Hello REIC People!
Read below for the full June 2016 reports from the NYC REIC’s various working committees.
In Solidarity,
-Newsletter Crew
Scoping Workgroup Update
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- The Scoping Workgroup hauls in the green!
The Scoping Workgroup is developing a set of criteria for projects that the NYC REIC wants to collaborate with local organizers to fund. The general goals for this document are three: (1) clearly communicate an intention for the kinds of projects the REIC wants to work with / support,
(2) communicate why certain projects should be supported, and (3) allow NYC REIC to say NO to some potential investment projects so that we can confidently say YES to others.
The latest draft of our criteria is here and we continue to refine it with in-person meetings and online editing sessions. Our next in-person meeting will be at the Sunview Luncheonette on Tuesday, June 14 at 7pm! Come to 221 Nassau Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, G train to Nassau. This is where the 607 CSA delivers its veggies on Tuesday (see photos of us getting lucky last time). If you want to get involved and can’t make the meeting, contact nyc-reic-project-scoping@googlegroups.com.
Steering Committee Update
Together with our other workgroups and committees, your Steering Committee is building capacity. At our May 7 meeting in Park Slope, we created a timeline for answering key questions this quarter about the NYC REIC’s future. Some of our first questions to answer are: What is our business model? What are the legal entities we will be incorporating to achieve it? Our full question-timeline is here.
Our lawyers at the Community Economic Development Clinic of Fordham Law School, helped us begin to answer these key questions at our May 19 meeting. They presented their research and recommendations on fundraising in compliance with securities regulations, entity choice, investing self-directed retirement accounts, and collateral securitization. They suggested legal entities we could form that would give us the capacity to pool our money to invest together in commercial real estate while managing decisions about those investments democratically. You can see the slides from the legal team’s presentation here.
Please attend the public portion of our June 12 meeting starting at 3:00pm at Spaceworks, 540 President Street, 2E, Brooklyn NY 11215 [closest transit: Union Street R, B37 bus, Carroll St F, G.] We will present our proposal for the entity the NYC REIC should form, based on the research of the Fordham Law School Clinic. There will then be a comment period, before putting the proposal up for approval at the next All-Member Meeting, July 28!
On May 22, we did a visioning exercise to explore three hypothetical but specific investment scenarios, based on some potential options including the property where Sure We Can operates now in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a vacant city-owned former Department of Health Building in Jamaica, Queens, and a vacant city-owned former Lincoln Hospital Clinic in the South Bronx. See the scenarios we used for this visioning exercise here.
We are on our way! Please write us at steering@nycreic.com with any questions or comments. Plug in to the process of forming our investment cooperative by attending our open meetings, posted on the NYC REIC calendar, and other upcoming WG meetings.Together with our other workgroups and committees, your Steering Committee is building capacity. At our May 7 meeting in Park Slope, we created a timeline for answering key questions this quarter about the NYC REIC’s future. Some of our first-to-answer questions are: What is our business model? What are the legal entities we will be incorporating to achieve it? Our full question-timeline is here.
REIC University Update
“SAVE THE DATE! During the week of July 10th REIC U will host a public film screening and discussion of the film Rerooting the Motor City: Notes on a City in Transformation. Look for more information, including the date and location, in the July Newsletter.
REIC U met on March 21, April 4 (jointly with CORB), April 19 (jointly with CORB) and May 4 to continue planning the film screenings and panel discussions as well as organizing a training for REIC members regarding cooperative membership and community engagement. Once we’ve achieved these goals, we will return to creating an official Wikipedia page, maintaining an up-to-date and centrally organized series of presentations and printed materials to educate new members on the status of the REIC, creating blog posts about other cooperative real estate ventures and more.
Please email nyc-reic-case-studies@googlegroups.com to get involved.
CORB: Community Outreach & Relationship Building (former PBIG: Public Buildings Inventory Group)
CORB has held a couple of joint meetings with REIC-U, to plan our strategy and timetable for collaboration on how to get trained in best practices in community outreach – in a “training the trainers” program – both to be able to put to use in the communities where we are currently looking at potential buildings and sites for investment, and also to educate the entire membership.
Meanwhile, we continue to do research into demographics and organizations in the main communities we have been focusing on until now: Jamaica and Coney Island, though we are also still looking at Bay Ridge, the South Bronx and East New York – and we may expand into other areas, if we find other potential buildings and sites.
We are also planning to make at least one or two PBIG/CORB “road-trips” together this summer, to look at potential sites. We have also had an invitation to partner on a field trip to Flushing with the AAFE Equality Fund.
We haven’t yet planned our next meeting, but you can always contact us at: nycreic–public-buildings-inventory-group@googlegroups.com to get involved.
Arts & Media Committee Update
Post! PLEASE post to the REIC blog! Contact Leland at leland.cheuk@gmail.com to post on a topic specific to your workgroup or anything else related to the REIC
Join! Please contact Mark Read at newsletter@nycreic.com if you are interested in joining the Newsletter Team! We need people who can write, edit and design in Mailchimp.