Small Business Anti-Displacement Network

Small business owners who rent their spaces have always had very little lease protections compared to residential renters, which leads to unexpected rent increases by hundreds of dollars, hidden maintenance or repair costs, lease terminations with only a 30-day notice, and overall vague lease terms that leave tenants vulnerable; Small businesses that have served their communities for years deserve more protection. 📜 SB1103 in California, which is coming up for a vote this week, is hoping to disrupt this status quo. If passed by California's legislature, this would be the first bill in the nation that mandates tenant protections for small businesses as small as five employees. 📰 Capital & Main, an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports in California, just released an article covering the content of the bill and its opponents. In the article, SBAN's Director, Willow Lung-Amam, Ph.D., emphasizes that clearly explaining maintenance fees, translating leases into the language of the tenant so they can properly read it, and providing a reasonable amount of notice to lease changes is a common staple in most residential contracts: 'Any number of things can happen in the process of getting a lease,” said Lung-Amam. ”There’s very few resources out there, comparatively to residential tenants, in order to correct for those challenges.' Read the full story and keep your eye on this bill as a model for tenant protections in other states: ➡ https://lnkd.in/gj6tSZy8

Reminder that SBAN member Small Business Majority is hosting the webinar “Empowering Black-Owned Small Businesses: Accessing Capital & Financial Growth," today at 2:00pm EST, about navigating predatory lending practices, improving access to capital, and understanding the current landscape of small business lending, with a special emphasis on the federal State Small Business Credit Initiative. Panelists will include small business owners, community development financial institution executives, and representatives from business-serving organizations. REGISTER: https://lnkd.in/eAGqnJ9q

Did you see our recent summer newsletter? Inside you'll find more details about our upcoming Summit on Community Ownership Nov 14, the second edition of our Small Business Anti-Displacement Toolkit, a featured resource from Small Business Majority, and an anti-displacement strategy-in-action from Portland, Oregon, about how a coalition passed a community-centered tax increment financing (TIF) district. Get all the details and register for the Summit: https://lnkd.in/eH4ZbBqM 📩 Didn't get the newsletter in your inbox? Stay in the loop and head to our website to sign up: https://lnkd.in/dGpRs8DK

Welcome another new member to the SBAN Network! Ellen Shepard is the Principal and CEO of Community Allies. Community Allies advances systemic change by empowering communities to define and address the problems that impact them. They go beyond community engagement, empowering communities in decision making, facilitating collective impact, and uplifting locally-owned and BIPOC-owned businesses. Ellen Shepard has twenty five years of experience as a practitioner and advisor of community empowerment, equitable and localized economic development, and collective impact. She brings thoughtful and strategic insights to her clients, with a fierce commitment to putting historically disadvantaged communities in the driver’s seat for decision making. She has led trainings in her Radical Inclusion model of community engagement in cities across the United States, and authored National Main Street’s “Community Engagement for Main Street Transformation” guidebook. Learn more about Community Allies: communityallies.net

We're proud to share that SBAN Director Willow Lung-Amam, Ph.D.'s new book, The Right to Suburbia, is out next month from University of California Press! "In this powerfully written book, Willow Lung-Amam delineates the forces of racial capitalism that shape public and private disinvestment as well as reinvestment in diverse suburban neighborhoods."—Tanya Golash-Boza, author of Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap. ----- Here's a short summary from the publisher: "In recent decades, American suburbs have undergone a so-called renaissance as multiple forces have transformed them into denser urban landscapes. At the same time, suburban racial diversity, immigration, and poverty rates have surged. The Right to Suburbia investigates how marginalized communities in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.—one of the most intensely gentrifying metropolitan regions in the United States—have battled the uneven costs and benefits of redevelopment. The book narrates the efforts of activists, community groups, and political leaders fighting for communities' (and small businesses’) "right to suburbia"—that is, their right to stay put and benefit from new neighborhood investments." 📘 https://lnkd.in/eD4utdha #antidisplacement #gentrification #suburbia #gentrificationresearch

We're so excited to share anti-displacement real estate strategies from Community Desk Chicago at our upcoming SBAN Summit on Community Ownership on November 14th! To prepare your questions, take a look at their Neighborhood Developers Initiative (NDI), a $2.7 million investment that will build community-based real estate capacity of three Chicago-based leaders and organizations, including Juan Manuel Calderon Cuza, Chief Operating Officer of the The Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC). The PRCC was a 2023 SBAN Case Study Awardee, examining the journey and impact of making Puerto Rico Town a State-designated cultural district, the first officially recognized Puerto Rican neighborhood in the entire U.S and a feature in our short documentary film, "We're Still Here," which you can watch here: 📽 Watch film: https://lnkd.in/gxcAPKHg 📑 Read case study: https://lnkd.in/ee4p_TCY ------ The NDI program distinguishes itself for being collaborative first, "ensuring developments are done not only in communities, but for and by communities – all while penciling out and generating a profit. NDI builds capacity of local leaders to work alongside developers, funders, and investors to ensure that real estate projects succeed." 👉🏾 Learn more about this model at Community Desk Chicago's website: https://lnkd.in/eqqcKhiM 📷 from NDI's website, showing Juan M. Calderon's profile and a local cocktail bar in Puerto Rico Town, Esmeralda's.

