On a commercial corridor in northeast Philadelphia, a diner, a hair-braiding shop and a photography studio stand as tangible evidence of a neighborhood taking control of its future and its real estate. Soon to join them: a solar-powered community grocery store with a shared commercial kitchen.
These storefronts between East Allegheny Avenue and East Atlantic Street are among more than 30 properties held by the Kensington Corridor Trust, an ambitious initiative to revitalize a historically disinvested neighborhood while protecting residents and small business owners from gentrification and displacement.
Under the structure of a perpetual purpose trust, governed by the roughly 32,000 residents of Kensington’s 19134 zip code, these properties have been removed from the speculative market, aiming to ensure long-term affordability, collective ownership, and community power.
Similar models of community ownership and “decommodification” are emerging across the United States, as local leaders adopt strategies to ensure residents and business owners benefit from neighborhood development and rising property values. In Philadelphia, the Kensington commercial district has historically faced high crime rates, visible drug markets, and some of the city’s lowest outcomes in education, employment, and health.
“We got here because policies failed this neighborhood on purpose,” says Adriana Abizadeh-Barbour, who has led the Kensington Corridor Trust as executive director for six years. “We’re designing our way out. We’re designing our way past redlining and insurance hikes and intentional speculation and crime.”
The Trust is now launching a community stewardship trust, allowing residents to buy property shares for as little as $10 a month and receive dividends. This initiative arose from requests from residents wanting to invest directly in the neighborhood’s revitalization.
“We were hearing from folks, ‘Hey, I have $100. I have $1,000, I would love to invest in that,’” Abizadeh-Barbour told ImpactAlpha.
To establish the community stewardship trust, the Kensington trust partnered with The Guild, an Atlanta-based organization that has worked with communities of color in Atlanta since 2015 to build community ownership of wealth-building assets. The Guild created the community stewardship trust model to give residents a stake in the financial upside of developments in their neighborhoods.
The model is similar to that used by Community Investment Trust, which has spun out of Mercy Corps Ventures to help neighborhoods gain stakes in their local commercial corridors. Community Investment Trust helped hundreds of residents in southeast Portland, Oregon, buy into a local strip mall, providing a small slice of the appreciation and regular dividends – a two-fold return on investment.
Other examples include Local Code, expanding from Kansas City, Missouri, where it helped a local developer acquire properties in the Oak Park neighborhood with the goal of converting them to community ownership. Chicago TREND last year provided hundreds of neighbor-investors with a five-fold return on their investments of between $100 and $5,000 in a shopping center in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood.
“Community ownership models could deliver a new wave of community wealth generation,” Devin Culbertson and Devin Murphy of Grounded Solutions Network wrote in ImpactAlpha last year.
Across the Delaware River in Trenton, New Jersey, April De Simone is drawing inspiration from Kensington’s approach. She has established the nonprofit Vesi through a perpetual purpose trust with a $500,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The trust’s first asset is a six-bedroom, Queen Anne-style Victorian home purchased in 2022 and currently undergoing renovation. The plan is to sell the home to the trust at below-market value and incorporate a renter-equity structure, allowing future occupants to share in the home’s appreciation.
De Simone and her husband plan to sell the home for $390,000, despite its current market value of approximately $500,000. “We’re selling it at a reduced amount and activating it so that it stays in the trust in perpetuity,” she told ImpactAlpha.
De Simone estimates the home could be worth $1.5 million in a decade. The Trust will retain 55% of the ownership shares, while the occupant will receive 45%, with the option to sell their shares after 15 years if they vacate the property.
Unlike the hyper-local focus of the Kensington Corridor Trust, De Simone aims to acquire residential, commercial, and cultural assets in blighted commercial corridors across the United States.
“We created a structure that allows us to work across the nation,” she says. “We’re really trying to formulate how do we create thriving neighborhoods for everyone, not just if you can afford to pay.” Such neighborhood development trusts, De Simone says, can help build communities where land and assets are protected for long-term public benefit, rather than speculative gain, and where ownership is broadly accessible.
The Kensington Corridor Trust began with modest beginnings. “All of this started with two condemned properties that were side by side, with bricks that were actively falling on the sidewalk,” says Abizadeh-Barbour. “Now we have our 32nd property under agreement.”
She initially discouraged other communities from replicating Kensington’s model, stating, “‘We don’t know if we’re sustainable.’” Now, her perspective has shifted.
