Nana Duncan says she was first inspired to become a real estate developer over a decade ago, at a time when she had a very different job: college counselor.
After college, Duncan was working as a free college counselor for high school students in Harlem when she noticed students’ housing was getting in the way of their work. They often broke appointments because they lived in crowded apartments and weren’t getting enough sleep, or were afraid they’d get jumped on their way to meet her.
“What I found was how much their living environment impacted their ability to access the resources that I had for them,” Duncan said.
This month, Duncan broke ground on a $100 million affordable housing project in one of the most underserved neighborhoods in the East Ward of Irvington, New Jersey. A native of Ghana who moved to the United States for college in 2004, Duncan is one of the first Black female developers to lead an affordable housing project of this magnitude in the state.
The development Duncan is planning would add multiple apartment buildings and houses and provide about 240 low- and medium-income families with homes in a New Jersey neighborhood that for the past several decades has fallen into decay. Duncan has successfully redeveloped more than 500,000 square feet of blighted property, generating more than $200 million in development since opening her firm. She said this project could take up to five years to finish.
According to Duncan, the property was home to a family neighborhood before the state took it over with the intention of building a new school. That project, however, fell through, and the property has been left mostly vacant for more than a decade.
Duncan said some of the homes in the neighborhood became hotbeds for crime and were eventually knocked down — leaving dirt piles and untended open space that became overgrown with weeds.
“There are individuals that have reached out to me and said my family owned a home here, this is where I grew up … and we're so glad to see you doing something that reminds us of what it used to be like,” Duncan said.
The project is breaking ground as New Jersey pushes forward with an aggressive plan to develop more than 150,000 affordable homes over the next decade. Her project pushes forward what state officials have said is a priority of redeveloping blighted areas in NJ’s urban communities to help solve the housing affordability crisis in the state.
In addition, Duncan is using state and federal tax credit programs to finance the development. These programs allow Duncan to pass lucrative tax breaks on to her investors in exchange for the funds to make the project a reality.
What’s next for these tax credit programs tied to low income housing development is sure to be the topic of much debate both in the state and in the nation in the coming months. While New Jersey officials have called for expanding tax credits to finance affordable housing development, similar federal programs are set to expire at the end of the year.
Duncan’s work as a college counselor was for the Harlem Children’s Zone, a renowned educational organization focused on fighting poverty and other inequities in New York City. After she decided that building better housing was the best way for her to help people, she got a job as a real estate consultant. Later, she opened her own firm.
Duncan said in addition to providing much needed housing, she hopes she’s also chipping away at the stigma against Black and female developers in the real estate industry.
“The biggest challenge is that we're just invisible in this space,” she said, adding that when she started in the industry most women she encountered were in administrative roles.
Irvington Mayor Tony Vauss said after the plan to build a school fell apart, the state fenced off the property and did some work to maintain it. But problems in the area persisted.
“Now you have a slew of properties that are vacant [and] it brings some of the worst things out in the community, such as crime and people squatting in buildings,” he said.
Vauss said his administration has spent the past three years going through “a lot of red tape” to get the state to turn the property back over to the township so that it could be developed as housing.
Along with the three affordable housing apartment buildings Duncan intends to construct, she said she’ll be building four two-family homes, a 30,000 square foot community center, and some retail and restaurant space.
“When people are developing urban areas, they have to think beyond the physical structure. They have to think about what is the need, the great need that they're trying to solve in these urban communities,” she said.
Jonel Giles owns a home in the neighborhood that she purchased through an affordable housing program about 14 years ago. Over the years, Giles said, she’s seen various real estate developers come in and say they want to revitalize the area only for those proposals to never come to fruition.
But with Duncan actually breaking ground, Giles said, she’s now looking forward to seeing the area “thriving” again.
“It's been a long time coming. We've been waiting and we've been hoping,” she said.
