Ten years ago, Chase L. Cantrell left his job as a real estate attorney to establish a Detroit-based nonprofit organization called Building Community Value, with a goal to mobilize Detroiters through real estate development.

“For people’s sense of civic participation in the city, they have to feel like they own something… they have to have some agency and ownership in their city, and real estate is just one of those things that changes the way that people engage with their city,” Cantrell said. “Ownership is extremely important for civic engagement, belonging and for the feeling of being a Detroiter.”

Recognizing the lack of minority developers in Detroit, a city that is prominently Black, Cantrell crafted his program in partnership with the University of Michigan to appeal to Detroiters’ passion for their city.

“Detroiters care about Detroit,” Cantrell said. “People who live in their neighborhoods care about their neighborhoods, and when developments hit that challenge, or when it takes a long time, it’s that passion that sustains people, myself included.”

Building Community Value revealed that 60% of program participants and alumni are Black women. This reality contradicts the common misconception that real-estate development is a male dominated industry and highlights the matriarchal strength that is found throughout the city.

“The majority of the people who come through BCV are women, there are a lot of Black women who are doing small scale development,” Cantrell said. “It’s almost intuitive because a lot of women end up being caregivers, which is a difficult role in a family to play, when someone passes and there’s a property left behind it’s oftentimes women in the family who take up the mantle to figure out what to do with that property.”

Similarly, many participants coming to the program are looking for smaller scale developments with 75% being categorized as single-family homes and duplexes.

“When people go through BCV, most often they are in neighborhoods where there hasn’t been a lot of development,” Cantrell said. “When that first house on the block is rehabbed, it begins to change the dynamic and interest of other community members who can do similar things, and people who live on the block begin to think through what changes they can make as well.”

Cantrell emphasizes how influential just one development can be in a community, and how smaller investments often lead to neighbors getting involved and building off the original development.

“We’ve seen people have a sense of pride in real time; they are happy to see these sorts of smaller projects happen in their neighborhoods,” Cantrell said. “Often it’s a sign of market value shifting in a positive way for folks, so it’s extremely important that people take pride once these developments start happening, and we encourage folks to keep investing in the same block that they started at.”

Cantrell understands that success is not linear and that every participant of the program is coming from a different place in their development journey. He believes that there are three main paths to success through Building Community Value: completing a project, learning the process and understanding that some projects are not worth pursuing and being informed so that they can ask better questions at public forums.

“To me, success doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has completed a project,” Cantrell said. “If they go through the program, they do all of the financial modeling and they come to office hours, and then see it doesn’t make sense to do a project, that moving forward, they would lose money, that’s success, we avoided someone doing a project that doesn’t make sense.”

Christopher LeFlore, associate program officer for The Kresge Foundation’s Detroit Program, has a unique relationship with Building Community Value, because he is an alumnus of the program.

“For me, this is the neighborhood I grew up in, the neighborhood that my grandparents moved to 50 years ago, and development in Detroit is hard for a number of reasons, but it makes it a lot more fulfilling to do work in a place that I call home,” LeFlore said. “It’s a give and take when you’re in a neighborhood, you’re having conversations about property and that can be challenging when you’re in such close proximity. But there’s nothing more rewarding, more fulfilling and more useful.”

LeFlore expressed his gratitude for the program and how it works with the community dynamic of Detroit residents.

 “A big thing about Detroiters is their identities are tied to their homes and to their communities,” LeFlore said. “I think there’s no more important thing than Detroiters having the opportunity to do the work in their own neighborhoods, and that’s what Chase’s program helps residents do.”

Applications for Building Community Value’s next class are open now and close on August 28^th. The cohort will run from Sept. 12, 2026 to Dec. 12, 2026, at TechTown Detroit.