A Q&A with its CEO

• Living Cities is a nonprofit organization that works to close racial income and wealth gaps in U.S. cities.
• The organization held its annual conference in Memphis to address strategies for closing the racial wealth divide through inclusive capital.
• Living Cities aims to redirect resources to Black and brown communities through procurement, new underwriting practices for lenders, and private equity investments.

A New York-based nonprofit that works to close racial income and wealth gaps in U.S. cities held a week-long conference this fall in the Bluff City.

Living Cities, which also has an office in Washington, D.C., looks to advance inclusive capital in key building pathways for Black, Indigenous, Latine and Asian Americans. The organization uses philanthropy, financial institutions and local governments to focus on the racial wealth disparity.

The Living Cities Collective Action 2024: Centering Inclusive Capital conference was held Sept. 22-26 at the Renasant Convention Center in Downtown Memphis. The gathering focused on strategies to address the racial wealth divide through inclusive capital from a national perspective, but also how to help that happen in Memphis.

Joe Scantlebury is the president and CEO of Living Cities. During the Living Cities conference, The Commercial Appeal sat down with him to discuss Living Cities’ mission and the work it is doing in Memphis.

The following discussion with Scantlebury has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How long has Living Cities been around, and what is the organization all about?

Living Cities has been around for 33 years. It has always been a funder collaborative of foundations and financial institutions. All of them know they can do individual projects and charitable things.

Most charities, especially in the Southeast, are doing great charitable work such as supporting the Boys & Girls Club, giving out backpacks (to kids for school) or doing soup kitchens. But when you start asking the questions: Why do we do so many backpacks and so many soup kitchens? Why is that Methodist church up the street packed with folks standing outside waiting for support? When you put all of that together, you have to come back to systemic issues. In order to get to those systemic issues, you have to start by asking the question: Why has this happened and can we do anything about it?

We believe at Living Cities that not only can we do something about it, but we have a duty to do something about it. We have a vision that in every American city that people should be able to live an economically sustainable life. People should be able to build wealth. People should be able to thrive. Abundance is not unachievable, and we should be connected.

What made Living Cities want to host its national event in Memphis?

Memphis is one of the five cities where we’re helping revitalize largely Black and brown commercial corridors that have been neglected and disinvested in. Of the cities we were looking at holding our event in, we know cities like Atlanta, Miami and Charlotte get a lot of love. We said between Nashville and Memphis, let’s go to a place that doesn’t always get the love, so we chose Memphis. We brought people here and they discovered barbecue and blues.

For me personally, there’s also the presence of the National Civil Rights Museum. Dr. (Martin Luther) King died in Memphis for supporting striking workers, who were fighting for dignity, jobs and justice. The work we’re doing, even though it’s a different methodology, is exactly the same. Memphis is a city that at one time Black bodies were traded for capital. Now, we’re the people that are saying that if you’re willing to invest in our bodies, we want you to invest in our ingenuity, our ability to build, and partner with us in building the America that children need.

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What are the biggest challenges Living Cities sees in Memphis?

Access to capital, access to knowledge capital and continuing commitment to build social capital to bring Memphians together to build a great city. That must be done with a generational view because it’s not just about what we have today but what are we building for the next generation or what are we leaving for the next generation.

How does Living Cities work to help cities like Memphis?

Our strategy in Memphis, or any other cities we are involved in, is zeroing in on the racial income and wealth gaps. The kind of income equality that we see that’s grounded in race, but not exclusively to race, is something that will continue unless we’re intentional about addressing it.

What was being addressed (during the event) was the intentional strategy to go after inclusive capital. We want to redirect resources through procurement and through new underwriting practices in the part of lenders. We want folks who hold private equity making decisions that you can invest in these businesses in Whitehaven because they’ve got the determination to build it without you, but they can’t grow it without capital. There is no growth without capital.

Our mission over the next four years is to increase the level of capital. We want to change the narrative around who’s worthy of investment, and how do we look at the returns around investment. We feel if we demonstrate that in places, then inevitably, people will say, “What’s going on over there in Raleigh? I can move outside of Memphis, but I could also move to Raleigh if I can get a quality home and get the capital to upgrade the home. When all of these businesses then come to Raleigh, I want to be part of that. I grew up here. I don’t have to go somewhere else to live.”

But you don’t feel that unless you see it, unless it is tangible. In some cities and some states, you literally have people get their education (college degree) and then they leave. They don’t see there’s any opportunity or they don’t feel like they’re going to have access to opportunity. Nobody should feel in any of our (U.S.) cities that the door is closed based on who they are or what ZIP code they grew up in. We can only break through that because those are historical patterns of exclusion.

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What are some of the economic racial barriers that need to be addressed?

Most of the private equity in this country is held in the hands of white men. There is $69.1 trillion in global assets under management, and the sad number is there is only 1% percent in the hands of Black people. When you add all Latinos, all Asians and all white women, it goes to a whopping 1.3%. By 2045, we’re going to be in a country that is multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial. When the children born today, who will be 21 by 2045, what is the economy we’re handing onto them and will it be still the same segregated economy, we grew up on?

What are the keys to building generational wealth in Black communities?

The future of this country is a future based on building an inclusive and equitable economy, which we should have always had that. But we (United States) used public policy to bar Black folks from participating in the New Deal. We used public policy to bar Black people and brown people from participating in GI Bill benefits and veteran benefits. We used public policy to exclude Black people from suburban housing and new housing construction. Then you say to us, “Please pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps,” when you’ve been giving everybody else both public and private policy advantages. Policy doesn’t have to be wrapped in a certain way for it to be beneficial to Black people.

We do need to understand the policy. That’s the work. We need to understand the Recovery Act investments. That’s the work. We need to understand tech hubs and all the other stuff flowing down to cities. That’s the work. We need to understand how public dollars can be used to help spur Black commercial corridors and businesses. That’s the work.

Nobody is going to come to us and say, “Well, by the way, you could benefit from this.” We’ve got to put the work in ourselves.

Corey Davis is the Collierville and Germantown reporter with The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached at Corey.Davis@commercialappeal.com or 901-293-1610.