Majora Carter - Reclaiming Your Community

Urban revitalization strategist MAJORA CARTER offers a solution to end the brain drain that cripples low-income communities, mapping out a development strategy focused on encouraging talented people to stay – and help lift up the community.

Carter argues that these areas need a talent-retention strategy, just like the ones companies have. Retaining homegrown talent is a critical part of creating a strong local economy that can resist gentrification. But too many people born in low-status communities measure their success by how far away from them they can get.

Carter, who could have been one of them, returned to the South Bronx and devised a development strategy rooted in the conviction that these communities have the resources within themselves to succeed.

In the new book - "Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in A Better One" (On sale: February 1, 2022, Berrett-Koehler Publishers) - Majora Carter (a MacArthur fellow, Peabody award-winner and serial entrepreneur) write about how she could have left her neighborhood. But she chose to stay in the South Bronx and develop a new way to revitalize and preserve her home.

In this profoundly personal book, Carter writes about: her brother’s murder, transforming a local dump into an award-winning park, her experiences as a woman of color confronting the “male and pale” real estate industry and what she calls the “nonprofit industrial complex as well as her successes, her setbacks, and her struggles of real estate and nonprofit and philanthropic establishments.

Carter advocates measure like:
BUILDING mixed-income housing instead of low-income housing to create a diverse and robust economic ecosystem
DEVELOPING vibrant “third spaces”—restaurants, bookstores, places like Carter’s Boogie Down Grind Cafe—to keep people and dollars in the community
HELPING homeowners maximize their property value so they can resist selling out and build generational wealth.
SHOWING homeowners how to maximize the long-term value of their property so they won’t succumb to quick-cash offers from speculators