Building Equity

Local public, private, philanthropic, and nonprofit changemakers have joined a growing national call to increase equitable outcomes for people of color and low-income residents. The need to improve outcomes is acute in legacy cities, where inequities tend to be prevalent and persistent. This paper presents a scan of equitable development strategies centered around real estate market activity that are specifically geared for use in legacy cities with predominantly weak real estate markets or a lack of extensive political will to support broad-based equity programming. The strategies in this paper range from hyper-local interventions responding to individualized development proposals, to more established programming that improves development processes or more equitably redirects anticipated market gains to people of color and low-income residents.