Colleen Fonseca
Executive Director, Builders of Color Coalition
Age: 31
Industry experience: 3 years
After three years helping transform the Builders of Color Coalition (BCC) into a sizable presence in the Massachusetts commercial real estate world, Colleen Fonseca is handing her role off to new hands. Fonseca came to the BCC from Providence, Rhode Island municipal government where she led workforce development efforts and became interested in how real estate projects build up local economies. At BCC, she built out the nonprofit’s professional staff in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic while establishing a series of now-signature events and launched three fellowship programs for aspiring commercial real estate professionals of color. She also gained commitments from the mayors of Boston, Cambridge, Lynn, Salem and Somerville to increase DEI evaluation criteria in public projects, a step intended to create more opportunities for minority-owned businesses to grow. A self-described builder of organizations, Fonseca will be the new equity and inclusion manager in the Mayor’s Office of Housing in Boston once she leaves BCC on Sept. 24.
Q: Over the past three years, what’s been your favorite win?
A: For me, personally, some of the biggest wins are the graduates of our fellowship program. When I first came to BCC, we had a Google doc with an idea of a program. We now have graduated a bench of 30-plus real estate developers of color that are doing projects all across not just the city of Boston, they’re doing projects in Brockton, Springfield Worcester, other parts of the state. We’ve been interviewing those business owners from our first cohort [that started in 2021] and we were honestly blown away by how they were doing. They’re working on 1,032 new units of housing across the state that are going to be built over the next two years – I think something like 40 percent of those are going to have some kind of affordability to them. We even have two fellows that met each other in the program and are now chasing deals and building together, primarily affordable housing across Boston and Chelsea and looking into other markets, too. This brings such a happy smile to my face.
Q: What role is BCC playing in the local CRE ecosystem today?
A: We’re building the bench of diverse developers across the state. Across the country, I think less than 1 percent of all development companies are owned by people of color. But over the last three years, if you look at the number of development companies that have been registered, that number has significantly grown over the last three years and in direct correlation to our fellows that are completing that program. Also, we have some investment funds that have come out of our fellowship, and then we’re diversifying the boards and workforce of our real estate partners. We have a jobs board that circulates different roles across the industry to our network of 650 or so individuals. We’re seeing individuals being placed into different roles that they may not have traditionally had access to.
Q: BCC has driven greater adoption of the “Massport Model” of requiring more diverse project teams on public projects and worked to help aspiring developers of color understand the affordable finance ecosystem. What role does public sector-focused work play in BCC’s overall strategy?
A: We haven’t necessarily focused on the public sector, but obviously our public work gets a lot more attention. Really, our key role as an organization has just been lifting the curtain and showing [aspiring developers of color] “this is how this works.” There isn’t a one-stop shop for how to be a developer how to do development. Even many of the training opportunities to understand how to work with affordable housing financing are only open to folks that are currently employed in affordable housing-related organizations. That’s where our organization was really successful, providing more transparency and knowledge-building so if it’s your first project or your first large project, you’re not going in blind.
Q: Has the backlash against corporate and public-sector diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives affected BCC’s work?
A: It’s interesting because there have been a lot of conversations around it, but in terms of how it’s impacted our work, as an organization it hasn’t. One of our founders recently said that he’s been having conversations with many individuals about BCC over the years [since it was founded in 2017], and he had a reflection point where he realized that talking about BCC is not really a tough sell with anyone. It’s because what we’re really talking about is giving folks in our communities freedom – the freedom to ideate, the freedom to create and to build something that no one’s ever seen before, and we really expand our industry. It’s just about “how do we great connect more, amazing talent to the social networks and the social capital that they didn’t have access to before?” and growing the [CRE] industry.
Q: Is there anything that you would wave a magic wand and have Beacon Hill, Boston City Hall or local lenders change to help your efforts to diversify CRE?
A: I would say definitely a more consistent and predictable zoning and approval process, and probably more capital resources to support the development of new middle-market housing. In our capital markets, we see that there’s funding for smaller deals, like single-family, duplexes three-families – 10 units and below. And then there’s a very limited amount of resources for anything in the area of 50 or 100 units, so you’re either doing multi-million dollar deals or small projects. This is persistent across the entire industry, regardless of what your background is: Scaling is extremely challenging.
Over the last year and a half, we’ve also been doing research on the different capital resources that exist in markets across the country that are helping and supporting and elevating marginalized individuals in CRE. We plan to turn to our capital partners and say, “Hey, we’ve been seeing this really interesting pre-development fund and this is how they’ve been able to do it.” Another thing we’ve seen: slow, patient capital that seeks three-year returns instead of, say,18 months on a construction loan. We really just want to connect our capital partners with the plethora of options and tactics that other institutions in other markets are taking to move this work forward, because we know every bank, every institution is different, and has considerations, different stakeholders, different goals.
The Five Books That Helped Fonseca Learn About Real Estate
- “Making It in Real Estate,” by John McNellis
- “Zeckendorf,” by William Zeckendorf and Edward McCreary
- “Good to Great,” by Jim Collins
- “Chain of Change: Struggles for Black Community Development,” by Mel King
- “The Color of Law,” by Richard Rothstein
