Tayyib Smith wants to make a derelict Kensington bank a testing ground for ‘ethical’ real estate development. Can it work?

Tayyib Smith was running a successful Center City marketing firm in 2016 when he received an invitation to attend a boot camp on “ethical” real estate development with Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based community activist and artist. Now an international art star whose work is celebrated in New York, London, and Venice, Gates had perfected the real estate version of the slow food movement and used it to reinvigorate neglected Black neighborhoods on the city’s South Side.

Smith’s only foray into real estate at the time was Pipeline, a coworking space that he helped establish near City Hall. But he came away from Gates’ program determined to apply the same development recipe — a blend of low-cost preservation, attention-getting art installations, and patient community engagement — to rebuild Philadelphia’s own forgotten neighborhoods.

Since then, Smith has managed to pull off a series of provocative public art events, including last year’s ghostly tribute to the historic figures who populated Philadelphia’s South Street neighborhood when it was the epicenter of Black life in America.

But for a Black entrepreneur with both a nontraditional approach and limited access to capital, the real estate piece proved more challenging. Several of Smith’s most promising projects have been caught up in the maw of the city’s bureaucracy, while others were sidelined by the pandemic.

Smith never gave up, and now he and his business partner, Jacob Roller, are poised to put Gates’ ideas about ethical development into practice at one of Kensington Avenue’s grimmest intersections.

This summer, they will start converting a derelict, early 20th century bank at Huntingdon Street into a banquet hall and commissary kitchen for Strother Enterprises, a Black-owned caterer. They’ve also secured financing for a handsome 114-unit apartment building next door. Designed by the JKRP, the architecture firm founded by Roller’s father, Jerry, the addition is expected to go into construction in the fall.

On its face, their $35 million Kensington project might not seem so different from other developments in Philadelphia that incorporate historic buildings. While businesses owned by underrepresented groups will get priority for the commercial spaces, and Impact Services will be brought in to train Strother’s kitchen workers, the apartments will rent at market prices. Smith and Roller make no claims about saving the neighborhood — which is already dotted with shiny new metal-and-brick mid-rises — from gentrification.

So what, you might ask, makes this an ethical development?

For Smith, who rarely goes anywhere without a book tucked under his arm and a Leica camera around his neck, real estate development is political action by other means. Described by Philadelphia Magazine as the city’s “theorist-in-chief,” Smith sees the renovation of the Textile National Bank, which was created to fund the operations of Kensington’s mill barons, as a way to tackle an even more urgent cause: Philadelphia’s yawning racial wealth gap.

The city’s income disparities tend to get less attention than gentrification, but as Smith likes to point out, the gap is one reason Philadelphia has never been able to overcome its inglorious distinction as America’s poorest big city. Median income for Black households in Philadelphia is nearly half what it is for white ones, the same as it was before the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Giving Black-, Latino- and Asian-owned businesses first crack at prime retail space, Smith says, is one way to reduce that chasm. Because the bank is in a Keystone Opportunity Zone, its business tenants won’t have to pay sales tax for supplies. That’s a big deal for a busy catering operation like Strother.

By renovating the blighted bank, they’ll also be eliminating a notorious magnet for opioid dealers and their customers, improving life for residents of the rowhouses on Huntingdon Street.

Smith’s interest in ethical development goes beyond the developments themselves. He’s made it his mission to amplify the wealth-gap issue through his art projects, photographs, and writing, including a recent series of opinion pieces in The Inquirer. “I feel like I’m more likely to get a response from a [foundation] board member” after one appears, he jokes.

In pursuit of change, Smith has also become what Tya Winn, director of the Community Design Collaborative, calls the “neighborhood curmudgeon.”

He is a regular at community meetings, especially those featuring presentations from city officials. When Angela D. Brooks, who is overseeing Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s housing initiative, spoke to the Design Advocacy Group, Smith used the occasion to pepper her with questions about the city’s problematic Land Bank, where one of Smith & Roller’s affordable housing developments has been tied up for years. As soon as the event was over, he rushed to another meeting to challenge Ryan Boyer, head of the Building Trades Council, on the same subject.

