Sauda Ahmad-Green calls herself a “developer by chance,” but her real estate journey has deep roots in the Detroit neighborhood where she grew up.

On her way to the bus stop to get to Pershing High School, Ahmad-Green — a born and raised Detroiter — would walk by the townhomes and vacant lot she would one day come back to redevelop. She recalls a Virginia Park in decline and past its heyday. Residents still had a sense of pride and ownership back then, though that dwindled as Black Detroiters moved to the suburbs.

In 2006, a year after graduating law school, she purchased the property using only her savings for what would become her first major development project — six townhomes dubbed Merrill Place I, on Merrill Street, between Seward Avenue and Virginia Park Street. Ahmad-Green remembers it as an abandoned property, with water and some fire damage. It was a danger to the community, she said, because it was not boarded up. She finished the rehabilitation in 2012.

About a decade later — after a mortgage crisis and a number of challenges such as cost overruns and issues with contractors — Ahmad-Green broke ground this October on what is expected to be Merrill Place II, a 27-unit multifamily housing development at 1312 Seward. The $12-million building is slated to open by spring 2025. Fourteen of the units will be set aside for those with incomes up to 60% of the area median income (AMI) — a regional measurement — which translates to $51,180 for a family of three. Ahmad-Green plans to embark on phase three of her project, similar to Merrill Place II, after that development wraps up.

“Growing up in the neighborhood that I’m developing — Merrill Place — has given me a unique kind of perspective that maybe an outside developer coming in doesn’t have,” she said. “I know what the neighborhood’s history is, I know what it used to be, and what it can be again. I’ve lived there, I’ve seen generations of people live in the neighborhood.”

Ahmad-Green resides in Detroit with her husband and two children, ages 13 and 9. She’s a practicing attorney and lived in Michigan for the majority of her life, graduating with her bachelor’s from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School.

There are at least 36 projects led by Black developers that are at various stages of development, ranging from predevelopment to completed construction, according to data provided in December by the city of Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department. Mayor Mike Duggan highlighted most of them during his State of the City addresses in 2022 and 2023.

Most of the projects have various levels of affordability, based on federal measures. For 16 of the projects — or a little less than half — all of the 930 units are labeled affordable at mixed income levels. For instance, of those units, 69 are reserved for those at 30% AMI (or $25,590 for a three-person household) and 80 are for those at 80% (or $68,240 for a family of three), according to available data. The data does not include AMI information for all of the units.

Black developers account for 25% to 35% of the total developer population in Detroit, according to Roderick Hardamon, CEO of URGE Development Group and co-founder and managing director of Ebiara, a fund created to provide capital to minority-owned development companies.

“Detroit has one of the most dense Black developer populations as anywhere in the country,” Hardamon said, because of a strong financial ecosystem, including philanthropy and community development financial institutions.

Still, Detroit needs more minority developers. Black and brown developers, he said, face “exponentially greater” challenges. Barriers include access to capital to take risks involved in real estate. Ebiara, alongside the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and Capital Impact Partners, provided predevelopment capital to Ahmad-Green’s company, S&S Development Group. That’s essentially a loan to support the company’s growth, Hardamon said.

Black and brown developers are important because of their willingness to invest in neighborhoods that others may not see in value in yet because it is their community and space, he said. They see the opportunity whereas others might see risk.

“It also allows the community to feel seen,” he said.

The Free Press spoke with Ahmad-Green, owner and principal of S&S Development Group, about her career as a Detroit developer and the challenges and opportunities that have come her way as a Black woman in the industry. The interview was edited for clarity and length.

QUESTION: What did it mean for you to come back and contribute to the redevelopment in that neighborhood? What is the personal significance for you?

ANSWER: I mean, it’s everything. It’s everything to be able to have the ability to do that, to contribute in that way. It’s one thing to become a professional. I have a great paying profession where I make a great salary. … It’s a whole (other) thing to do that, contribute to the revitalization and rebuilding of the community that I grew up in. That is a feeling that can’t be captured with any amount of money, to be honest. … It’s a sense of pride that I can pass on in terms of legacy to my children and their children. And not just for my family, but for other people that live in the neighborhood, grew up there as well. For example, when the groundbreaking for the phase two property project ran back in October, I had so many folks from the neighborhood that maybe I hadn’t even spoken to in 10 or 15 years, reach out and just say how amazing it is to see this happening in their own neighborhood and then being done by somebody that they grew up with, is unbelievable.

