You know, this narrative about gentrification happens over and over and over, and I was like, man, I know.
A few of us that are flipping.
I don't know anybody that's really trying to get into the development game, and you know, kind of change the narrative so we have some control over that. So twenty thirteen, that's when I decided to kind of get off into that.
So what you buying land in twenty thirteen was that the next step.
I didn't know what I was going to buy. I just knew what I was gonna do is stop flipping and try to figure it out. So I just started talking about it, and man, it came full circle. That same my same line brother that helped me get into the game. He had an old tenant reach out to him that used to be in one of the properties and say, hey, I'm over here in fifth Ward and the landlord over here isn't taking care of property. I think he's on drugs. And so you know what he
heard was opportunity. So he reached out to me and he's like, man, I think we got opportunity to go pick up a few houses over here. So I went to go meet with the guy ended up being a whole block, got a grocery store on it. How that okay true story. At the time this was in the hood, it wasn't worth nothing. It was probably worth three hundred thousand the whole block because everything was kind of run down.
But it's in the area where you tell somebody'm about to go to spend three hundred thousand, They're like, man, are you crazy? It's the hood, nothing but drugs and prostitution over there. You're gonna waste your money, you know. So what I ended up doing to talk him in doing the deal, I offered him four hundred thousand for it. So but of course I didn't have the cash to pay four undred thousand. So he actually had inherited the
property from his dad. His dad was like a real estate taccoon had like twenty six blocks over there, twenty six blo, twenty six blocks. Who twenty six blocks, And this block happened to be the one that they gave this this uh, this kid, and he was like the horrible.
Kid, you know what I mean? He watched it.
Yeah, yeah, So so this was the one he had and he still wasn't.
Taking care of it.
So I offered him owner finance scenario where it's like, I'll give you ten percent now on the finance. So that's when the instead of you, instead of going to the bank, the owner or that actually doesn't have any debt on the property will let you make payments over
time to buy the property from them. So I gave him ten percent of what we agreed to the four hundred thousand, so forty thousand dollars which came from me selling one of my rental properties, and then that allowed me now to control that whole block of property and it had the grocery store on it and then had the houses, but everything was really run down.
So instead of fixing it up, what I decided to do.
Was do parole housing for felons because it's really hard for them to find anywhere to live. So I would rent them out a single room in each one of the houses, charge them three to fifty a month or something that they could afford because of the type of jobs they could get, you know, they didn't have much income, or they like a halfway house pretty much like a halfway house.
Yeah, they call them sro housing.
And then so the state paid you that right.
Sometimes sometimes if it depends on what program they're in. They get some type of housing assistance, but most of the time, no, they had to go get a job. So that's what made it really good, because you talk about a low risk tenant, you got somebody that's happy to be out of prison. They was in prison for non violent offense. I didn't do violent people. They had to keep a job and they had to keep somewhere to stay, and ninety nine percent of the places wouldn't
even allow them to live there. So they were like they were like built in good high revenue for me, you know what I mean as collectively in each house. Whereas I could have rented that whole house for five hundred dollars to a regular family, now I'm making eleven twelve hundred dollars off that same house, you know, with this program. And because you were erected in the rooms ndom individual rooms, and most of them had trades, so
they were like carpenters, electricians, plumbers. They all earned their trades in prison. So anything went wrong, I just dropped off materials. They were the wind is built in and they were just happy to have somewhere to live, you know. So yeah, so that worked out that was a win win man and then that was twenty thirteen, fourteen fifteen. I did that in twenty sixteen. Redevelopment kind of started in the area that I was in. Something else that I always watched too, even when I was flipping, is
what the city's plans were. And you can go to the planning Department's website and it'll tell you what the planning to do five years, ten years down the road. And that's a lot of the game that we don't pay attention to, but you know, the other group's pay attention.
Where can you find that information that Usually you.
Can just google it, like like like Planning and Development Department or Urban Planning for whatever city you're in, and it'll pull up on that website. You know, it's usually a dot gov type website, and it'll have all their information. A lot of us talked about the city council meetings, so you can look up city council meeting minutes and they'll tell you about anything big, any developer that's proposedness to do something in a certain area. All that has
to be public publicly announced. So but what I what I noticed about Houston was like everything was going to counterclockwise around downtown and the fifth one neighbor that I was buying it was the last quadrant, So I knew eventually it was gonna come. I just did don't win, you know, and so yeah, so that's how I got into it. And twenty sixteen is another guy started building. So then I figured it's time for me to try to figure out how to get it done.
So what is your all right? So what's your philosophy on gentrification? What's your how do you feel about that?
So gentrification has a very negative connotation in our community because we are never.
The ones revitalizing that neighborhood.
