Stories
Empty Towers and Community Pillars: Addressing the Root Causes of Small Business Displacement
On Wall Street and downtowns around the country, declining in-person work is driving near-record office vacancies, with implications for nearby businesses, the urban tax base, and public services. But on main streets across the country, LISC is addressing some of the same technological and economic changes behind downtown vacancies, to support entrepreneurs of color facing displacement.
Supporting Small Businesses & Their Workers: A Quality Jobs Roundtable
People of color disproportionately bore the brunt of small business closures during the pandemic, even as large corporations reaped record profits. But the pandemic has also sparked creative and thoughtful responses to support an equitable recovery among small business owners, while helping them create quality jobs. The LISC Institute for Community Power hosted a conversation with three individuals that have been at the forefront of that experimentation.
Evictions and Profit vs. Home and Community
LISC's newest research report offers powerful evidence that racism, financial exclusion and disinvestment have paved the way for speculators to reap huge profits in neighborhoods of color. But there’s good news, too: Buildings with affordability subsidies are better maintained and remain protected from speculation.
How to Blaze Paths to Equitable Small Business Recovery
A new playbook from LISC and Next City offers a framework for paving equitable pathways to small business success, and lays out concrete strategies for supporting capital access, small business capacity, and commercial real estate. Two of its authors explain why that’s so important.
More Creative Community Development. More Powerful Art.
David Greenberg, LISC’s VP for Knowledge Management and Strategy, and author of a new essay and workbook exploring the relationships between art and community development, poses a question to our field: what happens when we dispense with our outmoded silos and allow culture-making and social activism to graft? The possibilities are limitless and liberating.
“Real Power is in the Land”: Community Land Trusts—Past, Present and Future
From their Southern roots in the Civil Rights movement to dynamic new efforts in diverse parts of the country, Community Land Trusts (CLTs) have proved to be a powerful means to combatting Black land loss and displacement, building community wealth, and strengthening community health and wellbeing. A recent LISC-led panel brought together leading CLT proponents to discuss the history of community land ownership in America, the rising movement today, and how CLTs are an imperative tool in the fight for economic, racial and environmental justice and equitable recovery from the pandemic.