that growing up, you use education or whatever it takes to get out and you do go. But when people like me leave our communities what are they taking with them? They're taking their example, you know, for what is positive, you know, within our community they're taking their money and reinvesting it in somebody else's. And, you know, they're also, you know, liquidate many cases liquidating even the kind of assets that many of us actually did grow up with, you know, within our community that came in the form, you know, of a family home and that we were led to believe wasn't really worth anything of value while the community, while we were in the community so we'd leave to go for somebody else's. So this talent retention strategy is all about creating the kind of opportunities for creating a beautiful, high quality built environment. And, you know, that goes as far as the spectrum from parks to homes, you know, to businesses and creating the sense of something that's commercially viable. So that people feel like, you know, their community is worth spending time and money in. It promotes community center, but it's not a community center because in many cases that's just code for the kind of things that developers build, you know, to pacify poor people or arts and crafts for kids. We want quality housing for local residents with really good paying jobs associated with them. We're not interested in conflating poverty as a cultural attribute. You know, we actually, all of our developments really work on trying to help people understand that there are opportunities for them to participate in and partake in by being a part of our community. But if we first started this work back when I was working on the local community development level with the nonprofit and one that started called Sustainable South Bronx and this was literally one of our first steps toward talent retention. We were in the middle of a big battle with our city because they wanted to build more waste facilities on our waterfront. And there was definitely a push to fight against something, but we also realized we needed to be fighting for something. And so the exact opposite as far as I was concerned of building more waste facilities on our waterfront was actually building parks in our waterfront. So this image is literally of a street that dead-ended at the Bronx River. It was meant to be the beginning of another interstate that Robert Moses was gonna build, but fortunately it was at the end of his reign of terror. So it didn't happen. But the street was mapped, which meant that it was never used as a street because it dead-ended at the Bronx River, but it was used as a dump for more than 30 years. And so this is what it looked like after many different, at least six cleanups. We got a very small seed grant, $10,000 from actually that came through the US Forest Service through the New York City Parks Department, which mostly paid for lunch for volunteers and art projects to sort of make the place look a little prettier. But this was our beta version. And after that, we really had to work hard because we didn't have the experience of a park-going community because we didn't really have anything that people wanted to go to. So we had to really work to create sort of like a marketing plan to get people to the waterfront from boat building excursions to getting people out on the water and canoes to parties, all sorts of things. We really use it as an opportunity to reconnect people with the possibility of what our waterfront could mean to them, educationally, environmentally, socially. And I love this picture of me at the groundbreaking until I've been working really hard. It was just like I was ready for my close-up. But it went from after a $3 million infusion of cash, it went from that to this, which is the Hunts Point Riverside Park as it exists right now. And this is after reddit was first done back in 2006. And it's still growing strong. Thanks to the, I'm so grateful we had it during the pandemic, it really did provide some great opportunities for us as a community. And I got married there back in 2006. Actually, that dog is the reason why I was able to go into the dump that it was, because it really was nasty with piles of garbage higher than my head. I would not have gone in unless I had sort of a crazy 60-pound dog running with me. So that was kind of fun. But having all this really just created, I think a push within me to think more about, well, what else do we need? And when I moved into development in the, I guess mid-2000s somewhere around then, no, like 2010s ish, we did hundreds of surveys. The high school kids I spoke about earlier were also a part of that same push, which was how do we create, what do you want in your community? So we did hundreds and hundreds of surveys, asking people, what were they missing? What were they leaving the community to experience? What were their hopes and dreams and aspirations for the types of developments that they wanted to see happening here? And one of them were cafes, cafes, Wi-Fi cafes, coffee shops, because those were the type of places that people would go to hang out. And we thought at first, we initially just tried to get somebody to come in and whether we actually went to Starbucks, of course Starbucks wasn't interested because they didn't think we had a market here. And Noah and anybody else, nobody else was really interested. So we decided to open it up ourselves and fortunately, we found an amazing partner called Birch Coffee and I'm sure if you guys are downtown, so you've probably seen them. And they're an amazing, amazing roaster and also do these that have an amazing aesthetic within the coffee culture, which I'm super excited about. And we partnered with them, but then we realized that we needed to move, literally kind of like flex a bit and develop, add some like South Bronx flavor to it. And in the form of whipped cream and special and syrups and stuff like that. But it was kind of fun to be rebranded as the Boogie Down Grind really became this like homage to the birthplace of hip hop, which the South Bronx is. We decorated the place with really vibrant imagery