And what happens is the people that are revitalizing are looking out for themselves or their own groups. It's not that they don't care about us, is that they have their own.
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Security personal agendas that they're moving forward, and so we can either continue to watch it happen or we can participate, right, and we can participate in the way that we kind of control the narrative of what's being built, who's being built for, and what happens to the surround the community that we're building in.
Right.
So, my goal with my project is, you know, most of the time when you hear about black builders in black neighborhoods, it's low income stuff, and I feel like that's great, Like, we do need to look out for the low income people, but we got to attract the people that were successful, to people that made it out those neighborhoods back to those neighborhoods because we need that income, we need that demographic. If we ever want a grocery store to come back. We can't sit and depend on
the government to do that. And right now, what happens is the people that are successful, they go and buy houses in the suburbs. Right It's not because they don't want to move back, it's because they have no options. So my focus was, well, let me start building some some market rate stuff, not low income houses and stuff.
But try to track these working professionals back to the neighborhoods with a high quality product that they know they're gonna pay the same price they're paying in the suburbs and in the city, your value is going to appreciate a whole lot more, especially when that neighborhood starts to revitalize.
And that's kind of what you've done with.
You know, the land that you bought in twenty thirteen, right, which is your the most recent development that you worked on.
So fourteen it's the fourteen Yeah.
Fourteen units individual house townhouses.
Yeah, you want to talk about that. How that came about.
Yeah, so it's the same property that I bought with the grocery store and everything. So twenty sixteen, I decided to just tear everything down when I saw there's another developer that was building houses deep in the neighborhood and he was selling them for two fifty before they were complete.
He wasn't even listening them on MLS. So I'm like, so that tells me that there's a mindset, there's enough people out there are willing to save one hundred thousand dollars because everything else inside the city Loop was like ENTI sixteen Loop was two three fifty or more so.
But people would.
Rather save that money and live in a neighborhood that was still pretty rough. So I was like, well, if he can do this deep in the neighborhood, I'm right on the feeder to the highway, you know, I got a view of downtown. I should be able to do something with my property too. And so that's when I decided I'm gonna move forward with this initiative to try to build these townhouses.
And it took a lot of work. It took me.
Building the right teams. I had no idea what I was doing. Goes back to what you're talking about earlier with the consultant. I had to find the right team, the right I had to find a builder that had enough experience that was willing to kind of lend his knowledge and time to me, of course for a fee, you know, had to pay him to be my consultant, basically teach me how to do the first project.
But that's what I did.
So what's what's your your plans now? As far as how many projects are you are you working on? Like, what's your what's your vision?
Looked like? For the next five years.
Next five years, I want to finish this project, which would probably be finished next year, and I want to continue to build uh, the same model in the same neighborhood. I kind of want to make this like a real world example that can be duplicated in other cities, like we can go in, we can buy the land. And I didn't mentioned my entire team is from the community too, so like my builders, my real estate brokers, my insurance brokers, everybody, the contractors as well, contractors as well.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm working with a black builders, so and it's not just anybody's people that got good reputations, but we kind of always silo ourselves and we never.
Really collectively work together on stuff.
So yeah, And the goal and the most important part of all of this, whether you're flipping another industry a lot of people in it's whole selling or building new construction, is ensuring that you put the product in front of the right end buyer. Because if you're flipping, you call yourself buying the block. But if you're not watching who you're selling to on the back end, you're still gentrifying
the neighborhood. So my goal is really to educate us on like, like I said, the working professional on why it's better for you to buy over here. So I'm building the first three now, got contracts on two of them. Both of them are young, young black professionals, basically all in gas professionals.
Townhouses, right, the townhouses.
Yeah, I got a dentist, a black dennist from from Dallas that's looking at buying one, you know. So it's all about making sure that we create that model because right now that gentrification narrative is the only thing that's that's that's real and for our people, we do better when we see examples of something that's actually working. And so when this is complete, I want to make sure that this model is as much exposed as possible. It's
not about me making all the money. I want people in other cities to do the same thing, you know, to say it's possible, we really can't do this.
And this is the example.
How do you evaluate like what area you want to I know you say you look at it like the city plans, but do you have like a set formula. It's just kind of like you just know the area and you just kind of have a good feeling because you can't buy in some bad neighborhoods and they don't get better, right, So it's like, I mean, how do you know like this is this is probably going to get better.
It's all about your network because you got to be talking to people in the industry. So a lot of the realtors that I work work with, they work with builders, and you know, you gotta have a network of commercial realtors around you too, because they know where the commercial developers are looking at, what areas are looking at. So it's a lot of it's word of mouth in addition to what you see on the city plans, you know. But yeah, you gotta have your foot in the door.
You got to be on the inside understanding where they're moving that and you just kind of ride that wave along with them.