Black-Owned Shopping Centers Are Reemerging as Engines of Community Wealth

Across the United States, a growing number of Black developers and entrepreneurs are investing in shopping centers designed to do more than fill storefronts. Their goal is to create places where local businesses can operate, residents can invest, and more of the economic value generated in a community stays within that community.

The idea has deep roots. In Philadelphia, Sullivan Progress Plaza opened in 1968 and is widely recognized as the first shopping center in the United States developed, owned and managed by African Americans. Founded by the Rev. Dr. Leon H. Sullivan, the project was backed by members of the local Black community and individual investors. The 95,000-square-foot center remains in operation today. 

More than five decades later, developers are adapting that model for a new generation.

In Fayetteville, Georgia, Felicia and Winchel Elibert opened Kingdom Corners in 2024, becoming the developers behind the city’s first Black-owned shopping center. The four-acre property contains seven commercial spaces, all of which had been leased when the development was announced. The Eliberts, who already had experience operating businesses, said the response from the surrounding community showed them the broader significance of the project. 

A similar approach is taking shape much closer to Chicago.

Chicago TREND, a social enterprise founded in 2016, acquires and improves neighborhood shopping centers while creating opportunities for Black professionals, entrepreneurs and local residents to participate in the properties. The organization says it currently owns seven urban shopping centers with approximately $44 million in assets under management across Chicago, Baltimore, Columbus and Minneapolis. 

Its model goes beyond simply placing Black-owned businesses inside a retail property. TREND structures some of its projects so that local residents, entrepreneurs and smaller investors can hold an ownership stake in the commercial real estate itself. It also works to increase storefront opportunities for locally owned businesses and assemble diverse teams to manage the properties. 

Among the company’s holdings are properties in Chicago’s South Loop and Roseland neighborhoods, along with Butterfield Plaza in suburban Olympia Fields. 

That distinction is important. These projects are not necessarily a return to the massive enclosed shopping malls that dominated American retail for decades. Many are neighborhood shopping centers, retail plazas and mixed commercial developments built around everyday services and locally owned businesses.

What is making the movement notable is the emphasis on ownership.

For decades, conversations surrounding support for Black businesses have often focused on where consumers spend their money. Developers behind these newer projects are expanding that conversation to include who owns the land, who controls the commercial space and who benefits when property values or rental income increase.

Sullivan Progress Plaza was built with a similar philosophy in the late 1960s. Its development created business and employment opportunities while also providing Black residents with a greater stake in their neighborhood’s commercial economy. 

Today’s projects are applying some of those same principles through modern real-estate investment structures, community investors and partnerships with entrepreneurs.

The number of Black-owned shopping centers remains relatively small compared with America’s overall commercial real-estate market, so describing the development as a nationwide mall boom would overstate what is happening.

But the examples emerging in Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and elsewhere point toward a broader shift: Black entrepreneurs are increasingly looking beyond individual storefronts and toward ownership of the commercial properties that contain them.

For communities that have historically faced barriers to accessing commercial real estate and investment capital, that difference could be significant.

The next chapter of Black-owned retail may not look like the traditional American mall at all. It may look more like a neighborhood plaza, owned in part by the people who live, work and build businesses around it.