SBAN is headed to the National Association for Latino Community Asset Builders' (NALCAB) Conference this September 4 - 6, and we are looking forward to the special screening of "La Manplesa: An Uprising Remembered," highlighting the 1991 Washington, D.C. protest for civil rights. The film is directed by the passionate, award-winning documentary filmmaker, Ellie Walton, who also directed SBAN's documentary, "We're Still Here," which told the stories of communities and business owners fighting commercial gentrification in Miami’s Little Santo Domingo, Chicago’s Puerto Rico Town, and the Los Angeles neighborhoods Boyle Heights and East LA. Hope to see members of the SBAN network at the conference so we can debrief sessions and this special screening!

📣 Registration is now open for the 2024 SBAN Summit on Community Ownership on November 14! REGISTER: https://lnkd.in/egeMrCSg Community ownership can provide stability for small businesses and mitigate commercial gentrification pressures. At the summit, we’ll explore individual and collective ownership models that support BIPOC- and immigrant-owned small businesses and help them stay in place, including commercial cooperatives, community land trusts, community investment trusts, and commercial property acquisition funds. The event will feature panel discussions, working sessions, and keynotes by small business advocates, policymakers, and other stakeholders involved in community ownership efforts across the United States and abroad. We’ll discuss community ownership as an anti-displacement strategy, develop collective policy priorities, and outline how to advance this strategy at multiple scales. The summit will also feature insights from SBAN research, case studies, and working groups. Note: The event is open to SBAN members and non-members. Register now and join the conversation!

We’re thrilled to announce that Ja'Net Defell, PMP, LEED Green Associate and Janelle Williams, PhD, will be headlining our 2023 Summit on Community Ownership, a one-day virtual event on November 14. Defell is President and CEO of Community Desk Chicago, which she launched in 2023 to help shift power dynamics and improve the quality of life in under-resourced communities through capacity building, technical coaching, and coordinated resources. Under Ja’Net’s leadership, The Desk launched a $3M Neighborhood Developers Initiative program focused on comprehensive capacity-building for neighborhood-based real estate development in the Englewood, South Shore, and Humboldt Park communities of Chicago. This initial investment is projected to garner an additional $20M in direct investments to these communities. She was also instrumental in helping to formalize a city-wide effort around commercial shared ownership models in communities, now known as Community Investment Vehicles (CIVs). --- Williams is Co-Founder and CEO of Atlanta Wealth Building Initiative , a catalytic nonprofit that seeks to achieve shared prosperity by building Black wealth in Atlanta and across the South through community wealth-building strategies. She previously served as Principal Adviser with the Community Economic Development team at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, where she worked to apply an equitable and inclusive lens to community economic development approaches. She co-designed the Federal Reserve Bank’s groundbreaking Racism and the Economy series with colleagues across the 12 Reserve Banks which amplified how structural racism constrains the overall competitiveness of our economy, and recently co-authored the Small Businesses of Color Recovery Guide and Navigating a Crisis - An Uneven Recovery for Communities and Organizations in the Southeast. 🎉 Stay tuned for our summit agenda and our speakers' full bio when our registration goes live THIS WEEK!

Today, we are spotlighting another NEW SBAN Member who is bringing their expertise and anti-displacement work in Minneapolis to the network: Russ Adams is the Corridor Recovery Initiatives Manager for the Lake Street Council, a place-based non-profit in Minneapolis founded in 1968, that supports immigrant and BIPOC entrepreneurs, placemaking/keeping through public art, and small business policy advocacy. Lake Street stretches over 6 miles and is home to more than 2,000 businesses and non-profits. According to their "Recovery Report" following the George Floyd uprising in 2020, the organization has clocked 4,320 hours of business assistance to primarily BIPOC and immigrant-owned businesses, supported 12 new affordable redevelopment projects with acquisition and predevelopment financing, and administered 500 business grants and loans for businesses looking to rebuild their storefront. 🙌🏾 -------- One of those projects is the Coliseum Building (shown in background of graphic), re-opened this past Juneteenth after being badly burned in 2020. This historic 85,000-square-foot building was renovated by a local non-profit developer who worked with three Black-owned businesses to co-own and operate the building in the future. It will include retail space, a community and artistic hub, and office space.  ➡ Learn more about Lake Street Council: https://lnkd.in/gmy4PZi 🏛 Learn more about the Coliseum Building re-opening: https://lnkd.in/ejUUyEa2 💡 Check out their Strategy in Action and other place-based strategies in our online toolkit: https://lnkd.in/e6RivZS6