“People tend to go along with dysfunction,” Smith told me. “I think a hit dog should holler.”

Smith grew up in the Friends Housing Coop, in what is today Northern Liberties, but says his family later suffered housing instability. After stints in the U.S. Navy, Temple University, and as a waiter at Le Bec-Fin, he launched his firm Little Giant Creative using the marketing strategies pioneered by hip-hop artists.

Smith and Roller came to ethical development through opposite ends of the real estate business. Roller, who cofounded the real estate company MMPartners, says he was already growing dissatisfied with traditional practices when he met Smith at a street festival in Brewerytown more than a decade ago. Roller had been doing development in the neighborhood and organized the event as a way of giving back to local residents. Smith’s marketing firm had convinced Heineken to contribute to the event.

As they talked, Roller recalls, they both confessed that they were struggling with the constraints of traditional development, which elevates profit over the social good. Smith asked Roller if he thought it was possible “to do development without displacement.”

There was no clear answer — then or now — but they continued to meet and talk. In 2019, they formed a partnership, Smith & Roller, in an attempt to pursue the strategies Smith had learned from Gates in Chicago. Their skill sets proved complementary. Roller knew the development ropes — how to obtain financing and work with contractors. Smith had contacts with nonprofits and knew how to articulate their mission.

It’s ironic that their first major project involves a vacant bank. Gates made a name for himself in Chicago when he transformed a similarly columned, early 20th century bank into a community center and exhibition space, known as the Stony Island Arts Bank.

Much of Gates’ work involves using remnants from the past to evoke memories of Black communities in their heyday and focus attention on the loss of cultural places — themes that Smith often references in his art projects.

Stony Island is now the centerpiece of a much larger collection of buildings that offers gallery exhibits, art classes, job training, and staged events. Like Smith, Gates doesn’t worry that these projects might accelerate gentrification; he believes giving people access to culture and wealth-building skills is more important.

Kensington’s Textile National Bank is also filled with buried history, both grand and painful. The white, Classical Revival building, designed by Herman Miller — a protégé of Frank Furness — in 1909, was founded by Kensington’s wealthy factory owners when the neighborhood was the textile capital of the country. The Market-Frankford El had not yet been built, and the ornate, temple-like entrance on Kensington Avenue became a portal to their exclusive world.

The bank, and then the neighborhood, went into decline after the stock market crash in 1929. It’s been empty since the 1990s, and today people made desperate by opioid addiction huddle between the Corinthian columns.

It is a testament to the developers’ faith in their project that they plan to restore and reopen the Kensington Avenue entrance when the banquet hall is completed. ISA Building Lab is overseeing the renovations. There is space in the bank and an adjacent, two-story factory for several businesses, and possibly a gallery space.

There must be something in the water in Philadelphia because the city has nurtured several developers who practice various forms of ethical development. Ken Weinstein, a Germantown developer, just celebrated the 10th anniversary of his Jumpstart program, which supports small, underrepresented developers.

Lindsey Scannapieco’s work at Bok, which also just marked its 10th anniversary, similarly allows entrepreneurs of color to rent affordable startup space and hosts regular arts events to create a sense of community. She honed her approach after participating in Gates’ Chicago program on ethical development — the same boot camp Smith attended. “I would often see him on the plane to Chicago,” she recalls.

One day, Smith pressed Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted into her hand. They’ve remained friends ever since. Meanwhile, Gates is now working on his first major Philadelphia project, the Forman Arts Initiative on American Street, a short walk from the Kensington Bank.

Nearly a decade after Smith first learned about ethical development, he is still pushing his real estate colleagues to embrace its tenets in their projects.

“It can’t just be about highest-and-best use,” he says, referring to the traditional zoning standard. “There has to be some humanity in it, too.”