This story is the second in a two-part series on community-controlled commercial real estate projects scaling up through new partnerships and relationships. Read part one, on a Denver community land trust\u2019s work, here<\/a>. This coverage was produced in collaboration with Proximate<\/a>, an independent media outlet covering movements for participatory problem-solving, as part of its series on the future of participatory investing<\/a>. Get Proximate\u2019s stories in your inbox<\/a>.<\/p>\n Located in the Kingsbridge Heights section of the Bronx, the 570,000 square-foot Kingsbridge Armory was said to be the largest armory in the world when first completed in 1917. Above its columnless, 180,000 square-foot main drill hall, the vaulted ceiling peaks at around 120 feet. Two 140-foot tall headhouse towers flank the main entrance on Kingsbridge Road, giving the building its castle-like appearance. After the National Guard vacated the armory in 1994, the building reverted to city ownership two years later, and has sat mostly vacant ever since. <\/p>\n \u201cAnybody who moved to the area, that building\u2019s been a part of our lives and it\u2019s been empty this whole time,\u201d says Juan Nu\u00f1ez, whose family moved to the neighborhood in 2001. \u201cWhatever goes into that building can affect the community as a whole, not just the businesses surrounding it, but everyone. We don\u2019t want it to turn into just, like, a Target where they give people these crappy jobs and push out our local businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last two decades, two city-selected development teams have tried and failed to repurpose the armory, first as a mega-mall and then as a multi-rink ice sports facility.<\/p>\n As an organizer with the 5,000-member Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition<\/a>, founded in 1974, Nu\u00f1ez has spent the last three years leading a grassroots campaign demanding the city turn over ownership of the facility to the surrounding Kingsbridge Heights community itself. The coalition sees community ownership and control over the facility\u2019s ongoing future as the best way, perhaps the only way, to revitalize the Kingsbridge Armory without displacing the existing residents and beloved local businesses nearby.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to make sure that whoever comes next, whatever the city decides, that the city doesn\u2019t decide on their own, make it so the community gets to decide, not just negotiate but actually decide what gets built inside of the building,\u201d Nu\u00f1ez says. \u201cWe want to make sure then this doesn\u2019t become something like the Barclays Center where they build something there that\u2019s just going to push out local businesses, raise local businesses rent and rents all for tenants, too.\u201d<\/p>\n After three years of meetings and negotiations between the community, public officials and developers, Nu\u00f1ez and the coalition are getting their shot. Backed by more than $200 million in public dollars and the vocal support of their local council member, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition is on track to own more than 20% of the square footage at the renovated Kingsbridge Armory. On top of that, the newly selected developer team has agreed to an array of additional elements giving local residents and businesses an ongoing voice in the tenant mix and programming at the site.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t A rendering of the redeveloped Kingsbridge Armory. (Image courtesy\u00a0FXCollaborative)<\/p>\n The project may yet fall apart. It may not meet everyone\u2019s current expectations. But Council Member Pierina Ana Sanchez \u2014 born and raised in the neighborhood \u2014 believes it will be the one that finally elevates community power in economic development to more than pilot projects, picket signs and community benefit agreements.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we could do it here in this massive, difficult, complex, horrific monster of a project, you can do it over there in that 200,000 square-foot project,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredible precedent. \u2026 These success stories show what is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n Community power in economic development<\/p>\n Community ownership and control of commercial and mixed-use real estate have been quietly gaining momentum across the country \u2014 Kensington Corridor Trust in Philadelphia, The Guild in Atlanta, E.G. Woode in Chicago, East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative in Oakland, Rondo Community Land Trust and Partnership in Property Commercial Land Trust in the Twin Cities, to name just a few. <\/p>\n Some of these examples are cooperatives, whose members include the occupants of the buildings as well as members of the surrounding community and investors. Others, like Kensington, have created perpetual purpose trusts<\/a> as another form of intentionally structured community control over real estate. And in Denver, as Next City and Proximate recently reported<\/a>, a community land trust has expanded beyond affordable housing to take control of 4,000 square feet of commercial and community space.<\/p>\n Read more: A Community Land Trust Is Raising the Bar for Community Power in Economic Development<\/a><\/p>\n So far, as important as these storefronts and other spaces are to their surrounding communities, they\u2019re mostly on the smaller end of the scale. A few hundred square feet here, maybe a few thousand square feet there. None comes close to the 570,000 square-foot Kingsbridge Armory. There aren\u2019t many projects of that scale, period. Something so large and also something city-owned, which offers a moment to set some new precedents for how public officials and city agencies can act in situations where they\u2019ve historically been all too easily prone to ignore communities and follow the lead of whoever has the deepest pockets.