Q: What are some of your reflections being in this industry for a while, especially as a Black woman developer?

A: There just aren’t enough of us. Throughout this journey, I’ve probably had or can probably count a handful of Black developers working in the city of Detroit. It’s opening up because there’s an identification of it and it’s being realized, so there are more people starting to enter the real estate development field, people of color and women, but it’s nowhere near the levels that we need. And so for me, having a network of Black and brown developers that I can talk with, pull from, establish relationships with, would have been a welcome aspect of this journey for me. So, I’ve been doing a lot of it, at least a lot of my early work on my own, just kind of self-taught and figuring things out on my own. It’s not been until recently that I really met some great people in the development community who have been working in this community for a while and have had great success that have helped me in the later stages of trying to bring phase two online. So, that’s been everything. But it’s one of the things that if I could ask for and could be gifted, I would say a larger BIPOC community of developers.

Q: What are the opportunities and also the main challenges and barriers that Black developers are facing?

A: Access to capital and access to resources has been the main barrier for Black developers in the city. … Capital, access and opportunity have been main barriers that are being addressed, they are currently being addressed, meaning there are resources, there are institutions and entities that are now trying to work with Black developers in the city to enlarge the community and to address some of the disparities that have been existing. But that is the main challenge. You have to have money to be a developer. … When I say money, I’m not talking about millions of dollars. I mean, just seed money. Having money set aside for just purposes of doing development, not money to live on, not money for your mortgage, not money for your kids’ tuitions and vacations. You need all of those things, plus, you need money for development. That is a huge barrier. When historically, Black families are, in general, are disproportionately represented in income levels, with disposable income. That’s just not something that we have a lot of access to, there’s no generational wealth. I’m not saying none at all. I’m saying inherently and overall, we don’t have a lot of generational wealth in our community and we don’t have generational wealth stemming from real estate development. So, we’re not inheriting real estate development firms like some of our counterparts.

Q: Why is it important to have Black developers and developers of color?

A: Because we’re from the city and we deeply care about it and we care about the outcome. It’s hard to have a city that’s emerging and that has so much opportunity, have development go on that doesn’t provide … opportunity to the people that live in the city, that live in that environment. … It’s only going to work when you have input and participation from the people that are going to benefit the most from the development. If that’s your intent. … If the intent is not to displace or move people out, then you have to include them in the narrative and in the process.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on the current availability of affordable housing in Detroit, especially affordable housing that is truly affordable for Detroiters?

A: Affordable housing is definitely necessary in the city. … It’s not just a buzzword or something that people are throwing around. It’s a real thing. How do I know? Because I have six units right now that I’ve had to raise rents on, whether reluctantly or not, just to keep up with expenses — taxes, insurance, utilities, all the debt service that buildings carry. When those things increase … developers don’t have a choice but to raise their rents, whether they want to or not. … We need more income to cover the overhead and the expenses. … I’ve had turnover, new tenants move in that can afford the new rents. But that happens for every developer.

Q: What needs to happen in order for Black developers to thrive in the city?

A: It’s access to capital, it’s having a place at the table to sit and talk about solutions. … So, if you want more Black developers in the city of Detroit, we have to be invited to the table and there has to be a collective understanding that in order to increase this community, that there has to be an equitable approach to providing resources to the Black development community. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to have pockets of development by Black developers and then a fall off.

Q: What do developers, who are focused on Detroit, need in order to bolster affordable housing in general?

A: Development in the neighborhoods is far different than development in the downtown corridors or the Midtown corridors. High construction costs can be supported because there’s a higher rental value associated with those areas. Once you start moving into the neighborhoods, which is where a lot of development is needed, you can’t support the projects based off of the market study rental rates with high construction costs. They don’t work. So the only way to do it with high construction costs is to start reaching out to the foundation institutions and the state and then to the city, to start bringing some more of the supportive financing, that automatically requires affordable units. It’s tied to their participation in your project. So, that’s really the only way to do it with the way the construction costs are currently holding.

Contact Nushrat Rahman: nrahman@freepress.com; 313-348-7558. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @NushratR.