from the early days of hip hop and even a little bit later than that, used the cultural artifacts within the neighborhood, signage and stuff like that so that people would immediately recognize it as such. And we were super excited that we were at this point where we could really bring this spot to the community and make it a really locally, make it a local quote unquote community center without being a community center because people would come and do things like credit repair workshops, open mics, poetry readings, the whole shebang art exhibits, it's become this really incredible space. And so what we thought we were doing was literally creating development that was biased and for us. And actually I was really inspired to use a phrase that I heard from the head of a historically black college down in Charlotte, North Carolina called Johnson C Smith University. Turns out that it was actually in one of the poorest parts of definitely poorest parts of Charlotte and the university was. And so both the college and then the community groups within the community, within the area and then also financial institutions got together and literally started working on getting the finance to the local community groups to do development in that town. And there were of course, because that always happens, there were some folks who were outside of those community groups who were just like, oh my God, somebody's coming into gentrify us. And the head of the university was just like, wait, wait, who's that? These are the people from the community. They're your sons and daughters. These are not developers coming in from way somewhere else and doing this development. It's actually intensely local. So it's not gentrification. If you wanna call it anything, call it self gentrification. And I was like, oh, it's an interesting phrase. And so I thought that it really just meant development bias and for us. But there were definitely, cause it always happens that way, that there were some members of the social justice world who did not take kindly to that. And so I woke up like maybe a month after the coffee shop opened to a little sticker campaign around the neighborhood that said, the use of that quote around self gentrification, but attributed it to local sellout, Majora Carter. About two years after we opened, some of the same members who did that little sticker campaign decided to ramp it up with a couple more people. And basically did a protest against us one, or excuse me, against me one day. This was one of my favorite signs. And yes, I did cover their faces to protect them. So this was a really interesting moment, I have to say in my life in part, because there were about 10 people outside with their children, with these big signs and saying things like this. But inside we had actually had about 40 people who were there because we were hosting a meeting about getting access to capital in the hands of small business owners in the South Bronx and also low income homeowners from the South Bronx. So it was a really, it was very ironic that all that happened literally when it did. But we still feel really good about the work that we've been doing specifically because we did open up, this is an opportunity for people to invest within the coffee shop. And actually this is a Soma Arzu Brown and her family. She's an immigrant from Honduras and her husband's an immigrant from Jamaica. And they were literally the first investors in the coffee shop. Now we have quite a few more. But this is the old rail station that I acquired several years ago at this point. And it's actually the reason one of the reasons why my father decided to buy his home here. It's because he was a Pullman porter and this rail station was on his main line. So they didn't have the rail station, I'm sorry they didn't, they closed rail service by the time he actually physically moved here. But, and then Amtrak who acquired the station in the first place sort of just split it up into like a bunch of different little storefronts. But then when the owner of the ground lease died a few years ago, they just kicked everybody out. And they just left. So one of the first things we did before we acquired it, we hired some young kids from the community to actually, you know, cover up the graffiti that the not very nice graffiti that was on it. And they did their own public art project on it, which was sort of fun. And again, going back to the third space says that the community and through our survey data suggested people wanted. It was really interesting. So we decided to look at that particular space. And this is the Casco, and it was also designed by Casco Burt. Of course everybody on this call knows exactly who that is. So while he was doing the Woolworth build and he was also doing a bunch of rail stations around the country. And this is one of the ones that he did. And so this is what it looked like at the first built. We're planning on developing and turning it into an event hall, you see for concerts, for tech events, for different kinds of like fancy parties and meetings, because we have weddings, because we don't really have anything like that in the South Bronx of this size. And so we're really excited about building that out. We also plan to, you know, take it full, you know, even more advantage, you know, of the current rules with the Security Exchange Commission that now allow for small investors to invest in real estate development projects. So, you know, for, I think as little as that, we haven't done the full packet just yet, but I think we can do it. We'll be able to have investment for as few as little as $250, actually investing in this project as we go forward. We had some amazing conversations about it. And unfortunately, just before COVID happened, but, you know, we're gonna be working on developing this pretty soon. We're very excited about it. This is another project, which I think is emblematic of all that I've been talking about so far. This is a former juvenile detention facility called Spofford. My dad was a janitor here. This was the last job he had before he retired. And back when it was finally closed, because it was a terrible