JPMorgan Chase commits $30B to advance racial equity.

Let’s break this down.

$8B promised to come in the form of home purchase loans. That would increase wealth held by Black households by 00.17%.

The share of wealth Black households hold in the U.S. would remain…unchanged Source for the graphs: federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/da…

Private equity firms have acquired a lot of commercial property in cities over the past decade or two. Due to the pandemic, lots of those properties, especially hotels, are basically producing zero cashflow.

You would think that would put PE firms in a bad position, but… …instead, they are skipping payments on the debt they hold on those properties. Some properties are already falling into default.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

I don't like to give advice. It's not my role as a journalist. But since no big corporate CEO is going to listen to me anyway, maybe this doesn't really count as advice.

The only people who care about your "racial equity” or unity statements are other powerful white people. And yes that includes the other powerful white people who happen to hold prestigious newspaper editorships and TV and radio producerships who will assign stories and give you nice sounding headlines.

Lots of buzz in my world today about this.

Let's break it down.

nytimes.com/2020/06/10/bus… @FordFoundation is spearheading a bunch of the leading foundations in issuing bonds to finance additional grantmaking this year in response to the pandemic and everything else that's going on. Ford plans to sell $1B in bonds and grant the proceeds out over the next 2 years.

Black people are tired. They're hurt. Frustrated. Mad. Embittered.

They're also brilliant and powerful.

Not brilliant or powerful in the sense that non-Black people have no moral obligation to do anything about all that has happened or is happening to them. We damn sure do. Black communities are brilliant & powerful in the sense that another world is possible & despite everything the rest of us throw at them, they continue trying to build that world.

It’s up to the rest of us to join them. It would be a better world for all of us, including them.

Alright, fine. I admit, there is one aspect of “the good ‘ole days” that I wish we still had today.

@federalreserve c. 1932: fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/his… Omg this is like a fantasy world

I arrived as scheduled at 3:24 a.m. on Sunday, 12/8, in Fargo, ND. With foggy breath, the Amtrak conductor greeted everyone with a jolly, "Welcome to Miami!" I stepped off and walked a few blocks north to my hotel. I thought I understood then what was the true meaning of cold. I had about 17 hours to wait. There is only one passenger train per day in either direction from Chicago to the Pacific Northwest and back. There is only one bus per evening from Fargo to Bismarck the state capital — it departs from Fargo around 10:30 p.m.

When people ask me “what do you write about?” Generally I typically say something like “economic revitalization for historically disinvested communities.”

But that of course still encompasses many things. Here is a thread of one of those things: shifting the flow of capital. Shifting the flow of capital also encompasses many things, but it’s definitely one of the common threads that runs through my work. It's about cities or communities gaining access to or influencing large, existing pools of capital that typically ignore their needs.

This week for @NextCityOrg, I wrote about a new initiative focusing on (but not exclusive to) entrepreneurs of color who are looking to grow manufacturing businesses.

nextcity.org/daily/entry/th… I took the opportunity to start the story in Detroit, both a historic center of manufacturing as well as the gasp-inducing disparity in businesses owned by people of color, particularly black people, and white-owned businesses.

Yesterday, #SpacesAndPlaces, an accredited #NPC19 offsite session held at @impacthub_oak, a group of largely black planners, urbanists & activists discussed ways they are practicing planning in ways that go deeper than engaging with black & PoC communities. They start from there. The session featured folks like @oakclt People Power Solar Cooperative, @EOakCollective @bankCBB & more who are doing planning, housing, cultural, environmental and even banking work that is rooted in, values, uplifts, builds from the perspective of the historically marginalized.

Here in the United States, banks are required to meet the credit needs of the communities where they do business, under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Penalties for violating the act can include temporarily freezing a bank's asset growth or denying all merger requests. Some consider the law to be the last great policy of the Civil Rights era, in line with the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), Fair Housing Act (1968), Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974). Notice the gradual expansion from political rights to economic rights?