“The community that recycles its dollars is a lot more successful than a community that does not.”
Kansas City is one of the most racially and economically divided cities in the US—and it was designed that way. For years, laws and policies kept the city’s Black population geographically isolated and under-resourced, so much that a single thoroughfare, Troost Avenue, became the representational dividing line between the haves and the have-nots.

Ajia Morris stands in front of the abandoned Sanford Ladd School in Kansas City’s East Side, the site of a redevelopment that prioritizes local ownership.
But there is wealth in Kansas City’s East Side, in innovation and energy, and in the land that makes up its neighborhoods. As real estate in the area is redeveloped, LocalCode Kansas City (LCKC) is making sure that residents have not only a voice in the plans, but a financial stake as well.
LCKC works with LocalCode, a national nonprofit organization, which helps low-income communities navigate local ownership of businesses and real estate and supports local businesses as tenants, keeping money in the community to build wealth and wellbeing over the long term.
Two people who have been integral to the initiatives of LocalCode and LCKC also happen to be fellows of programs of the Aspen Institute, and we’re happy to support and celebrate their work. LCKC founder Ajia Morris is a Wealth Innovation Fellow with the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program, and LocalCode founder Jeffrey Mendelsohn is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Through AGLN, Mendelsohn (and LocalCode) was just awarded one of four Spark Grants from the Global Inclusive Growth Partnership, a collaboration between the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth and the Aspen Institute.
Morris and Mendelson graciously agreed to interview each other with provided questions. The conversation is transcribed below, lightly edited.
Q: What is the problem that LocalCode Kansas City is trying to solve?
Morris: For me, most simply stated, it is wealth inequality.
Mendelsohn: That’s at the heart of it. For me, as the leader of a nonprofit that supports LocalCode Kansas City, I’m trying to solve for how human and financial resources come into Ajia’s community and urban communities of color in a way that is supportive of their wellbeing, as opposed to being extractive.
When I met Ajia, I was very taken by her commitment to addressing the racial wealth gap on a meta level, and how she landed on real estate as a key lever. That synchronized really well with my own perspective on this issue, which landed on real estate as one of the most catalytic and impactful arenas to shift the reality on the ground for communities long suffering from structural inequities.
Sorry, that was a lot of words.
Morris: Yes, but it’s right. It’s the wealth disparity that we all see growing more and more vast, but that not enough of us are actively working to address. So, so long as we can provide more opportunity to advance equitably for those who have the least, our work isn’t done.
Mendelsohn: You look at every big city in this country and you’ll find enormous parts of it that have suffered from generations of structural inequities. And there’s clearly no systemic solution in play, given that the situation has persisted—and in many ways gotten worse—up to the present moment.
Q: How is your approach unique?
Morris: Our approach is unique because we leverage ownership of commercial real estate as a wealth-building mechanism in modest income communities.
Mendelsohn: I also think it’s unique in that it’s authentically supporting local leaders who have trust in their communities to lead these large, mixed-use real estate projects that can define a neighborhood. In this arena, community-led initiatives tend to be smaller projects and the big neighborhood-impacting projects tend to not happen until somebody wants to come in and gentrify a community.
Q: How might others replicate this approach in their communities?
Morris: A part of our goal, our national effort, is to train local leaders from communities similar to my own that have tons of opportunity but lack the access and resources to fully capitalize. They don’t make the most of the opportunity they have in front of them because the ability to participate in the process, let alone actually control it, has been historically out of reach.
Mendelsohn: From my conversations with Ajia, I think we share not only an incredible amount of excitement but also a sense of responsibility to the movement. LocalCode Kansas City’s success will be a leg up for all other communities, whether or not LocalCode supports them directly. The success story of what Ajia does in Kansas City will be something that people can point to in other communities. In terms of replication, I think one thing we’re really eyes-wide-open about is that real estate is ultimately unique and of a place, and so we don’t like to think of it as replicating; it is more about expanding the reach of the support systems that we provide. But we do believe there’s a process that is repeatable in a way that can be game-changing for any community that has faced conditions similar to Kansas City, and there’s a lot of them across the country.
So while each community is unique, they all have a need for mission-aligned financing and resources.
Q: What are some of the benefits of local ownership? How does it help build wealth and local communities?
Mendelsohn: Well, for me, it all boils down to ownership. I think the primary benefit of local ownership is for the community to know that as they invest in their own community and as conditions improve, they’ll benefit from that. This isn’t wealth that will be extracted; it’s their community and their wealth. Embedded in this is a building of agency— not as a byproduct, but as an intention in what Ajia and I are doing together. The lack of agency is one of the biggest catastrophes that happens in communities such as this.
Morris: For me, the benefits of local ownership are agency in the control of your community—controlling what happens, what tenants come in, what businesses occupy the spaces.
The benefits of local ownership are more likely to keep the communities on track where we respect the wishes of the majority. We practice development without displacement, meaning that our goal is to help our neighbors around our commercial projects stay in their homes and not be negatively impacted by the development at all, and that is uncommon.
Local ownership brings heart to these commercial projects. Our model is that we invite in members from the immediate neighborhood first. And then we cast a wider net, and then an even wider net, inviting the community to invest in itself, because the community that recycles its dollars is a lot more successful than a community that does not.
Mendelsohn: And the commitment we have is that long term, the projects are over 80% locally owned, which is quite a high standard. These are projects that can throw off serious wealth as a community improves.
Q: What is the most difficult obstacle you’ve encountered so far, and how did you overcome it?
Morris: Community resistance. I was most surprised at members from the community that would directly benefit from several different assets—even without them directly investing into the project in any shape, form, or fashion—when they took issue with us converting, in one instance, a 15-year vacant elementary school and activating a full city block.
