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Can Impact Investing Redefine Urban Development? (with Brian Murray) · Building Better Cities

• Kate Gasparro: Every neighborhood is a living, breathing entity with its own life cycle. And figuring out where to invest in that life cycle for the benefit of the community living in that neighborhood is both an art and a science. And no one knows that better than today's guest. For nearly 15 years, Brian Murray has led Shift Capital, working at the intersection of community and real estate. His early work co-founding the Kensington Corridor Trust. Widely recognized as the pre-eminent model of community-owned real estate, and his pioneering projects in place-based development have solidified his belief that the buildings we live within are among the most powerful and underutilized levers we have for breaking cycles of poverty. What started as a handful of investments in older industrial assets in Kensington, Philadelphia, has evolved into a national portfolio of projects that find the through line between investment in place and investment in people. As an impact investment platform, Shift Capital is dedicated to finding and supporting the developers in projects that have the grit to catalyze neighborhood growth, not just for a season, but for generations to come. This is a conversation about what it really takes to do this work, the wins, the hard lessons, the tension between impact and return, and what Brian believes it will take to truly shift the trajectory of American cities. I'm Kate Gasparo and this is Building Better Cities. So you sort of describe yourself as coming to real estate from outside the industry as an entrepreneur. You worked with the Peace Corps for some time. You went to business school. And you've always tried to blend doing well by doing good. And I'm curious what made you realize that real estate could do more for the community than just creating financial returns? I'd like to say that you throw all those things into a pot, you mix it up, and that's kind of what came out of it. A love for real estate. I didn't grow up in real estate. I didn't have that type of exposure when I was younger. Family of teachers, and there is kind of a thread to what I do that lands in that boat as well. ⁓ but being out in the world focused on building better communities was passion that I think honed in on P in Peace Corps, but I didn't really fully appreciate how much real estate affects people's lives until doing my first real estate deal. And then, you know, it's for those in the space and probably preaching to the choir a little bit, once you see it, you can't unsee it. We live in it, we breathe in it, we walk by it. ⁓ and when you think about what affects kids growing up into, you know, better versions of themselves. It is their built environment that they're in. And that's the physical side of it. That's the emotional side of it. ⁓ that is the wellness side of it, that is the educational side of it. And all those things are about place and real estate. And so to me, you know, seeking I I think efficiency in life, it felt like the most potent and direct way to do that doing well and doing doing good. And how old is Shift now? How long have you been with Shift? So first real estate deal was in two thousand nine, ⁓ while I was in business school. Start of it was probably in two thousand twelve. And that was when, you know, I had a couple projects that I had ⁓ kind of cut my teeth on, so to speak, and the idea of how to invest in neighborhoods, who's investing in neighborhoods. How to think about that long term, how to create interventions to poverty, ⁓ probably started in 2012 with really two core assets, both in Philadelphia where we started, that were the anchor project, the anchor project that we felt like we could build a more strategic plan around when we thought about investing in neighborhoods. I think I remember reading that your first project was a old dilapidated industrial site. Is that the case? And can you sort of talk through like how that first project became a small portfolio that then became Shift? Before I fully kind of embraced the idea of Shift, I had been supporting another real estate group based in Philadelphia that had ownership of a 300,000 square foot Former industrial mill that was sixty to seventy percent occupied with artists and creatives of all different types. And it was largely the cheapest real estate in town. It was on the fringes of a very challenged neighborhood. But I was obsessed really with the idea that these creatives are small business people. They are not the creatives and artists of the seventies when we think about, you know, the the classic gentrification story of New York. ⁓ these are people that are building businesses, whether it's light manufacturing businesses, whether it's ⁓ Etsy businesses, whether it's ⁓ their art is their business. And they were willing to be in places that others wouldn't. So they were willing to rent in neighborhoods that your traditional people wouldn't normally rent into. So you take the combination of a small business entrepreneur and you put them in a neighborhood that has a need for jobs and and people who can spend money in their neighborhoods. And a lot of times those overlap anyway, right? A lot of the people that are from those neighborhoods are the people in these buildings. And so that became kind of the tip of the spear for the neighborhood approach to development, which is Okay, start with these small entrepreneurs, build a space of community. At that time, we were looking at what was happening in Brooklyn at the time, and that was just exploding with these small businesses. And we felt