A FIVE-PART PODCAST FROM TRANSFORM FINANCE
Own The Block
What does it take to move land, capital, wealth, and decision-making power into the hands of communities that have historically been excluded from ownership?
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ABOUT THE SERIES
How are leaders combining capital, policy, organizing, governance, and long-term stewardship to make CORE durable?
Own the Block explores how Community-Owned Real Estate (CORE) can shift power and capital toward Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class communities—turning real estate from a vehicle of extraction and displacement into infrastructure for ownership, wealth creation, and self-determination.
Across five episodes, we ask what it would take to stop treating community ownership as an exception and start treating it as necessary. Guests bring perspectives as organizers, community developers, funders, researchers, intermediaries, and practitioners working at the edge of what is possible.
Listeners will leave with a clearer understanding of how Community-Owned Real Estate projects are moving land, wealth, and decision-making power into the hands of communities that have historically been excluded from ownership. They will also come away with a sharper sense of what it will take—capital, policy, organizing, governance, and long-term stewardship—to make CORE durable at scale.
Five conversations.
Each one is a different place to start.
EPISODE 01
What Is CORE—and Why Capital Matters
IN THIS CONVERSATION
About this episode
This first episode of Own The Block sets the table for the season: what community-owned real estate actually is, how mature the field is in 2026, and what it will take for community ownership to become a durable, repeatable part of the real estate system rather than a one-off exception. Curt Lyon (Executive Director at Transform Finance) and Ahmed Mori (Co-director of the Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab at the University of Miami) zoom out to the state of the field and its policy landscape, while Nikishka Iyengar (Founder and CEO at The Guild) brings it down to the ground through The Guild's own work building the Community Stewardship Trust.
In this episode
- A working definition of community-owned real estate (CORE) and what separates it from conventional development or mission-driven real estate.
- The scale of the field today — including an estimate by Bridgespan of 300+ organizations holding over $10 billion in community-owned real estate assets.
- What "ecosystem stewardship" means and who is playing that connective role around the country.
- Where policy is moving the field forward (opportunity-to-purchase laws, Measure ULA, community wealth-building funds) and where implementation still falls short.
- What "durability at scale" would require — not just more capital, but standardized legal tools, revolving acquisition funds, and long-term stewardship financing.
- Inside The Guild's Community Stewardship Trust model and how its buyback mechanism lets community shareholders — not outside investors — capture the upside as properties appreciate.
