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Let every community own the wealth they create

Flipping For Good

StreetWell is a real estate development firm putting ownership back in the hands of the community it serves. We buy distressed real estate assets, employ community labor, and transfer wealth back to that community through our neighborhood re-investment shares.

Contact

David Lidz

Problem

Crumbling Infrastructure
Lack of Opportunity
Gentrification

Solution

Invest in Communities
Build it together
Get Buy-in

StreetWell is a development strategy that turns traditional distressed real estate investing on its head, breaking the wealth extraction cycle that depletes affordable housing inventory as struggling neighborhoods revitalize. StreetWell will create a mechanism for all stakeholders--investors, workers, and residents--to build equity while improving and preserving affordable housing units.

Inviting workers and residents into cooperative ownership provides a sense of stake that motivates everyone to steward the value of the property, and in the long term generates wealth building opportunities for community members who have been historically marginalized.

StreetWell will acquire distressed properties in Baltimore’s Park Circle neighborhood, and Hagerstown, Maryland's Locust Point and Jonathan Street neighborhoods. StreetWell’s principals have deep experience and relationships in these neighborhoods, and a track record of both completing successful rehabilitation projects and changing people’s lives through job training.

Working with worker coops, social enterprises, and workforce development non-profits StreetWell will renovate the properties it acquires, flipping them from under occupied neighborhood blights into safe and desirable affordable housing units.

A portion of ownership will be allocated to the workers who renovate the properties and the residents, and will be awarded based on hours worked, property management services provided (taking out the trash, shoveling the sidewalk) and engagement in supportive services like financial literacy classes or job training and advancement.

This approach will increase affordable housing supply by creating a mechanism that can finance rehabilitations of unusable housing stock on terms that give investors market returns, but also maintains long-term affordability by putting permanent ownership and control of the portfolio in the hands of a broad and growing group of community stakeholders. It will also improve access to difficult-to-acquire sites, as it will be appealing to communities that have resisted outside investment because of legitimate concerns about extractive, exploitative behavior.

Long-Term Impact

1. Break

Break the destructive wealth extractive dynamic that emerges as neighborhoods experience real estate appreciation and gentrification

2. Provide

Provide wealth building pathways for residents and employees, who are too often trapped in poverty when working on and living in affordable housing

3. Create

Create a virtuous circle of real estate investment, with the profits being reinvested to increase affordable stock, provide reasonable risk adjusted returns to investors, and engage all stakeholders in the success of each property and the entire portfolio

4. Scale

Create a scalable model for community real estate ownership and control. We have seen how outside capital that is unaccountable to communities has driven gentrification and its attendant displacement and destruction of affordable housing. However, housing cannot be created and preserved without capital. What we need is a way to bring commercial capital into neighborhoods that compensates that capital fairly but also gives communities real power, agency, and ownership in forging their own economic destinies; the StreetWell model does that in Baltimore, and can do that anywhere where there’s housing stock available for rehabilitation.