place, it didn't rehabilitate any kids. It was just, it was known to be badly run and abusive, like most juvenile detention facilities aren't in our country. We don't do juvenile justice or any justice very well here, but hopefully that'll change. But anyway, when it finally closed in 2011, I actually convinced the Bloomberg administration to consider it for the site of a large mixed use and mixed income housing project that could literally sort of change the dynamic for what passed for housing development within our community. And so we've been pushing on the idea of using the site as a catalyst for mixed income housing, mixed use commercial development. We looked forward at economic growth trends and manufacturing, specifically around food and apparel and technology, looking at public space as a great democratizer and really using that as like a lever for the kind of community character and care that people tend to like when they see beautiful green things. And then of course commercial and retail so that we can have more opportunities for dollars to continue to circulate within our community. Because right now what we have are, the dollar goes in once and then it generally goes out because there aren't that many locally owned businesses specifically within our corridors as well. So having more restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, they create opportunities for people to work here and more opportunities to build a tax base as well. And it also, when we really looked at just where the community, the type, where the type, sorry, you had the, in terms of zoning, the way that this type of, the way it was actually situated is really, really very common in a lot of post industrial American cities. So on one side you've got the residential section and on the other side you've got where the, with the residential section here, meaning the jail. And on the other side is the industrial sections starting. And here it literally meant there was a, the truck engine rebuilding shop, some illegal chop shops, but mostly it's everybody in the neighborhood knew that this is the place where you, where a trucker would go and pick up a prostitute. But that would change if when you change the ground plane for all of this kind of stuff, everything from the, you build, you've got multi entrances for different types of industry, both in industrial as well as of residential uses. So imagine having light industry with three shifts working, entrance to housing nearby, really doing it in a sensible, sensitive way so it can happen. Again, good uses will drive out bad uses. And then, again, our idea was to raise the bar for what passed for real estate development within the South Bronx, again, both on the housing as well as the business development side. And because we didn't just want to have like, sometimes you have one nice project happening, but then the rest of the community stays kind of sucky and it's just sort of like, well, great. There's like nice places for some, free people that got the lottery to live there, but nothing really changed within the community. So we actually put together this amazing team within New York City. We had more women and minority owned developers with equity stakes, like it wasn't, we just weren't just a sub on it. It was just, it was very real. We led this team and we're really deliberate about wanting to see of that. So our proposal included 1,200 units of mixed income housing, including 100 units of low income home ownership. It would have been the largest project ever in the country for you to support low income home ownerships to move into the path for home ownership. It was gonna be done by Habitat for Humanity, New York City. And we also had about 800 jobs associated with the type, with the businesses that wanted to come to the community, everything from a major prepared food manufacturer, and well as a bunch of other things as well. So 800 jobs were also associated with this as well. But our city did what they're kind of used to doing, which is, they looked at the neighborhood of Hunts Point, recognize it's a really poor community here and that I guess treated it as with poverty as a cultural attribute, and instead did what they normally do in communities like this, which is they went with two all white male development teams. There definitely were some women and minority subs involved on it. But they're building a very low income housing project and there's a big health clinic and a large community center associated with it and not many jobs to speak of. So it just seemed like, well, they know exactly what they're doing and they continue to do it. Okay, I don't want, like, sorry, I don't know where that went. That is not what I want. Hold on a second, sorry about that. But yeah, so we, but it was just a really interesting dynamic to sort of see happen. And because again, in the American low status communities, we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting something to be different. And so Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail, I think this quote gives some real reasons why we need to stop thinking about it that way and figure out how we can move forward. And because we should be really impatient about how we've continued to create the same type of developments and communities that have served mostly to concentrate poverty. And then we wonder why things don't change. So yes, we have absolutely moved, since the era of the burning Bronx, no doubt. And so I'm grateful that that's happened, but essentially we haven't moved far enough. And if the current political climate doesn't inspire us to think about what is possible, then I hope that the kind of work that we are trying to do will show that you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. So thank you very much. Hi, Major, that was really fantastic. Thank you so much for your presentation. Thank you. I'd like to start off with maybe a couple of questions for you and then we'll open it up to the Q and A. We actually already have a couple of questions in the Q and A. But I'd like to maybe just kind of go back to some of the terms that you're in. Nation became this flounder, but also terms like talent retention, low status communities, which I think that was maybe one of the first places that I read it was something that you wrote, although I think you said you actually got it from someplace else. But also I think in one of your essays that I read, you said that we should think of these communities like we think of corporations in terms of talent retention. And so there seems to be a definite strategy of changing the language in terms of how we think of these communities. And I suppose or you can tell us more that that has something to do with seeing the value that's in our communities by using a different kind of language and not thinking of poverty as a cultural attribute. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the first time I, I mean, look, I would say things like poor and impoverished and low income and, you know, and they obviously serve a purpose and it's not like they're not true. But I think that when it came right down to it, the main thing that was that we noticed about these communities and it wasn't just my own neighborhood. It was like all over the country, like because they're South Bronx is all over the country. They have a place that, you know, that's the other side of the tracks or whatever. And but it was about inequality. And, you know, when people are in a place and they know that just by, you know, the accident of birth, you know, being born in a place that it almost has a stain on you. And so we're led to believe that, you know, you have to measure success by how far you get away from it. And, you know, and the, I think one of the most effective tools of white supremacy, you know, has been just that, that, you know, somehow our communities in and of themselves are deficient when we're in them. And so, again, we even think about how do we leave them? And, you know, some of that may, one of the unintended consequences of the civil rights legislation, you know, people should be able to move wherever they can afford to go to like that should be fine. But when we had racial segregation in black communities, but then, but there was economic diversity. But when we could, but thanks to civil rights legislation, I know it's still not a perfect thing, but the bottom line is, you know, folks were able to move and our communities never fully recovered, you know, from the lack of talent staying in our communities. So when you think about the way companies work, they are like, they're not trying to make investments in their talent pool so that for somebody else to hire them away, it's so that they can work to support that particular company. And then, honestly, this is really driving me crazy. I'll take it off. So when you think about it, you want to, so companies know, let's make sure that we're creating the kind of infrastructure that makes people want to stay. And we don't do that in our own communities. We actually create the kind of things that repel talent. And then we also create, you know, real physical and even psychological ways to make people feel as though, oh, they should be getting out of here. And those are the programs for the gifted and talented kids. You know, those are, you know, the kind of like special, you know, those are in schools, but then their programs, you know, for folks, you know, to get them out of the neighborhood so they can go to college and not come back. And we see it all the time. And then we wonder, why don't those neighborhoods get any better? You just literally took out, you know, a pivotal part of the population that could actually reinvest if they saw value in it. And of course, we know that urban infrastructure has contributed to that as well. I mean, thinking of the, you know, the decimation that the cross Bronx Expressway sort of wrought and you mentioned Robert Moses and not only, you know, did such urban infrastructure, let's say destroy communities or hurt the fabric of those communities. It also suggested that, oh, the Bronx Expressway will take you to this parkway, which will then take you to the suburb. So it also seemed to be a kind of psychological motive to sort of say, okay, here's an escape or just pass through and you will end up in this, you know, verdant landscape, you know, outside of the city. Very deliberate, not by accident, absolutely not. So since you've been sort of in the real estate development world and working with architects and you mentioned some of the, you know, the markers in low-status community and some of the things that repels talents, how do you think or how have you seen that, let's say architecture, you know, has signified, you know, those markers? And I'm thinking when you put up the slide of Center or the Payday Loan Shop or the Pawn Shop, that those seem to be a certain kind of architecture. Yes. And I'm wondering, you know, in your work, what is it that you've tried to bring in terms of, you know, as being the client or the developer, you know, when you have your conversations with architects? Yeah, I mean, it's all about lifestyle and infrastructure because you're right, you know, the type of things, especially, you know, when it's all concentrated together, it does signify something, right? And when you concentrate, you know, all the things that I showed, like lack of, like, you know, nice shops, you know, all the things that, you know, financially extract your money from you and that are generally not all that nice. Those kind of things, I mean, you know, without a shadow of a doubt, like, oh, you in the hood, things that are not really great here and, you know, the second you can get out, you should. And they, that's what it tells you. So in terms of our own practice, it's about lifestyle infrastructure. What is it that you would seek out, you know, just the same way, you know, water like seeks, you know, to find like the path of easiest resistance, you know, same way with people. Like we want things that make us feel good about being where we are. So it is the things like coffee shops, it is parks, it is, you know, the kind of places, because another thing about people, you know, even if we're like super bore, the bottom line is we all want