Despite more than 15 years as a residential real estate developer, Buwa Binitie says he has grown accustomed to regularly fielding queries about his expertise.
“Those questions come when a lender might be underwriting you, or maybe there are brokers who are marketing the deal and don’t know you. Questions like ‘Where’s your capital coming from, who’s behind you, who owns your company?’ ” says Binitie, who is Black and is the managing principal of Dantes Partners, a real estate development firm in D.C. “Me and my peers call them ‘unnecessary questions.’ We feel our White peers don’t get them at all.”
Binitie — whose company built the Hodge in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood and Delta Towers in the H Street corridor, both affordable senior housing developments — is far from alone in his experiences. In the Washington area and around the country, the development community is almost exclusively White. In an industry characterized by huge sums of money, Black developers say they face major hurdles in accessing capital, connecting with influential networks and expanding their businesses.
Click here to read the rest of the article written by Amanda Abrams over at The Washington Post
