Amazon is committing a portion of its $2B Housing Equity Fund to go toward a new training program dedicated to promote developers of color.
The e-commerce giant is partnering with Capital Impact Partners in Northern Virginia to build the two-year, $21M professional development program, it announced Wednesday.
“Developers of color bring enormous opportunity for creative and inclusive solutions to community-focused real estate development, but systemic issues continue to create multiple barriers to their success,” Ellis Carr, the president and CEO of Capital Impact Partners and CDC Small Business Finance, said in a statement. “Through this program, we are partnering with Amazon in helping open doors for people of color who can then pay their experience forward.”
The job training program would include virtual and in-person instruction on real estate fundamentals, small group mentoring, networking opportunities and access to capital for pre-development expenses, Amazon said in a press release.
The program is split between the three markets where Amazon has headquarters —Seattle, Arlington, Virginia, and Nashville — and will initially support up to 30 participants.
Diversity remains a deeply seated issue in commercial real estate. According to an analysis by Bisnow published last month, the number of public board of director seats at the country's largest firms filled by people of color has increased from 14% to 16.5% over the past year, a slight increase that shows improvement, but is far from where many companies pledged to reach.
The numbers look even bleaker for professional real estate organizations: The Urban Land Institute, for instance, acknowledged that just 5.4% of its U.S. members are Black in its 2020 annual diversity report.
Amazon said its program is designed to bring more developers of color into the business, especially in the realm of affordable housing, where it has dedicated significant funding.
“With this accelerator program, we are laser focused on lifting up emerging real estate developers of color. We want to foster their professional growth through education and training, as well as improve their access to capital, which can be elusive to developers of color,” Amazon Housing Equity Fund Director Catherine Buell said in a statement. “If we are going to bring about lasting, holistic, and meaningful change to how affordable housing is developed, developers of color need to be a part of the solution.”
Beyond this latest accelerator program, Amazon has already committed millions toward preserving affordable housing in the area surrounding its HQ2 in Arlington.
In June, the company committed $125M toward funding 1,000 affordable housing units near Metrorail stations in a partnership with regional transit operator WMATA.
It also purchased and donated to a nonprofit an affordable living community across the street from the first phase of HQ2 in National Landing in order to preserve the building's affordability for 99 years. In July, it announced an additional $40M investment on the land next to that building, Crystal House, for a new affordable building that will provide rental units for those earning up to 80% of the area median income.
At Bisnow's Greater D.C. Affordable Housing event this summer, Buell said Amazon's significant grants, loans and donations were setting an example in the region that it hoped would inspire more developers to preserve affordability over longer periods of time.
"Many of us have seen buildings where 20, 30, 40 years in, as the neighborhood gets really, really great, all of a sudden, you're losing those assets," Buell said. "We know that change takes place over time, and we wanted to make sure just as the neighborhood is really taking off that there is a diversity of incomes that are able to stay in the neighborhood."