It was difficult to work through. Because, as with outliers generally, there was a passion, but I couldn’t necessarily understand the foundation for it. We worked through it with just honest, plain conversation. I explained to them what our purpose was, what our mission was, what our intent was. I gave them the commitments we had already made, and answered every suspicion that they held about the project, every unsubstantiated concern.
Mendelsohn: Yeah, that was a huge eye-opener for me as somebody that grew up in a different environment. I saw just how profoundly abandoned a lot of people felt in the community. There was just a deep level of suspicion of anybody who comes in offering something to the community. That obstacle was one I didn’t anticipate because I just thought that people would get behind something that was intended to support them. It also drove home the importance of our model—of having someone living in the community, knowing everybody—but even with all those relationships, this was still a hurdle.
Other hurdles are mundane but real. I think the biggest obstacle is that when we started, interest rates were about 4% lower than they are today, and construction costs were perhaps 40% lower in terms of raw materials. So here we are working on something that is intended to be very affordable, high quality, and throw off a profit for the community—and immediately we ran into headwinds on costs of development. We overcame that obstacle by leveraging public incentive programs, and we had some real successes in getting both philanthropic support and mission-driven equity investment from within Kansas City and from across the country.
Q: What is your vision for the future of KC’s East Side, and how does focusing on real estate support that vision?
Morris: My vision for the future of Kansas City’s East Side is one of success and peace. Locally owned real estate supports that vision by providing neighborhood preservation, and in activating long vacant assets so property values appreciate to the direct benefit of each community member whether or not they actually leverage the sites. The projects that we redevelop will help close the income gap between neighborhoods east of Troost and west of Troost. We have over $200 million in development on the East Side right now, in just our first five years. If we keep going at the same pace, I see the community owning $500 million in commercial real estate. That’s game changing.
Mendelsohn: That is game changing, and it’s super exciting! I don’t live in Kansas City, so part and parcel for LocalCode is for my organization to be in support of the local vision. And I was thrilled when that local vision aligns in a really large way to some of the dreams I had coming into this, of seeing locally led, controlled, and owned real estate development up and down the main street in an urban core community of color. I can’t wait to see that come to pass in Kansas City.
I think locally owned, regenerative real estate is the most catalytic thing that we can invest in to help structurally disadvantaged communities build wealth and wellbeing. Before you can support a business, you’ve got to get the real estate aligned in a way where the right businesses can even get the space. You have to have people who can buy products, and mixed-use main street development brings density back to neighborhoods where there’s high vacancy and a high percentage of blighted homes. So real estate is really upstream.
Q: What’s one thing you wish you knew before starting this work? Do you have advice to share with others who are just starting out with inclusively and locally owned real estate?
Mendelsohn: I wish I had had a better understanding of the bottlenecks you face when moving through real estate development projects. Our first project is going to take a year to a year-and-a-half longer than it might have taken to get from concept to construction closing.. In terms of advice, dialing in the right support network is essential. That’s something we did well from the outset, and we continue to improve. We’ve identified some of the best people in Kansas City to support this effort, and, as we go, we keep bringing in more people with incredible experience to help solve problems and set up the projects for success.
Morris: One thing I wish I knew before starting is that every bit of you goes into executing a project, making sure that it happens in a way that honors the community and prioritizes our mission of building wealth in modest income communities. So my advice to share with others who are just starting out is “pace yourself.” It is not a quick thing, and once you start, if you’re like me, you’re absolutely going to finish it. You’ll know where you can cut-copy-paste the next go-round, but the first time you’re figuring it out. So pace yourself and be patient with yourself.
Q: What led each of you personally to this area of impact? Where and how did the two of you intersect?
Mendelsohn: For me, it was a result of a 10-year period of inquiry after I stepped back from my first company, New Leaf Paper. I was awarded an Aspen Institute fellowship and took the time to think about where I could make the maximum impact. I came up with the idea of LocalCode in 2011 and launched it in 2021; it was the most impactful thing I could do with my life as an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. I got really excited about the challenge of helping Main Streets come back to life in the most general sense, this idea of vibrant local culture, local economies, local food systems. That was the initial spark. And then I learned a lot about the history of how this country has treated Black Americans, and those two threads came together for me in the form of LocalCode
A friend had moved to Kansas City, met Ajia, and literally called me the next day. He said, “Jeff, I think I found the person that you might want to work with.” I came to Kansas City and saw that the city itself was a strong fit given how racially divided it is and its history of structural inequities.When I met Ajia, I met somebody that I knew I could trust, who had aligned values, and who I was excited to support via LocalCode.
Morris: What led me to this area of impact is lived experience. For the majority of my life, to and through law school, I was spending a lot of firsts in my family—first-generation homeowner, first-generation real estate property owner—and by all measurements I’m successful. But as I went through the process, I realized that it was inherently biased against the community that I came from. That led me to found a business focused on single family residential home ownership as a way to transfer significant amounts of wealth back into low income communities, recognizing that real estate has historically been out of the grasp of a majority of my neighbors. I set out to use the skills I’ve obtained through school and work experience to help them bridge the gap and to connect them with the resources that have been made available, but are not readily accessible by my neighbors.
Q: What gets you out of bed every morning, what keeps you up at night?
Morris: I have four kids. That’s enough!
Mendelsohn: You know, I now have two kids. They came into my life at five and six, and I have to say they’re now primary in my motivation and in my awareness of why I do what I do. But I started working on this before they showed up. I’ve been given a lot, and I feel fortunate. I was born into a family where I was encouraged to do meaningful work, and this is the most meaningful work I can imagine. What keeps me up is that I don’t want this work to be a blip on the map. I’m really excited and committed to figuring out how to support a shift at scale, and to participate in something that’s truly transformative.