like we could deliver a better product in Philadelphia than was currently being offered and attract a community of entrepreneurs into an old industrial building. And so, The other advantage to that that industrial building and multiple industrial buildings that we ended up buying is that they also sat on public transportation. So Philadelphia has two subway lines and ⁓ the Market Frankfurt line and the Broad Street line. And so everything that we bought was within a three minute walk of a subway stop. And if you think about that in context to probably any other you know, city in America, and that is, you know, prime real estate. And we were able to purchase assets at four dollars a square foot. Wow. And that basis was also the other key to the equation for us, which is that basis allowed us a lot more flexibility with what we could do with it. That if we bought it later in a neighborhood cycle, we would not have. But it did start with ⁓ really two to three old industrial buildings that were kind of clustered together as a starting point. It seems like you aren't just aligning the capital with community, which is what Shift is all about today, but you're also aligning the project with the community and meeting them where they're at at the time and place and what you're acquiring and visioning for a project. Can you sort of talk about how Shift's approach starting from the inception of this industrial small portfolio that you're positioning for those small entrepreneurs to the portfolio that you have today, what does it look like in contrast to what might be a typical or traditional urban development model in a city like Philadelphia? So when we say project, I think and it didn't happen overnight, but it did evolve over a couple of years, which is our project to us bled outside of those initial projects. Right. So we never really looked at it as just like, how does this project fit in the community? It's really how do a set of projects and investments and strategies fit into the needs of a community. And it started with this okay, we we're investing in these large projects. There's all of these smaller buildings that surround these projects that one is on a key walking corridor. It's too small for a project in of itself. It's too small for just, you know, a set of investors. It's too soft for a bank, but it's critical to the idea of investing in this neighborhood over time and and and thinking about safety and thinking about how to get the street to be alive when you have in in this neighborhood in particular a lot of vacancy. So we were struggling and thinking about all those things. That that really led us to The idea of, you know, you you mentioned this in your question, but really first, how do we align capital on our side? So there's the idea of aligning capital with community, but it starts with aligning capital with investors that was our first struggle. Because what really happened is that we invested in one building, we invested in the next building, we had a set of investors here, then we had a slightly different set of investors next to that building. And then if we wanted to buy this smaller building in between, Would we get a different investor for that? And all of a sudden we were going to quickly be in a position where the investors were misaligned. And so when we think about the traditional model of real estate that most people do, it's either you're a specialist, you're a multifamily specialist, you're an affordable specialist, you're an office specialist, and you are doing it typically project by project or programmatic approach by programmatic approach. But When you're investing in a neighborhood, if you don't have investors aligned, then that investor cares. If you t if a tenant comes and I put them in one building, not the other building, investors care that who didn't get the one tenant. But if everybody's in the same pot, if everybody's benefiting from the small purchase that we made next door, then they don't care as much, right? You can have a loss leader. You can have multiple loss leaders. ⁓ And ultimately what we learned, you know, through trial and error is that need to find a model where we were taking all of our investors, putting them in one pot, and having them participate across all the assets so that we could actually do more for community for that placemaking than we would if we said, Hey, we're just focused on these industrial buildings because that's all we do. We do adaptive reuse and that's it. ⁓ and so It was a little bit of evolution, a little bit of experiment. And also, yes, looking back at kind of the older models of how real estate happens and saying we need to find a better way to do that. Hmm. It seems to me that what's key to this approach is the concentration of assets next to each other. So that they can create this synergy. And so your lost leader is actually part of a larger ecosystem. So that the block or the community itself can over time grow together. And that sort of stood out as I was going through Shift's history is that you're focused on I wanna say the district scale, but you have your own terminology around what that means. Can you sort of elaborate on the scale at which ⁓ Shift likes to work at and what that means for the locales that you work in. I'll start with saying, you know First taking the approach that every neighborhood in place is different. And so w regardless of what it could be consistent maybe across a set of neighborhood strategies, Kensington, the place we started in, is unique to any other neighborhood in the country. And there are some massive challenges there that are hard to explain, you know, in words unless You know, you have visited the place