to feel like, you know, we can afford something nice. I mean, it's just a real thing, like everything, but it doesn't, you know, having everything handed to you is, you know, even though it's some, in some cases it's like, yeah, we should, you know, there's a part, I think of a poverty mindset that's actually been, you know, that has been put upon people, you know, within our community that you should be getting stuff for free. But really a bunch of us actually are just like, you know, we want to be seen, you know, in places that we paid for. You know, we want you to know, you know, that we've got, that we know the difference between a fancy coffee and one that's not. And we like that. So when you think about it, you have to create these kinds of spaces, you know, of course they need to be affordable for folks, but they also need to have a sense of aspiration because people like that too. And, you know, they don't want to be beholden to everybody. So that's why it's like, we do take an emphasis on having commercially viable spaces. And so we started with a coffee shop, mostly because it was the one I could afford to do, you know, there wasn't, you know, as a black female developer in a merging market before it got like to the point where like white developers were coming in going, oh, we can do something like a gentrifying, you know, or development looks more like the typical gentrification path. You know, it was just me, you know, and money that I made outside, you know, of New York through my practice and then in making the investment myself because I did believe in my own community and knew that there were people here who were looking for that type of thing. And that's why we do what we do. But yeah, it was the architecture was making something that people felt good about being in, period. Like. Yeah, that's a fantastic lesson for our students. Yeah, across the board. All right, I'm going to start with some questions here. The first question asks, Majora, what type of funding would you expect to need in order to create a dynamic, beautiful, built environment and landscape included? The same, wait, let's give it the same type of things that you'd need in any development that you need a capital stack that actually makes sense and that you are building the kind of projects that, you know, you can actually make a little, you're not losing money, you know, off of them as well. It's so the kind that we're doing does require a lot more creativity. And there is an assumption of risk that is inherent within doing the type of mixed income and mixed use projects, you know, ahead of the kind of development curve that a lot of white developers and, you know, the typical, you know, the sort of typical past the characters, you know, that do affordable housing in poor communities like the South Bronx, you know, or, but if they had their druthers, they do, you know, market rate in other communities as well. So, but yeah, you build a capital stack that actually makes sense and you have to be really creative about it. We're working on a project in Minneapolis and it's in the hood, you know, where our co-developer, you know, it runs a, you know, a direct service organization there, they're a nonprofit, but they're really focused on actually, you know, using this moment in time and the fact they've got access to a piece of land that's large enough for the kind of development that we wanna do that will also like really impact them, the work they're doing in the food space. So there's gonna be a large anchor tenant, you know, that does prepare school lunches, but then there's also gonna be a much, a smaller, you know, food incubator for minority, you know, people in the food space on whether they're manufacturers or food retailers and that piece, the non-credit worthy tenant, you know, because we can get a bank loan, you know, off of them, because, you know, they're major and any bank would go, oh, they're not a risk, but all these other little ones, that's a risk, even if they collectively, even if all those tenants could pay rent, banks are gonna be like, why would we loan like who are these people? So we're actually gonna be looking for a, like a master lease guarantor, you know, to basically back that, that part of the development. Otherwise, you know, it's, again, we have to be creative because nobody's, again, it's either sort of poverty-level economic maintenance or, you know, it gets gentrified and we know that there's something in the middle, but we do have to be incredibly creative and it will, and often it takes longer. And honestly, I am hoping that, you know, whether it's, you know, philanthropy or government and financial institutions realize that they have historically benefited from, you know, off of the backs of people of color all these years that maybe, just maybe, they might go, maybe there's something we can do about this and create different avenues for access to capital that will actually make our communities a lot more equitable than they have been historically. Our next question is from Bo McMillan and he asked, Mrs. Carter, I appreciate your work and this discussion. What I'm curious to know since so much of your ideal vision of development is based off of residents staying in place, is how you envision a best practices version of moving for residents, of moving for residents who decide according to their needs and their desires to leave. I know some communities have been interested in land banks or types of land tenure which prevent outside speculators from moving in on such desires and pump prices beyond local affordability, not state development. Sorry, this is a long question. And ensuring some level of community control over the land itself. According to your experience, do you feel that these structures aren't a oppositional substitute or perhaps a complementary structure to the type of self gentrification you propose? I guess this question is about land trust, land banks, land trust. Yeah, I think I love the idea of land banks and community land trusts. Haven't seen them work that well outside of places like Vermont, which is kind of incredible. Real estate levels in places