“We firmly believe that this is a sustainable model that can advance collective ownership, and decommodification,” she says. “We’re very actively moving to replicate.”
Local groceries
Before becoming known as “ground zero” of the US opioid crisis, Kensington was a 19th-century industrial center, with steam-powered textile mills and brick factories supporting thriving working-class neighborhoods of European immigrants. The Market-Frankford train line provided direct access to jobs in central Philadelphia.
The corridor’s decline began with post-war deindustrialization, followed by decades of disinvestment, redlining, and speculative activity. Today, Kensington is a majority-Latino neighborhood with a large Puerto Rican population.
“This corridor’s very high crime, very high drug trade, very high sex trade, so it’s not the most appealing corridor across the city of Philadelphia,” says Abizadeh-Barbour. “But the folks who already live here, they feel safe here. This is home. This is their neighborhood.”
The Kensington Corridor Trust was created in 2019 by a local consortium led by Shift Capital, a social impact-focused real estate development firm, and including Impact Services, a community development nonprofit; IF Lab, an entrepreneurship incubator; and the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. The consortium funded the acquisition of its first two properties.
With backing from local philanthropies and lenders, the trust has become the largest acquirer of commercial and mixed-use assets on Kensington Avenue, according to Abizadeh-Barbour, with 31 properties valued at approximately $10 million. A Philadelphia Magazine feature highlights the individuals behind Kensington Avenue’s storefronts, including Yolanda Del Valle, who runs Sherry’s Restaurant on East Ontario Street.
Shift Capital has sold one of its properties in the area to the trust under an agreement granting the trust right of first refusal. The mixed-use property contains 16 residential units and a nonprofit food pantry, the Sunday Love Project. “We’re really excited to take anything that they’re trying to sell and bring it into community control all day, every day,” Abizadeh-Barbour says. “We want to buy all their stuff.”
Under the Kensington Corridor Trust’s ownership structure, any resident of the 19134 ZIP code can formally raise concerns about how a property is being used. Any Kensington resident can trigger a community discussion and, if necessary, a vote on the matter. In a food desert, residents have consistently called for a community grocery store.
“When you’re part of a collective ownership structure, you do own it, and you do have control, and you do have a say — along with all your neighbors, along with all the small businesses that are around you,” Abizadeh-Barbour says. “It produces a vastly different outcome when we’re all collectively making decisions together, versus a single person governing something that directly impacts others.”
By removing local assets from the speculative market, the Kensington neighborhood can collectively “decide what happens to the land and the real estate, what types of small businesses are brought into those spaces, how we develop the built environment, and how we think about climate resiliency and energy efficiency,” she told ImpactAlpha.
“When I first started and was going around the neighborhood getting to know folks, the number one thing everybody kept telling me was to bring in a grocery store,” she says.
The 800-square-foot grocery store is scheduled to open this spring. The Kensington Food Company, owned by veteran and Kensington native Thomas Sheridan, will sell fresh produce, baked goods, meats, and imported goods. The second floor will house a shared commercial kitchen for local food entrepreneurs. The trust has secured a grant from the Green Family Foundation to install solar panels on the roof of the community grocery store and commercial kitchen.
Ownership shares
The decision to launch the community stewardship trust came from conversations with residents who wanted to invest capital in decommodifying more assets in the neighborhood. Residents can now buy property shares for as little as $10 a month and receive dividends.
The community stewardship trust provides an individual ownership opportunity, while the Kensington Corridor Trust enables community governance. The community stewardship trust allows Kensington residents to build wealth by investing in the commercial and mixed-use assets transforming their neighborhood.
“You’re investing in bringing small businesses, grocery stores, childcare centers,” The Guild’s Nikishka Iyengar told ImpactAlpha. “You’re meeting a real commercial need for the community.”
The stewardship trust will only include revenue-generating assets in the portfolio that already have tenants. Assets that have not yet stabilized will be excluded. “What we don’t want to do is ask low- and moderate-income people to put $100 a month at a high financial risk,” Abizadeh-Barbour says.
Kensington Corridor Trust is seeking $25 million in low-interest, unsecured debt to begin new projects, support those currently in development, establish its community stewardship trust, and support new neighborhood trusts in other cities.
“We have a lot of projects in construction at different stages in the pipeline,” says Abizadeh-Barbour. “We need capital and it needs to be integrated and blended capital.”