and you've seen it. We are the home to the largest opioid crisis and drug open drug market in the country. But as I mentioned, it has all of this incredible working class roots. It has public transportation. Philadelphia is a big, growing, vibrant city. And so the idea of where we got to with this I'll call density and scale. To be honest with you, we kind of got it wrong. If I were to do it again, I would go more scale. So I would have raised more capital. And I would have gone more dense. So we ended up spreading our capital a little bit farther than we should have. And I will say, because of the inefferent challenges of the place, a lot of our investments that we made outside of our original core went sideways. And In the end, if we had concentrated a little bit more on that block by block strategy, I think we would have had a radiating effect faster than we would have by trying to do too much. So size and scale matter to this equation. I think that there are a lot of developers and groups that we know and we work with that have tried to do this, but There are so many factors that layer into it, right? Is there already momentum there? Are there already developers there? Is there a strong institution that wants to come up alongside? There are different ways to get there, but this idea of higher density investment, I think, is, you know, big learning for us as we move through this process. And when you say density, sometimes we talk about density as the concentration of units or the height of a building. And you're talking about the number of parcels within a given area. Can you elaborate on that a little more too? Yes. I am using them interchangeably. And I will say that they're both important. ⁓ but the way I was using it was yes, is is the density of investments. Mm-hmm. The number of like on a block, you know, one example I'll give is that there was an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is the kind of leading newspaper in Philadelphia that Did a deep dive on a block, on a residential block that was about two blocks away from our big commercial stuff. And it labeled it the worst block in America. Wow. And, you know, drugs were a part of it, you know, dilapidation was another part of it. And we we took that on as like a challenge to say, what is the right amount of density to purchase on that block to actually change that narrative? ⁓ And so density in that case, they're single family homes. It's not a I mean, it's high density from a city perspective, but not high density from like a multi unit perspective. And the reality was is that our dense again, our density of like trying to make an impact, we should have been buying fifty percent of that block. And we bought like 10, 20 percent of that block. ⁓ which was still a lot of parcels, but it wasn't enough to make a lasting impact where we could really control, you know, narrative on that block and control kind of future on that block. And then, you know, to say though the density as a whole is not critical to this equation if we're talking about urban, yeah, 100% is, right? A hundred we I think everybody in the urban, you know, community knows that, you know, density is what helps keep small businesses afloat. you know, without density, and I I watch this play out in other cities that are more car cities. Philly is a car city, but not like you know, not like New York and not like DC and not like, you know, Boston. but a lot of smaller cities have this challenge where they're doing the type of w I mean, d Detroit is to me a good example of this where, you know, the density of Detroit's not there. I mean, you know, I I you know, visited there What are 10, 12, 13 years ago when everyone said, You gotta go check out Detroit. And you walked one block out of the core downtown and you, I mean, you it was like land everywhere. You know, there is this struggle between density, having affordable spaces for small businesses, and understanding that we're also in this like crazy transition, continued transition of where people spend their money. And so, you know, how many coffee shops can you have? How many ⁓ candle shops can you have? And so the struggle of how you bring in people that do have discretionary income and balance that with the needs of the community long term and balance that against how does a small business person thrive, that's at the core of that density question. Yeah, it it's so interesting because, you know, I I've worked in Detroit and I've worked downtown and you're right. The amount of investment that had to go in to create that ecosystem and that density of investment that was needed far outstrips what you're seeing in other parts of the city. And so I could imagine when you're talking about 50% of the block is what's needed to be a catalyst or create that radiating effect. And I'm curious, you talked a little bit about the indicators that you're looking for as to which block to invest in. Could you go a little bit deeper there? And where in the neighborhood cycle is it such that, ⁓ this is a good time to invest for the community versus coming in at the tail end, like this is a good place to invest for someone else that's not the community. I'm a huge ⁓ believer that the necessity of doing this work equitably, you have to come in earlier. than anybody else would come in. And that is the only time where the basis is at the right place that you can find exit strategies that that are still preserving and also providing that return set for your investors. But but there is a risk and I think we landed on this risk, which is you're going in too early. And this goes back to this we needed to come in as I think we came in at the right time, but at the moment, two things happened that were were challenging. One is that I don't think we came in at at enough scale. And again, back to that question. And then two, we didn't have the social capital to bring other is interested groups along with the strategy. And what I mean by that in particular is the city government. Okay. And so there was a moment in time where We had gotten interest in Kenzie to to a place where a lot of other groups were interested in investing there, which was great because it was needed. 