<\/p>\n A community vision for community power<\/p>\n Community organizing helped defeat the first proposal, back in 2009, to turn the Kingsbridge Armory into a mega-mall featuring the standard big corporate tenants like Bed, Bath & Beyond or Old Navy. <\/p>\n The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition spearheaded a campaign demanding the city require all future mall tenants to pay employees at least $10\/hour, then considered a living wage in New York. After the city-selected developer team refused to agree, City Council voted to deny their proposal.<\/p>\n The ice rink plan, which city council approved in 2013, seemed to come out of nowhere. Fueled in part by celebrity involvement (hall of fame hockey player Mark Messier) in a deal backed by corporate dollars from ice sports equipment manufacturers, it was indicative of a development process that privileged those who had an abundance of money and power but little connection to the community.<\/p>\n \u201c[With the ice rink developers] we were able to negotiate community space and procurement and local hiring,\u201d says Nu\u00f1ez. \u201cBut that really was, I felt like, something that was going to be put there and then ultimately change the neighborhood and who lives there \u2014 a kind of gentrifier armory. The folks that are living here now are not going to be going ice skating. They were prepping for those that were coming after. That wasn\u2019t for us.\u201d<\/p>\n The community benefits from the ice rink project never came to fruition. Developers failed to raise the funding necessary for the project to break ground \u2014 despite the celebrity backing, millions from corporate donors, a $108 million loan commitment from New York State, and eight years to find the rest of the money. The city, which still had ownership of the property, quietly walked away from the ice rink plan at the end of 2021.<\/p>\n The third time around, things have already unfolded much differently. Before soliciting a new round of proposals from developers for the Kingsbridge Armory, the city spent nine months engaging with thousands of local residents to bring their ideas and vision into a new request for proposals. The community engagement process was c0-chaired by Council Member Sanchez and Sandra Lobo, executive director of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.<\/p>\n Residents told the city they wanted flexible indoor space for community events and recreation as well as a live performance venue. They wanted affordable retail that complemented existing businesses in the neighborhood. They wanted space for light manufacturing businesses that were already being displaced from the Bronx, businesses that could provide good paying jobs. <\/p>\n But the biggest, most ambitious idea of them all? Residents wanted the city to turn over ownership of the Kingsbridge Armory to the community, allowing neighbors long excluded from major real estate decisions to have ongoing power over what goes on at the site. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Outside the Kingsbridge Armory. (Photo by\u00a0Oscar Perry Abello)<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been to all the meetings they\u2019ve had for a couple years, wrote on ideas, gave ideas, presented ideas, or when I can\u2019t make it to a meeting, I\u2019ll call or email Juan [Nu\u00f1ez] to ask what happened,\u201d says Tara Carr, a member of the coalition and lifelong resident of the Bronx. <\/p>\n \u201c[Community ownership] is a huge key component, because it lets us know that we have power, we have a say in what happens around us, what happens in our environment. Because we live here, we work [here], we take our children to school here, we take our children to the local businesses here, we develop a relationship with local businesses over the years of living here.\u201d<\/p>\n Creating possibility<\/p>\n For those who grew up nearby, the Kingsbridge Armory has been such a constant yet quiet presence that it can be hard for them to recall their first memory of it. <\/p>\n For Council Member Sanchez, it might have been tagging along after school with her mother to pick up one of her older brothers, who was among the last ROTC trainees who trained at the facility before it was decommissioned. Or it might have been picking up strawberry cheesecake from a bakery across the street from the armory, one of the first places her mother let her walk by herself. <\/p>\n Sanchez first took office as city council member in January 2022. As she started going around to have her first informal one-on-one meetings as a council member, usually over Dominican coffee, everyone told her she was crazy to put the armory at the top of her list of priorities while in office.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople were like, \u2018don\u2019t take that on, it\u2019s going to be a huge failure, it\u2019s going to be impossible, it\u2019s too expensive, it\u2019s too complicated,\u2019\u201d Sanchez says. <\/p>\n But Sanchez knew that, with the city having just walked away from the failed plan to convert the armory into an ice sports facility, she would have a huge opportunity. In New York, as in nearly all cities, the local council member has veto power over zoning and significant land use changes in their district \u2014 including and especially when it comes to deciding the future of long-vacant city-owned property, like the Kingsbridge Armory. It was that veto power, pressured by the community organizing, that killed the proposal to turn the armory into a mega-mall back in 2009.