Kensington Corridor Trust Episode 1: Moving Beyond “Congenial Partnership”
Purpose is working closely with the Kensington Corridor Trust (KCT) and Executive Director Adriana Abizadeh (part of our inaugural cohort of Purpose Fellows) to design and fund a structure for permanent community ownership and governance. This series will continue through the year as KCT continues to buy new properties and share learnings.
Reversing Decades of Disinvestment
The low-income Kensington neighborhood in north Philadelphia faces a similar challenge to many gentrifying communities across the country. How can a neighborhood ride incoming waves of gentrification, while ensuring that existing communities stay intact and benefit from economic development?
The challenge is particularly acute in a place like Kensington, which has suffered under decades of disinvestment from public and private sectors. Like many blue-collar factory neighborhoods, Kensington was dramatically affected by the deindustrialization of the 1950s. “White flight” to the suburbs began in those years and has continued to the present day, as documented in a census analysis conducted by PEW:
Philadelphia has experienced significant changes in its ethnic and racial composition over the last two decades, with many neighborhoods undergoing sweeping transformations. Since 1990, the city’s white population has fallen by nearly a third. The black population has shifted to new parts of the city.
For Kensington to become a healthy, thriving neighborhood, the community needed to address the heart of the area: its struggling commercial corridor. Revitalization of the area would require investment in local entrepreneurs of color to spur economic development as well as mechanisms for protecting against extraction and keeping wealth in the community.
The Kensington Corridor Trust (KCT) emerged in 2019 in response to these needs. The project was co-developed by four partner organizations: Impact Services, a CDC in Kensington; PIDC, the city's public private partnership for economic development; Shift Capital, a social impact developer; and IF lab, a small business incubator. The collaboration began as what scholar Joseph Margulies calls a “congenial partnership”— which he defines as a “collaborative, non-confrontational approach that draws on residents, nonprofit providers, foundations, philanthropies, the public sector, and private enterprise.”
A core challenge that Margulies points out is that “congenial partnerships” tend to develop and fund solutions on behalf of low-income residents. This usually means “a community depends on what others give them. They do not own or control any of the money earmarked and spent for their benefit and cannot invest it to provide for their long-term needs.”
To move beyond conventional congenial partnerships and non-profit models, KCT partnered with Purpose to pioneer a new approach to community ownership and local economic development.
Rather than acting on behalf of low-income residents, the model seeks to put control over the assets directly into the hands of the neighborhood. The theory is that doing so will create new avenues for community members to meaningfully engage and self-determine within the neighborhood and new power in dialogues with local government and private interests.
Keeping Value in the Community
KCT’s neighborhood trust is using philanthropic funds to purchase real-estate in Kensington’s commercial corridor and move them into an evergreen holding entity. These properties will be revitalized and managed according to local needs. Long-term profits will be reinvested in the neighborhood at the community’s discretion.
Kensington resident and founding Board Member Alex Robles describes the vision:
“The goal is to rebuild a distressed commercial corridor that, once stabilized, will generate jobs for people in the neighborhood, it’ll also provide amenities at price points that are affordable for those residents, and will be clean enough and safe enough for people from other neighborhoods to come and visit.”
Shift Capital CEO Brian Murray adds:
“If we take real estate at scale and move it out of the commoditized capital market… even if the rest of the neighborhood develops, at least you preserve or keep a large chunk of the neighborhood in a perpetual state outside of the markets.”
When Adriana Abizadeh came on as Executive Director in early 2020, her role would be to refine the Trust’s goals and navigate the many inherent tensions between the needs of business owners, residents, and potential funders. For example:
Should KCT prioritize long-term affordability of commercial space or earned-income to reinvest in community programs?
What kind of shops would go into the neighborhood? Would storefronts be cost-accessible for local BIPOC entrepreneurs and customers?
In developing one of the first Neighborhood Trusts in the country, Adriana would have to confront deeper questions about power and benefit as well:
Who did the project exist to serve? Who would define “community” and “benefit”?
Who ultimately had power and what would happen if the interests of outside funders diverged from those of neighborhood residents?
For Adriana one answer was unambiguous: she wanted the project to be truly “for and by” neighborhood residents so they could answer the big questions themselves. To her this meant:
“Neighborhoods aren’t just consulted and placated; they are in control. They have the legal power, autonomy, and agency to engage and develop to meet their own needs… Land and asset ownership mean their voice rises and cuts across the noise to policy change, government collaboration, and increased community engagement from within the neighborhood. ”
For 19134, By 19134
KCT’s Board was initially composed of real estate and community development professionals from the four founding institutions, alongside a few local residents and civic leaders.
According to Impact Services CEO Casey O’Donnell, the Board was very concerned with keeping local residents & businesses fully centered in the effort:
“Kensington does not have larger anchor institutions... so the network of service providers, businesses and civic leaders have really become that anchor, and that’s what’s driving this forward.”
In October of 2020, Adriana and the Board collectively decided that they would spend 2021 undergoing a governance transition away from the founding institutional Board and towards majority control by residents.
The transition process begins this month, March 2021. By September, the Trust (and the real-estate assets it holds) will be majority controlled by residents and small business owners inside the Kengsington zip code, 19134.
As a Purpose Fellow, Adriana is working closely with us to develop the Neighborhood Trust and clarify its purpose & governance:
“Purpose has been my shining Northern Star in all of this. When I first came into KCT, I had no idea what that infrastructure looked like for a Trust, what the frameworks were, what the legal constructs were, or where the power lay. Purpose helped us understand the multitude of options— some of which are deeply intentional, and really neighborhood governance focused, while others are kind of more fluff, and you're just going to continue to do the work that's already been done through private real estate.”
The journey we are on in this series is about how the story of community ownership unfolds — through the legal form, through personal experiences of board members, and longer-term through the corridor itself.
KCT is a story of a low-income neighborhood stepping into their power and also a story of how that power coupled with assets in the commons can set the stage for inclusive revitalization.
In the next episode of this series, we’ll share a detailed look at the groundbreaking ownership and governance structure of KCT’s neighborhood trust.