'Cause at that point it was really only us and one other group and and, you know, a nonprofit or two. And I say this sadly, you know, the city we didn't have the social capital with the city and and leadership there to bring them along in a way that they were gonna support this this work and ended up That this became a dumping ground for the drug trade. And the city ended up kind of co-siding on that, to be honest with you. And that really set back the development there. So I say all that just to re-emphasize what I said at first, which is like these things are like living organisms. You can have a theory of change. And I think our theory of change still has re relevance in a lot of places. But even if you nail that. there are other factors that can affect you negatively that, you know, take away from the impact you're trying to make. And that's the risk of a quote for profit impact developer. You know, you're constantly trying to figure out exactly where that edge is where you can do as much impact as you possibly can, but also get that, you know, that return right. Before we dive into the impact investing side of the equation, we started this conversation of shifts journey back in 2009. And now we're in 2026. And so over the 17 year arc, what has the theory of change proved out in those initial investments? Can you speak to that? The place making and the place concept still has relevancy even more so today than it ever had. I would encourage there's a recent report that Browschetty, Bruce Katz, and a number of groups just put out on the Hope Six work. Yes. And in essence, the Hope Six framework is is not too dissimilar to the type of framework we were trying to bring as well to these places. And the Hope Six is a, you know, is a s 80s strategy to invest in. low-income neighborhoods and disrupt the ⁓ the time, the downward trajectory of, you know, urban places. It is only thirty plus years later that the measurable results of that actually start to be understood. And the reality is that it proves that mixed income communities are the number one intervention to improve A young person's life, period. And so I'm still fully a believer in placepace, you know, hyperdense investment. Where we've evolved though is that we are not the group to do that everywhere. Because we're not in Baltimore, we're not in Newark, New Jersey, we're not in San Diego. ⁓ and so as we move through our cycle and people said, ⁓ this is if you know it's incredible is what you're doing. You know, would you do this here? Would you do this there? And I s I just kept saying, like, this is taking over this is my life. Like, I'm not dropping in, you know, and first off, this is all pre-George Floyd and pre a lot of stuff, but I still felt like it is a as a white male that I was disconnected from being the right person all the time to be parachuting into places. And we started By accident, really starting partnering up with other developers in other places to say, okay, well, maybe, maybe it's not us, but maybe we can create that bridge for others to do that. And so for the last eight years, that has really been philosophically and strategically our way of building our scale. Ultimately for shift, our goal is to be a a a ⁓ billion dollar plus impact platform. And we're not going to do that if we are not. ⁓ building those bridges for others, finding new ways and pathways for capital to come into the space and support what might be the smaller scale developer who has a vision in a place that might be the developer from a community from North Philadelphia who wants to build a big real estate platform so that they can be the ones down the road to come back to their community and know how to invest in that neighborhood, right? That's a quite a broad portfolio of work. And we started off by talking about place-based investment and shift has sort of evolved to not just be about place-based strategies, but also about people-based strategies. So you talked a little bit about that, but can you talk about on a daily basis, as an impact investing company focused on real estate, what does it mean to invest in people and place? ⁓ well, if we all take a step back, we're all investing in people, right? I mean, you know, that we say at Chiff that we're we're in service to our tenants, right? I think a lot of times we think about the landlord-tenant relationship as to be honest with you, fairly broken. ⁓ and so the people side of this has a number of different angles. One is, you know, treating respecting our tenants like they're people. Mm-hmm. You know, look, we have to evict. We have to Badger tenants who aren't paying. We have to do all the things that a landlord has to do to manage, you know, a building in a place. But, you know, sometimes that person just lost their job. So what are we doing, right? What are we doing before we think about eviction to know that there's a person on the other side of that? So that's important to us. Investing in small businesses. We have so many examples of groups that we, you know, started in a closet and we gave them time and space and we invested in building out their restaurant that now is won a James Beard, you know, nomination and they're donating their profits back into the youth in Philadelphia. So we think that ultimately that's our other way of investing in people. Well as I was going through some of the programs that Shift has invested in, I came across the Good Neighbor program. And I it just made my heart warm that what Shift is saying is actually being implemented at a community scale. Can you expand on that? I just want to hear how you phrase that program and its ⁓ success and longevity. I think it started during COVID or twenty twenty one. Yeah. There's two influences here. One, there is a project called Teachers Village in Newark, New Jersey. And then separately from that, there is also a spin-off of that in Philadelphia called Oxford Mills that was started by a developer, Tebow Manikin from Seawall in Baltimore. And both of those projects were providing a rent rebate for teachers to live there. And I loved it. I loved it on all levels. Obviously, the teacher side comes in as well. I mean, always admired Teach for America, which was a partner in one of them. And then the other influence was the Peace Corps, right? And volunteering. And I always say this about the Peace Square is that there is no organization that puts you more in a place that you've never been before and integrated into that place than the Peace Square. You spend two years learning the language, you become a member of that community. And when I think about some of the fears of gentrification and the fears of investment happening in places, when a community says, ⁓ there goes my neighborhood. It's largely built off a disconnect of people, in my opinion. And so that disconnect is that is on both sides. On one side it is, you know, people that want to move into that community that c actually they want to be part of that community, right? They're not coming in with the with the the mindset that might be generalized about. And then on the other side you have community who walks by You know, someone who moved into that building and that person doesn't say hi and that person doesn't say hi and they both think the same thing. And so the idea is that we expected that there would be new people not from the neighborhood moving into some into this J Central building. But could we c create a program where there's an onboard, there's an on-ramp, right? Like we lived in this siloed world. So but if there's a program that allows you to get to volunteer, get to know that community, then you actually get to know the community. And vice versa, the community gets to say, ⁓ you're just a you're a person too, and you're now a member of this community. We adopt you. And ⁓ so I use the the teacher, you know, rebate concept to say, okay, we want to be the most civically engaged building in the country, and we're gonna provide this rent rebate to people who volunteer. ⁓ that has spun off. There's a there's a group in Baltimore that has now done something similar there. We're now replicating the Good Neighbor program in Newark, New Jersey. Like everything we've done, there's some goods here. There's some there's some things I've we could do better. But ultimately I get most excited about the concept of breaking down barriers and thinking of ways that, you know, that real estate developers can can do that. And that's what's exciting about the program. What I love about this is it's so authentic to your story. This experience that you had with the Peace Corps and the way that you ⁓ speak soap. Passionately about mentorship and the community that's created through mentorship and from mentorship is sort of being replicated through place itself, especially with programs like the Good Neighbor program. I'm curious, like when investors come to the table, there seems to be a very clear alignment between you and Shift's purpose. And I can see that they're investing as much in that alignment as they are in the program itself. Can you speak a little bit about the investor pool that you draw from? Because these must be very patient investors who understand the mission that really resonate between what Shift is doing and what their personal mission is or who they're representing at the end of the day. When we started Shift, the impact investing world was not really embracing real estate like I felt. It should be. ⁓ they were investing in affordable housing funds, the view that were out there. and they would invest in CDFIs, which, you know, key component of the overall ecosystem, but never really in developers themselves or projects themselves as much as, you know, our goal was. So in our first fund, I would say about a third of our investors are Core mission, I mean, they love the mission, maybe don't care as much about the returns, but love the mission side of what we were doing in that first fund. A third of our investors are also mission oriented, but have a fiduciary responsibility. So they were attracted to the idea that we were going to be able to balance those. And so we had three foundations in Philadelphia who made their first impact investment out of their endowments into that fund. And then I had a third. Who looked at what we were doing and said, ⁓ as we've evolved over time, we've raised a couple individual asset deals. Most of those were opportunity zones. So now you have investors who have a capital gains desire. Our second fund is a little bit of a mix like our first fund. But there is, I mean, there's just so much happening right now in the impact investing world. And I won't go too deep, but just to say, There's a lot of distress right now. Distress in the real estate space. There's distress in out in the venture space. And a lot of in impact investors with patient capital have now been in a position