[22] East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: Community Owned Real Estate

Cooperative Journal

East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is based in the East Bay of California. They facilitate BIPOC and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties, taking them permanently off the market. Residents, investors, community members, and EB PREC staff then co-own and co-steward the property. It creates a shift toward community controlled assets, and empowering their communities to be ecologically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and economically restorative and regenerative.

In this episode, I speak with executive director Noni Session about how EB PREC is garnering support to shift real estate ownership from extractive developers into the hands of the BIPOC community in Oakland and the East Bay. She shares the difference between a permanent real estate co-op and land trust, ancestral remembrance of cooperative ownership, how they got the first group of people to invest, their governance structure and multi-stakeholder model, prioritizing inclusivity and accessibility to individual investors, transparency of investment risks and how they mitigate it, and their exciting new venture - a historic Black arts svenue they’ve acquired for Black artists and small businesses at 50% of market rate.

Document detailing their direct public offering: https://ebprec.org/offering

Esthers Orbit Room - mixed-use Black cultural venue: https://ebprec.org/esthers

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperatives