BY ELLY FISHMAN
Fast Company
It was the call Juli Kaufmann had dreaded, and it came just one week before the activist-turned-real-estate-developer planned to break ground on her $10 million, 16,500-square-foot project. The building, called The Aux, was pitched as a new anchor for Black and brown businesses in the city of Evanston, Illinois, a place where wealth disparities between Black and white residents stand among the worst in the country. But now, the plan teetered into uncertainty. The project’s final permit, Kaufmann was told, would be delayed. Again.
A sprawling wellness center with 10 committed tenants, The Aux—Kaufmann’s first project outside her hometown of Milwaukee—had already weathered several delays. First, there was the pandemic. Then, the sale of the proposed building fell through. Over time, what began as a $6 million project almost doubled in cost. Kaufmann and the project’s codevelopers—three Black entrepreneurs (Tosha Wilson, Jacqui White, and Tiffini Holmes) and Lori Laser, a philanthropist invested in racial equity, had spent months reassuring more than 60 investors, many of them Evanston residents new to real estate, that the project would soon break ground. The permit problem was a disappointment, but, says Kaufmann, hardly a deterrent. Finding ways to overcome barriers is core to her ethos. “Systems are hard to change,” says Kaufmann, who has spent the past 15 years trying to do just that. “You just keep going.”
Read more here.