like New York City are really high, so unless there's real support to make that happen, I see it as pretty hard. There are, I'm not saying that I have the entire answer. I know I have a pivotal one, which is really supporting people that do wanna stay in our communities and give them reasons to actually make, give them reasons to stay and support them, whether it's people who still own homes within the community and help them see the value in them so that they don't fall victim to predatory speculators or having people such as, I wanna go back to that question so I can actually see more of it. Yeah, and so, but we just wanna make sure that everybody's got a chance if they want to stay there. And it's just, we know people are gonna go and I'm hoping that they go being educated about what it is they're leaving and what they're going to. Because that's often the case, it's not like they go with any kind of real understanding of what they've even left. And so if they're not generating wealth in some other place, why not stay? But I do think that, yeah, I do think that it's all complimentary. I mean, everybody needs to be doing something. And I feel like that it's a sort of a false choice to sort of present these things as oppositional. They're not, they don't need to be. And quite frankly, we're always gonna, I think the best approach is that we've got a way to actually deal with the many different parts of our society. Because we always will need homeless shelters. We will need very affordable housing for very poor people. We're also gonna need different types. So it's like we don't, and yeah, I do think there's gonna be opportunities for land trusts and land banks. I'm not gonna try to push it, because that's bad in and of itself as a job. And God bless anybody who wants to try to do it. And I wish them well. I'm really. I think up to this next question, because I think it's perhaps somewhat related. Do you have any thoughts about how opportunity zones could be reconceptualized to actually benefit low-status communities? I mean, it's opportunities zones. It's another tax credit program, period. It's all gonna come down to, whether or not the folks that are investing in them actually see the value of different types of developments. Because from what I understand, and I haven't been following it all that much to say that you're over what I understand, like where the tension is coming from is that, it looks like the same type of developments and the same type of developers are being funded to do work in the same type of communities. And it's not necessarily going directly. The benefits are not going to either local developers or to the local communities. And so that's no different. But again, I do think that at this time in American history that the regular folks who are in a position to take advantage of these type of tax credit programs, I'm hoping and praying that they're looking at them very differently and then looking at deals that include people that look like me and go in, you know, we've never actually done anything quite like that. How about we like suspend our disbelief and then actually do some work that actually is meaningful and not just dismiss it out of hand because that's often what usually happens. Let's see, we have a question from Jane Hahn. What are some other examples of smaller interventions that are detached from a client that can grow such as community gardens, murals, et cetera, that designers can contribute without large funding? Yeah, I think one of the smarter things that the city is working that I honestly, I can't remember whose idea it was if it came from the city or if it came from the design world itself, it's probably the latter. But, you know, we're actually taking advantage of it right now with our coffee shop. We were connected with an architectural firm, you know, through the cities, some of the design initiative to help support various, you know, small business owners who go on cafes, like figure out how to build the kind of structures and shelters that's gonna allow us to continue to do the open restaurants, outdoor restaurant seating during the winter months. And, you know, they don't build it for you, but they absolutely work on the design and then we can figure out how to get it built, that kind, and we can, you know, but that type of interaction has been, we're super excited about it because, you know, we know the value that we have as a small business for our local community. We're not getting, you know, thanks to the pandemic, we are not gonna be able to continue as we did, you know, especially when it was so beautiful for the summer months and we're not gonna be able to stay in business unless we can absolutely figure out a way to do it outdoors, you know, in a food court to make people warm and, you know, not so exposed to the elements. So that kind of thing, I think is a brilliant way. I mean, they're focusing on the business community. And, you know, and I love murals and all the rest of that stuff. And I think that could be fantastic, but I don't know what I'd do without that. I think it was seriously, it was so necessary and so helpful. And obviously none of us had any idea this was coming, but Lord knows I'm happy that we're getting the help we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder, this is not a question that came through the Q&A, but I wanna go back to, you were citing examples of community centers and arts for kids. And the way that I sort of took it is that, you know, affordable housing usually gets these kind of benevolent programs and that those programs are kind of also one of those markers, if you will, of, you know, of low status or of poverty or what have you. