By OSCAR PERRY ABELLO at NEXT CITY
Earlier this year, Crystal Ortiz started walking up and down Kensington Avenue looking for a proper storefront she could rent out for her growing business. When she found it right down the street, she was delighted that she didn’t have to deal with a real estate brokerage, an absentee landlord or some Wall Street-backed real estate investment trust looking to extract profit from the property.
Ortiz’s new landlord is the neighborhood where she grew up. In October, she signed a lease with the Kensington Corridor Trust for the storefront at 3314 Kensington Avenue. She’s the trust’s first commercial tenant. It’s a new type of commercial real estate entity that, as previously covered in Next City, is attempting to put control over the corridor’s future economic development into the surrounding community’s hands.
Read the full story at nextcity.org.
