Joe Minicozzi, who runs the property-data firm Urban3 out of Asheville, stood in front of a ballroom in Galveston with a parcel map of Buncombe County, North Carolina, walking the room through what his own county’s tax assessor had quietly done to his neighbors. Four point four million dollars redirected away from public schools in a single year, enough to cover more than a hundred teachers’ salaries, and none of it required a vote or a scandal. It required a property tax formula that already existed, working exactly the way it was built to work.

The Neighborhood Economics gathering in Galveston is significant not only for the local community, but to any community development effort looking to add to the capital stack. Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) are rebuilding the investing playbook around a central question: how can our money actually serve the places we live?  Two of those RIAs – […]

How TICA is getting the collaborative wheels turning by Kevin Jones There’s a particular moment in building any new field of practice when a room full of well-meaning people who all say the word “impact investing” realize they’ve never actually watched each other invest. Texas recently had that moment.  Kate Knight, former director of a […]

For years we have been teaching the Field Guide to Transformation as a forensic player map. Who is on the field? What role are they playing? Is there a System Entrepreneur calling plays? Is there a Finance Wizard devising funding innovations? Has the local Prophet been co-opted by the institution they were supposed to hold […]

I’ve been working on a book with Rosa Lee. Our working title is This Shit Works — And Why It Matters. One of my tasks has been compiling case studies of economic justice solutions, projects like Buy Back the Block, which enables average people in poor neighborhoods to become owners of commercial real estate in […]