where they can't get capital out of things. And they're also in some cases getting burned on some stuff. Our first fund was not a home run. And so so I think we're in this real moment in time where, you know, I think we're all trying to figure out what does the next set of investors look like. ⁓ you know, who's gonna step up into this space? You know, but I think the core mission that you you do through your podcast, through your own work, the the work that we see through all of our partners is, you know, keep spreading the importance of investing in place and in in these urban environments, because it matters. And like that's a core part of our mission is just educating developers on Okay. Yeah, this might not have gone well, but why and how can you continue to invest this way and lower your risk in a way that makes sense for your capital? I've heard that from so many people that it's just a difficult time to see capital flow across almost every asset class. And I'm curious as you are positioning this new fund and you've already said like low risk, good returns, as you look to others to invest in. Because this fund will then invest in others. What are some telltale signs that you know this is a winning bet or this is a better bet than what we're seeing across the board? Like we're willing to take a chance on this because there are elements of the developer themselves, there's elements of the community, there's elements of the project or the partnerships that they've brought to the table. You sort of talk about what is interesting to shift as they turn that fund into actionable projects. Yeah, so our second fund the catalyst fund, which is our Code GP fund, is fully deployed at the moment. But I will say that what we were deliberately trying to do was to not create, hey, if you don't fit into this little sliver bucket that I care about, then I'm not investing in you. And most of the capital sources out there are saying, I need multifamily with under 80% AMI. With these other factors, and that's not how real estate opportunities work, right? Like you see an opportunity or or or developer sees an opportunity. Maybe the city government is giving them a huge subsidy, or maybe they're getting the land for free, or maybe there's you know, a a inventive pilot opportunity, payment in tax ⁓ and low taxes. There are all these other factors that lead to a developer having a project that that is impactful and potentially fundable. And so yes, first and foremost, what's what are the factors of the developer themselves? What are their long-term plays? Right? What are their, you know, are we are we helping them on a journey? Are we just helping them with one project and then, you know, that's it? How are they capitalized right now? What have their what's their track record look like? We've worked with some green developers and that has worked sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't work. As we move through, like working with developers who are not paying their tuition has kind of become a critical gating item for us. But we have to factor that in with what is the what is the project itself. So what is the impact of the project? How does the project underwrite? What are the factors that make it special? Or maybe not special? Maybe it's something that they it's replicatable. All of those things played into all of our decisions. We invested in about 14 different deals. And we have Lie type projects in DC. We have Office to Resident Conversions in Newark. We have master plan projects in upstate New York. It really was a factor of how we were seeing the risk between the developer and the project and where we want to jump in. But deliberately saying, Hey, there isn't one deal, you know, that is like you have to fit in this box. We want we want to meet you where you are across the board. And we think that that's an important th thing that's not happening out there. What I love about this approach and with Shift is that you actually have done the projects. Yeah, there are a lot of investors out there who think that this is a great asset class, that they like the stability of real assets. and when we're talking about ⁓ I wanna say non traditional or atypical. projects like the ones that Shift is investing in. It's nice to know that you as investors have also done the projects yourself. So I was hoping you would talk a little bit about J Central and how that brought together, I believe it's adaptive reuse, local partnerships, social infrastructure is tied to the Good Neighbor program, from what I understand. And how lessons learned from your own projects have helped inform how you invest on the other side of your portfolio. Yeah, so the Jason Trail project was a part of our original place-based Philadelphia platform, and it was strategic physically to everything we were doing there. At the time, though, there was no multifamily in the neighborhood, large multifamily. So we were creating a marketplace by doing this project. The Good Neighbor program was probably early adopted into c the thinking, but ultimately it's 110 units. And a ground floor of retail. So we could combine this idea of small business entrepreneurship on the first floor with this idea of the good neighbor program above. And we felt that, you know, that would be a very compelling project that would physically sit on this the it's called Kensington Avenue, which is the ⁓ underneath the elevated train and the most challenged corridor in the in the country. But I think the real innovation for Jason Trail is not. maybe how we put the project together and how and the asset use historical tax credits and and you know as a as a as a subsidy source. But the the innovation is the