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 through its Impact Real Estate Portfolio vision.

IREP’s

StreetWell is a team innovating a distributed, democratic neighborhood equity structure it has pioneered called the Impact Real Estate Portfolio (IREP).

The IREP is an impact-oriented modification of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) model, particularly designed for inclusive rebuilding of urban, rust belt, Appalachian or First Nation neighborhoods that have been ignored, exploited or oppressed for generations.

SW’s pilot IREPs are located, for example, in redlined neighborhoods of West Baltimore.

The distress and oppression such neighborhoods have endured manifest as:

  • Empty trash-strewn lots & ailing forests

  • Dominance of highly distressed (eg, restoration costs > 75% of restored value) buildings

  • Crumbling roads, alleys and sidewalks

  • Absence of amenities and services

THE PROBLEM

Crumbling Infrastructure, Lack of Opportunity & Gentrification

THE SOLUTION

Invest in Communities that Build Together

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.

IREP ROADMAP

1

Execute Purpose Trust with neighborhood leaders, guaranteeing SW’s exit to community.

2

Acquire, renovate and then lease concentrated bundles of distressed homes in targeted marginalized - particularly historically redlined - neighborhoods;

3

Use this renovation work to hire and train people facing barriers to employment, such as individuals from the neighborhood or recovering from incarceration or addiction;

4

Lease the finished homes to those workers, and to other individuals and families from community;

5

Per Purpose Trust Terms, distribute IREP equity, and thereby governance and wealth, to IREP workers, tenants, and community partners through a multi-stakeholder trust.

READY TO START?

If you’re interested in learning more about Streetwell, let us know, and we’ll get back to you!

Impact
Real
Estate
Portfolio

How It Works

  1. Acquire

  2. Renovate

  3. Generate

  4. Flip for Good

Multi-Stakeholder Approach

  • Tenants

  • Workers

  • Communities

  • Investors

Streetwell Services

  • Real Estate Acquisition

  • Real Estate Development

  • Asset & Property Management

  • Advocacy

  • Coordination w/municipalities, neighborhoods, & local non-profits

TEAM

Ty Brown

Xiomarra Brown

Graham Mclaughlin

Yessenia Lidz

David Lidz

John Polizzi

Lifelines, not redlines.