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean, so many developers are just, I mean, they've been doing it the same way for so long. And it's a way, you know, where I think our communities are, you know, infantilized and in just every way. And it's just like, oh, you just need to build a community center for the kids. And it's somehow or another, that's all we ever need. And as opposed to, you know, some kind of, you know, job creation, you know, infrastructure that could be helpful or anything like that. And it's just a really lazy, but, you know, completely, it's just part of the status quo of development right now. And it's still to this day. It's like, you know, what are you doing for the community? Oh, we need a community center. And it's to the point where, you know, both, you know, activists and developers are saying the same thing. And I do wonder like why, especially on the activist front, like have you seen things change as a result of like this plethora of community centers run around your neighborhood? Or it could be a little more interesting in what is actually being developed there or is it just a way to pacify us? And I think it's a way to pacify us. And I do wonder why more folks haven't caught on. Okay. I asked that question for our students such that as we're working on the housing projects in our studio that they start to perhaps rethink some of their program. Yeah. I mean, just think about like, is this something that, if you're thinking about building something for yourself and your own family, is a community center like the kind you're building something that you would even consider building in your own neighborhood? Like, I don't know of anybody, you know, like the many people that, you know, flee the South Bronx in search for greener pastors. I don't know if any one of them that decided to move to another neighborhood because they had a whole lot of community centers in it. Yeah. Good, very good point. Yeah. We'll take one or two more questions. This one is from Cecily King Plummer. Cecily asked, in my experience, the type of development you are pursuing relies heavily on not only philanthropy but also public subsidy at potentially multiple levels, federal, state, and local. In your work around the country, what city or state administrations have been most progressive in their support of your projects and truly been good partners in contributing funding subsidies, tax incentives, land, et cetera? Oh, honey, it's always a drama and a burden. And it's, I wish I could say it's like, oh, there's this here over there. Most of it's consistently like you have to go through this over and over again. I mean, we're excited moving into Indianapolis because I think all the signs are pointing to the group that we're working with who has a 30 year history within the community actually finally, finally, finally being able to push this thing forward. The thing that most inspires me, frankly, are the fact that there are people working on the ground in communities that are actually pushing that agenda as well. Like one of my favorite groups now is there. It's E-B-PREC is the E-B-P-R-E-C which.org which stands for East Bay Permanent Real Estate. I don't know if it's collaborative or collective. I can't remember, but or it might be cooperative. Actually, now I think about it, but they're literally on the ground working and it is a cooperative. They've got members that are contributing money specifically to buy buildings and property and do the development themselves. And it's different from like a sort of a typical either CBO or CDC where they're just regular people who are deciding that they're gonna be a part of it. But through that process, they're also having to connect with public policy folks, other community groups, and they're really like bringing all of that attention to development, but on a local, local level. And but again, they're doing it in a way where, because you can't do development alone. There's no way you can. I mean, you've got to deal with whether it's the approvals and the financing. It's like you can't do by yourself. Well, actually some people can, but for the most part, you're not doing it by yourself, but it is really, it's encouraging to know that there's others who are pushing the same kind of envelope that we are. And we'll do maybe one last question. How do you get people from the community to buy into the value that they already have in that place? I'm smiling because I just was thinking about my own experience, like just literally yesterday. We built this coffee shop as a way to help people see that there was value within our own community, to have a space like that that was that beautiful. There were moments and we still get them to this day, even though we've been there since 2016, I've been in the neighborhood since 2016. We hear from sometimes people would say like, this is just too nice a place to be in the South Bronx. And that was a painful, still is a really painful thing to hear from folks when they put it in those terms, but then you realize that it's because we've been led to believe that our communities have so little value that when you see something that's beautiful, it makes you go, that doesn't belong here. And so the way that we're getting buy-in is by continuously showing up. That's why I made the investment in our community, but to build something that was absolutely ours and that really showed that this was something that we could have and deserve to have. And so when I see people enjoying the space, the way that they do, which I do every day, it makes me go, this is how you get community buy-in because people on a daily basis are discovering that spot and then also thinking about seeing other people there that they probably never would have met had it not existed. And that gives people an opportunity to sort of really reinvest in their communities in a way that they never thought they could. So that's how you get buy-in. You keep showing up, you keep showing beauty, you keep showing possibility. And sooner or later, people will start feeling that they could have that too. Oh, I think that that is just perhaps the best way to end this evening. Thank you so much for your practice, which is so informative, not only for architecture students, but for our real estate students, our planning students, our preservation students. I wanted to ask a question about the Cass Gilbert building, I mean, it's a fantastic space, that photograph is really fantastic, but I think this has been such a fantastic evening for our students and thank you very much for this conversation. Thank you.