In a tumultuous year of redevelopment and transition, preservation efforts are pointing to the economic structures that once anchored D.C.’s historic communities.
Among the local advocates championing the vision is DC Community Wealth Builders (CWB) organizer Abi Shakur, who says the work starts with reinvesting in the residents themselves, especially the city’s most vulnerable.
“I’ve been asking myself…what is the actual pathway forward to solve all the issues, to transform our communities, to break the cycles of trauma, poverty, etc., and I think [it’s] building solidarity,” Shakur, 28, told The Informer. “Community wealth building as a means … to right all those systemic wrongs … to change how we interact with one another, how we think of community itself.”
Backed by data from Harvard University-based research hub Opportunity Sights (OI), disparities in economic mobility are steep, but not immutable.
According to OI’s July 2024 “Quarterly Journal of Economics,” divergent trends in economic mobility were most strongly linked to differential changes in childhood environments, such as exposure to neighborhoods with higher outcomes and lower race gaps — both of which can increase outcomes and produce smaller disparities in the next generation.
To that point, Shakur emphasized where communal empowerment and betterment meet in the middle.
“Imagine you step out and in every resource that you use — the grocery store, the bookstore cafe, everything you do day to day is not owned by some big boss up in the sky, [but] the actual workers themselves,” he continued. “It builds a sense of connectivity, a sense of camaraderie, it builds a sense of ownership and stake. You want your neighborhood to survive [and] everything in it, you can see yourself in.”
Among roughly 200 local organizers fueled through the CWB coalition, Shakur said his drive stems from his own upbringing, bearing witness to an inequitable ecosystem.
After his family was priced out of the District, the then-preteen moved to Baltimore, where the realities of living in an impoverished neighborhood meant opportunity was defined by access, and economic injustice was the status quo for minorities.
Now, at the tip of the mission for the 28-year-old is redesigning the terms and conditions in which residents can thrive — one that puts wealth back in their own hands.
“On the one hand, we have: how can we just create more avenues— more mechanisms for folks to make money, to actually build wealth. The other component, to me, feels more like … the cultural element of this goal,” he said. “When I look back at where I come from, the number one issue on anybody’s mind is: ‘How am I going to pay my bills, how am I going to survive economically?’ And there is a way for those of us who are focused on change … to answer that question.”
Investing in Wealth ‘Outside the Paradigm of Dollars and Cents’
Piggybacking on the Community Wealth Building mission, Shakur highlighted alternative economies as a clear first step to shape wealth for underserved areas across the DMV.
The D.C. native touted a model that prioritizes long-term sustainability over corporate growth, all the while pouring into its own residents and the spaces that uphold the city’s roots.
“We have the means to make it easier to survive just by knocking on each other’s door,” Shakur explained. “You can knock on your neighbor’s door because Beau works on carpentry and plumbing, and I have my own skills….there’s the old classic example of [borrowing] a cup of sugar. We can help each other that way.”
A series of avenues to create more cooperatives include: increased ownership for employees and tenants, as well as more spaces for small businesses to thrive right within the communities they serve.
Aside from prompting systemic change, Shakur said the method aims to restore the mutual aid work that has historically spurred progress among D.C.’s most vulnerable, including the historic Barry Farm neighborhood in Ward 8.
What started as an opportunity catalyst for newly freed African Americans post-Civil War, and later became Barry Farm Dwellings for affordable housing, now stands as a blueprint for forging Black excellence and economic empowerment across generations of D.C.
“I mean, they built that [community] with their own hands,” Shakur said. “There’s a legacy there, and it’s a legacy that has been anchored in D.C.’s Black community, specifically, through things like Barry Farm. The time [was] probably worse than it is now, but [policymakers] did not value what that was and…what it meant to the people there. I think there’s definitely a parallel here to today.”
With the Barry Farm legacy comes the voices of African American leadership — from figures like Frederick Douglass and Dr. Georgiana Rose Simpson, one of the first Black women to get her Ph.D, to the civic activism in the 1950s and 60s that led to the integration of D.C.’s public schools.
Now seven years into a decade-long redevelopment project, which prompted a mass relocation of residents in 2019, the mission to preserve historic neighborhoods like Barry Farm is a two-prong cause for Empower DC’S Corey Shaw Jr.
“This is still an isolated incident of a better-than-other-folks developer coming in and doing some work — because there are, in fact, communities across the city that have been displaced, and likely will see some kind of displacement force, unfortunately, visited upon them,” said the staff historian.“We have to get back to this notion of what community development looks like. What does it mean to have community at the table?”
What usually starts with stipulations to boost morale too often results in injustice and gentrification, Shaw continued, either dwindling District neighborhoods by race or reinforcing the cycles advocates aim to obstruct.
“Wards 5, 7, and 8 are all we have as it relates to strongholds of Black folk, and that’s by design,” he told The Informer. “We really have to center community voices in the development process, because if we don’t, all we’re going to continue to see is this displacement. And we’re going to get to a place where the folks that have been in place for 10,15, 20,30, years, they will be gone, and there won’t be much of anything.”
Where Narrative Meets Policy — and Progress Happens
While local organizations work to drive policy and engagement, Joseph Green, CEO of LMSvoice Productions, is emphasizing the power of storytelling to shape what communal wealth looks like.
Green, who helped lead the 2025 documentary “Barry Farm: A Conversation Across Generations,” in partnership with Empower DC, told The Informer the tool lies in using art to not only revisit history, but depict the resilience that captures its essence.
“For all of those who may be cynical because of what the world has been, there have been moments in time where certain things have come together and people have been able: to take care of each other,” said the CEO, “to lean on their neighbors, to seek careers that [they] were told, ‘people who come from where you come from don’t get to do all of that.’”
When it came to creating the short film, and his passion for professional storytelling overall, he shared one goal: to build something for the next generation to “live a little better than we did.”
“We, as filmmakers, need to understand that what we are dealing with isn’t a commodity of pretty pictures on screen, but an opportunity to invoke conversation and create tangible change in the communities that these films extract their stories from,” said the award-winning storyteller. “I dream that young people in Barry Farms see … they don’t have to be served up to the developers, they don’t have to be served up to the members of the [D.C. Council]. They can take back and build on the legacy that was there…make Barry Farms whatever they think it should be.”
Following a screening of the Barry Farm documentary earlier this year, Shakur reflected on the realities of a historic trend where big corporations come in and “sell out” the longtime residents who, evidently, keep the local economy flowing.
Thus, CWB is pushing for local leaders to implement a land bank — allowing the city to invest its own property in community use, such as partnering with a local land trust to develop affordable housing — or a public bank, where decisions from interest rates to financial investments can be made “in the best interest of the residents themselves.”
“We want people to be able to start their own businesses, to chase their own dreams…in the neighborhoods they claim as their homes, and serve the people who are there with them,” Shakur told The Informer. “We have a ton of power already here, but you have to look outside of the paradigm of dollars and cents to really recognize and value it for what it is.”
In the meantime, the organizer said the future of the city depends on communities as a whole learning how to lean into one another and build the sort of wealth that can’t be counted in dollars.
“It takes trust, it takes love, it takes hope, really,” he said, “we’re trying to bring that back.”
This story is part of a national initiative exploring how geography, policy, and local conditions influence access to opportunity. Find more stories at economicopportunitylab.com/.