<\/p>\n That kind of power has often been a magnet for corruption and political favoritism. Developers often make campaign donations with the implicit, or sometimes explicit, expectation of buying influence over officials whose decisions can boost speculative developers and investors\u2019 profits. Developers also wield access to capital as leverage when seeking zoning or land use changes, pitching their projects as the only way to bring jobs, tax revenue and the kind of ribbon-cutting photo ops that flatter elected officials.<\/p>\n Sanchez wasn\u2019t about to push forward a community-led vision for the Kingsbridge Armory empty-handed. At the same time that she was co-chairing the task force that resulted in a new RFP for the armory, she was working on getting the city and the state to commit $100 million each to the facility\u2019s redevelopment. Her own office committed an additional $12 million in discretionary public funds, and Borough President Vanessa Gibson\u2019s office chipped in with another $2 million. <\/p>\n \u201cKnowing that I would have a shot at having so much leverage during the [land use approval process], I wanted to first make sure that I set it up for success with overlapping elected officials,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cI said, let\u2019s pull together as much public funding as possible, then we can put the terms around it together and hopefully move it and shepherd it from there.\u201d<\/p>\n Those $214 million in public dollars aren\u2019t nearly enough needed to implement the vision put forth by the community in the RFP process, but the timing was important. They were committed<\/a> after the community visioning process that led to the new RFP, but before the city had announced which developer team it had picked to implement the vision. <\/p>\n For Sanchez, that meant the city agencies and public officials involved in selecting the developer as well as approving zoning and land use changes for the project would be less prone to sacrificing pieces of the community\u2019s vision for the sake of making sure the project \u201cpenciled out\u201d \u2014 the phrase developers love to use in reference to a project\u2019s financial feasibility. <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t A rendering of the redeveloped Kingsbridge Armory. (Image courtesy\u00a0FXCollaborative)<\/p>\n Community ownership still ended up as one of those pieces that was constantly on the chopping block, before and after those $214 million in public dollars were committed to the project. According to Sanchez, there was resistance and skepticism all along the way to ensuring some version of community ownership and control would make it into the final redevelopment agreement between the city and the developer. While New York has thousands of housing co-ops and other forms of community-controlled real estate, it just hadn\u2019t been part of a project this large before. <\/p>\n \u201cMy philosophy on most things, but especially in this job as a council member, is that possibility doesn\u2019t exist, it is created,\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cWe can\u2019t let people tell us what is or what isn\u2019t possible. We have to create what is possible, and we do that through public engagement and conversations and persuasion.\u201d<\/p>\n The first step was ensuring community ownership would be in the final report from the community visioning process. Step two was making sure community ownership made it into the RFP documents from the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which led the RFP process on behalf of the city.<\/p>\n \u201cStep three is when they\u2019ve selected a developer, and conversations are moving forward, it\u2019s saying, hey, [community ownership] was in the report, it was in the RFP, what are you doing to make this a reality?\u201d Sanchez says. \u201cWe didn\u2019t really know what it was going to look like from many perspectives in terms of elected officials and community groups. We started with that vision that we wanted the community to have not only a say, but, explicitly, community control.\u201d<\/p>\n Bringing a vision to life<\/p>\n After months of working with the city to develop an RFP for the armory facility, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition submitted its own proposal to the New York Economic Development Corporation, the city\u2019s quasi-public economic development arm. <\/p>\n The agency selected another developer: 8th Regiment Partners, comprising local firms Maddd Equities and Joy Construction. But, shortly after being announced as the winner in January 2025, 8th Regiment Partners reached out to Lobo.<\/p>\n \u201c[They] wanted to partner with us,\u201d Lobo says. \u201cIt was important to start that conversation with a bigger framework of the non-negotiables that were really critical to the community.\u201d After being tapped, she said \u201cwe gathered with folks and said OK, here was the big, long list of things we wanted\u2026now we need to get a sense of, where is the line in the sand for us?