exit. So, you know, one of the things in our original place-based approach was how do we exit smartly? How do we exit into a stewardship of assets long-term? And that was a many year journey to create What is now called the Kensington Corridor Trust. And that trust is a neighborhood trust. It's the first one in the country. It's a perpetual trust that is mission, so its purpose is to preserve affordability for the commercial corridor of Kensington Avenue. We ended up making and hiring along with three other partners, an executive director, Adriana Bizida, who took that concept and then She leaned so hard into community to really make sure that it was community-led, community driven, that now that model is is, you know, the model across the country for how to think strategically about preservation and long-term stewardship of assets. J Central will be their biggest ac acquisition. They've they've had it under agreement now for over a year. We gave them a lot of room. And time, because I knew that they were going to need to raise capital to do it. Knock on wood, they're on target to close probably late summer, early fall. That to me will probably be the legacy of that project is that it will forever be an asset for the community, producing and preserving affordability on one side, but also producing cash and real dollars that then can get reinvested in other ways back in the neighborhood. These projects and especially this exit strategy to the Kensington Corridor Trust, which is it is famous across the country. Anyone who's interested in community ownership models of real estate needs to look at this model because it's been so impactful in Kensington. And I wish we could spend a whole hour on that. I would love to bring on to like talk about that in particular. ⁓ and then, you know, I'm curious. About the relationship building and the trust component that goes into these projects. ⁓ we just had an episode with Jim Hyde and sort of talking about how developers have been seen as the enemy of the community and they've been extractive for communities. But Shift is trying to ensure that the investments they're making in Philadelphia and the investments they're making in people and places elsewhere are authentic to place. So you can you talk about this last component of the importance of relationship building and trust as these projects take off? Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's so much to unpack there. and I did listen to Jim's podcast. So that was ⁓ that was I'm glad I did. ⁓ and he's, you know, I think that there's a couple components to this. One is that there is a he he's dead on, there's a perception issue. ⁓ and that is a a real one. So I don't want to dismiss it. There is extractive capital and extractive forces that are at play in a lot of places. In addition to perception, there's also a lot of people trying to do the right thing. More people than I think neighborhoods give credit to. And so that's not just the shifts. That's other people doing the work. And so how do we how do we change that education narrative, right? And I and I I mentioned Raj Chetty's Pope Six work and his social capital work and We as a society need to do a better job of armying communities with the best available information about how investment in their neighborhood can also benefit them. And yes, we need the tools for them to be able to participate, crowdfunding. There's a great program in Philadelphia that's now national called Jumpstart, which at ⁓ trains and educates ⁓ people in the neighborhood on how to do development. so there's all of these different tools. But at the end of the day, the community has to really, I mean, capital has a lot of choices. It can go a lot of different directions. And a lot of capital stays out of low-income neighborhoods because they don't want to be called gentrifiers. They're worried about the the pushback and blowback. And that's at the detriment 100% of the ⁓ many of the people that actually live there that are You know, trying to build wealth and think about, you know, this cycle of poverty. You know, people say we want to gentrify without displacement or invest without displacement. There is no such thing as change without displacement. First off, I think there's a huge misunderstanding of how much displacement actually happens in low, like deep poverty places to begin with. There's tons of displacement that happens on a regular basis. When a neighborhood changes, there's going to also be changes that happen there. And there's going to be people that are vulnerable. but I wanna acknowledge that with also saying that we're we, the impact real estate world, we're doing a great job of talking to each other and building a community and building a network of people who care about this. We're doing a terrible job of communicating with communities in a way that they want us to come in. ⁓ and that to me is, you know, core of things that we want to try to change over the next, you know, ten, twenty years. This conversation reminds us that real estate is never just about real estate. It's about who gets to stay, who gets to build wealth, and who gets to decide what a neighborhood becomes. From an old industrial mill in Kensington to a national affordable housing fund, Brian's work has proved that patient, place-based investment can actually move the needle. If today's conversation sparks something for you, share it with someone who is just as curious about their own neighborhood's theory of change. Because this work belongs to all of us. I want to thank you for caring about the people and places that make our cities worth fighting for. So until next time, let's keep building better cities together.