Bernice Radle: Small Developers Are Your City’s Biggest Champions
Everyone has an entry point on their journey to caring about and taking action for their place. For Bernice Radle, it was witnessing the steady depopulation of Buffalo, New York, during its industrial decline, and seeing a landscape of unused, unloved buildings headed for the wrecking ball. Radle (a partner in the organization Neighborhood Evolution, which will be speaking at the 2024 Strong Towns National Gathering in Cincinnati) was motivated to save them, and, building by building, her work has helped bring a neighborhood and, with a network of like-minded citizens, the city of Buffalo back.
Radle is a developer in upstate New York, a former faculty member of the Incremental Development Alliance, and her current work helping save the city’s heritage one project at a time was recognized in her new job as the executive director of Preservation Buffalo Niagara.
In presentations Radle does with Monte Anderson (also speaking at the National Gathering), they use a farming analogy to describe how to approach being a small developer. In addition to the land, “you have to provide water and soil and sun and nutrients and love.” Radle says this extrapolates to “neighborhood farming,” for which you need skilled labor, knowledge honed from experience, and a system of supportive businesses in related fields.
When all these materials, people, and processes come together, “It's not just the building that you're trying to build, it's the community that surrounds you,” says Radle. She also lives by her own words: “My farm is one mile, basically the 14213 zip code, it's a six- or seven-minute bicycle ride” from one end to the other.
For Radle, starting small gave her an appreciation for the importance of locally owned businesses to a community. “Small businesses are where dreams come true,” says Radle, and she relishes providing commercial opportunities in her redevelopment work. “Most of my projects have been mixed-use commercial buildings [in which] the small storefront becomes a leader in the community,” says Radle. “It's like the cherry on top, right?
It’s not just the presence of local commercial outlets, which Radle calls “little centers for human interaction,” it’s the commitment of their owners that boosts a community. Local business owners provide eyes on the block, shovel snow, and pick up trash. For such citizens, operating their shop or restaurant is more than “a number on a spreadsheet; this is their everyday lives. So they won't give up unless they absolutely have to, and that makes the economy more resilient.”
Radle champions the idea that historic preservation provides an economic boost to a community. She’s excited about a Buffalo program that provides funding to rehabilitate old buildings with small businesses. This could include roof repairs, masonry work, and structural repairs, and, in one recent example, the program fixed the floors of a neighborhood coffee shop in a historic building, enabling a popular minority-owned business to continue to serve its customers.
When asked what people, including the elected officials who set some of the development rules, should know about being a small developer, Radle chuckles, “People think that people in real estate have a lot of money.” Much of her career has been doing small projects on commercial buildings, apartments, or duplex housing for which it’s been challenging to secure financing and burdensome to navigate city bureaucracy. She notes that there are many banks that won’t even issue loans under 500,000, while the average financing for one of her projects has been $120,000.
As she and a committed group of incremental developers in Buffalo have shown, enabling such activity pays big dividends for a local economy and housing supply. But financing still favors large developers and too few places have community banks, credit unions, and the ecosystem to fund local projects. “I wish cities could hear that small developers desperately need easy access to capital, that community-minded people should have all the ability that they could possibly provide,” says Radle, adding that “for a community member who is in love with their neighborhood, it's not just a building to them, it's their life.”
If you’ve got your eyes on a potential project in your town, Radle has some words of advice: Go for it. She says one great model for a first project is to renovate a duplex, allowing you to live on one side and rent the other, but the most important thing is to not be daunted. “I grew up in downtown Niagara Falls in extreme poverty and was in foster care for the first few years of my life. So I say that, because if you're trying to convey that people can do it, I will tell you right now, that they absolutely [bleeping] can do it.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.