\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next six months, the coalition laid out what they wanted under a potential partnership with the city-selected developer. <\/p>\n Living wages and union jobs were once again part of the community\u2019s vision. That\u2019s now promised as part of a project labor agreement signed between the city and 8th Regiment Partners. <\/p>\n The coalition also wanted the redeveloped armory to adhere to high environmental standards, given the long history of environmental injustice in the Bronx. The building will be all-electric, including the 500 new housing units that will be built next to the historic structure in the project\u2019s second phase. (All 500 units will be low-income restricted between 30-80% area median income, affordable to a large swath of existing Bronx residents.) There are also plans for a rooftop solar array, as well as stormwater retention elements around the exterior of the site.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t A mural outside the Kingsbridge Armory. (Photo by\u00a0Oscar Perry Abello)<\/p>\n 8th Regiment Partners estimates the completed project will generate $17 million a year in total revenue from concerts and rental income. Under the agreement with Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, a percentage of those revenues will flow into an ongoing community benefit fund, governed by a community advisory council, with the intention of supporting community wealth-building and anti-displacement programs in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n And the centerpiece of the agreement: two 99-year commercial condo units owned by the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. <\/p>\n One will become a 25,000 square-foot community hub with space for workforce development programming, worker-owned cooperative development and local business support; the other, a 100,000 square-foot facility with flexible space for at least two light manufacturing businesses that will sublet from the coalition. Together, the two commercial condos comprise around 20% of the total square footage at the Kingsbridge Armory (excluding the new residential buildings to be built later).<\/p>\n In addition, through a community council and a commercial condo association, the community will have a voice when it comes to the tenant mix and programming throughout the rest of the commercial and office space in the facility. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen we thought about the core components of the community ownership piece within our project, it was the light manufacturing,\u201d says Lobo. She points to Don Carvajal Coffee Roasters and the Point Morris Distillery as examples of successful Bronx businesses that have been pushed out of the Bronx or have been unable to find space to expand. \u201cThat really felt like the quintessential challenge to the Bronx. When we have these success stories, they actually can\u2019t remain. They can\u2019t stay.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanchez was pleasantly surprised by the agreement struck between 8th Regiment Partners and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. She anticipated much more distance between the developer and the community that she might have to help bridge. <\/p>\n There are still plenty of details that will only be worked out after the project moves forward. There\u2019s work to be done codifying the community-ownership and community governance pieces into the ground lease signed between the city and the developers. That agreement must be signed before the developer team can go out and start raising the rest of the estimated $650 million needed for phase one of the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment \u2014 which would cover rehab and renovations on the existing 570,000 square-foot facility. <\/p>\n But community control won\u2019t be an afterthought tacked on to the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment at the end of all that. As the developer team goes out to seek funding sources to cover the rest of what\u2019s needed, there is actually a small but growing crop of investors who are actually looking for projects that involve some form of it. <\/p>\n \u201cThe partnership is definitely the right path to get to where we need for this project to be successful,\u201d says Maddd Equities founder Jorge Madruga, speaking for 8th Regiment Partners. \u201c[The coalition] knows a lot of the stakeholders who already lost space in the Bronx or have a big need for space in the Bronx. We weren\u2019t in touch with those businesses, that\u2019s something the coalition brings that\u2019s special to this. Hopefully those businesses will come in and grow so much they\u2019ll move out of there and then somebody else will come and do the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Cooperative investors<\/p>\n John Holdsclaw IV may claim to be an introvert, but he\u2019ll talk your ear off when it comes to historically Black colleges and universities (like his alma mater, N.C. A&T State), community development finance and the power of cooperatives.<\/p>\n For more than two decades, Holdsclaw held various positions with the National Cooperative Bank, a unique commercial bank created by Congress and specializing in lending to cooperatives<\/a>. He\u2019s currently the board chair of the Cooperative Development Foundation. And he\u2019s the founder of Rochdale Capital, a small, relatively new, nonprofit loan fund. Named for the Rochdale Principles, a set of seven principles<\/a> internationally recognized by the cooperative movement, the fund specializes in loans to cooperatives and community-owned real estate projects. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/NYCEDC-Press-Release-Inline-Image-Rendering-Kingsbridge-Armory_920_517_80.jpg\")
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