Own the Block | Episode 3 | Transform Finance: Julia Parker, Program Manager
When I hear that community-owned real estate is “too risky,” I want to ask: risky for whom?
For the investor expecting repayment? For the family facing displacement? For the community trying to hold onto land while someone else decides what it is worth?
These questions sit at the center of Episode 3 of Own the Block, “Assessing the Capital Ecosystem.” I’m joined by Oscar Perry Abello, Senior Economic Justice Correspondent at Next City; Jaime Gloshay, Managing Director of Impact Investments at Common Future; and Cindy Wu, Chief Executive Officer of Our Neighborhoods Capital Fund, to examine who controls capital, whose priorities determine its movement, and what needs to change for community ownership to grow.
I approach this conversation with a conviction: communities should have the power to own and govern the places they call home. Our financing systems should make that possible. Too often, the people working to secure land for collective benefit are the ones asked to justify themselves to institutions whose wealth and authority go largely unquestioned.
I want us to interrogate what we mean when we say there isn’t enough money for community ownership. Who has the money? How did they accumulate it? What conditions do they attach to giving communities access to it?
In this episode, we discuss an estimate that places the value of stolen Indigenous land in the lower 48 states at $23 trillion. I want funders to sit with the scale of that number—and with the dispossession it represents.
It demands a different starting point for conversations about investment. Communities seeking control of land are making claims within an economy built through stolen land and the extraction of wealth. That history belongs in the room when institutions decide what they can afford, what returns they require, and which projects deserve support.
I’m especially interested in how the language of risk gives financial decisions an appearance of neutrality.
A lender can assess a project’s repayment prospects while leaving the consequences of displacement outside the calculation. An investor can protect a return while a community absorbs the costs of losing its homes, businesses, and gathering places.
Those losses count. They should shape how we underwrite, how we price capital, and who gets to participate in those decisions.
Our conversation draws on Justice Funders’ Just Transition Investment Framework to examine the risks communities carry. For me, that opens a necessary question: what would financing look like if protecting a community’s ability to stay and govern its future were an explicit investment priority?
I want to push funders beyond declaring support for community ownership. That support has to survive through the underwriting process and not rest with the loan agreement.
Repayment schedules, return expectations, collateral requirements, and decision-making rights all shape what true ownership makes possible. Communities need room to pursue collective goals without financing terms pulling them toward extraction.
The distinction between “capital with values” and “capital with terms” matters because the terms are where power becomes enforceable. If we say we support community control, we should be willing to examine how much control our investments actually allow.
The episode also challenges the assumption that community ownership must ultimately find its financing through global capital markets. Local and regional banks have long supported ownership in white communities. I want us to ask what it would take for those institutions to finance community ownership—and what relationships and accountability would make that financing accessible.
Relationships matter because decisions about money are made by people and institutions with the power to open doors, change terms, and commit resources. Building trust has to come with a willingness to use that power differently.
That is the challenge I want to put to the capital ecosystem: fund community ownership on terms that help communities hold land and exercise power over its future.
🎙️ Join me for Episode 3 of Own the Block: “Assessing the Capital Ecosystem.”
Own the Block is a podcast from Transform Finance exploring what it takes to finance, build, and sustain community-owned real estate.
