Alumni Spotlight: George Adams, Jr.
By: Serena Maria Daniels
For George Adams, real estate has always been more than an investment — it’s a family legacy. Long before he called himself a developer, Adams was helping to clean out his father’s rental units in Detroit. “I remember waking up really early in the morning when a tenant move[d] out and he want[ed] to go and clean it out before 11 o'clock to make sure it's ready for whenever he was going to release it to the next tenant,” he says. That early experience stuck with him.
After his father passed away, Adams convinced his family to use part of the inheritance to buy another property, keeping the dream alive. From there, he stepped into his role as an investor, and eventually a developer.
Today, Adams is both a for-profit and nonprofit developer working in Detroit’s Virginia Park neighborhood, where his organization, 360 Detroit, is developing dozens of units of affordable housing while also leading community beautification and engagement projects. His vision is as personal as it is professional.
Adams says he grew up in the Detroit neighborhood now known as Northwest Goldberg. Back when he was a kid, he knew the area simply as Zone 8. “We would make the trek across West Grand Boulevard to get to school and get back south of the boulevard as quickly as we could, because there was a lot of gang activity on this side of the boulevard that we didn't want to be a part of,” he says. “When we bought our property after my dad died, we bought it in this particular neighborhood, so we became more familiar with being around the property.”
Adams’s early real estate work focused on small-scale rentals — in particular, duplexes that he renovated unit by unit. “I would go in and say, ‘OK, which [unit is] the easiest one I can get up right away, and I would focus on that one and get it done,” he says. Once he got a tenant secured in one unit, he would use rent proceeds to focus on renovating the other one. It was a methodical, bootstrap approach that built experience, but it wasn’t until he founded 360 Detroit in 2014 that he began thinking about the broader potential of community development.
“I felt that this was the model to help me raise some dollars to kind of meet the need at that time, which was cleanups and beautification projects,” says Adams. “It wasn't our mindset to develop, per se, under the nonprofit, but I knew some development needed to take place.”
Those community cleanups helped to change the perception of the community. “We’ve changed it from half empty to the perception of half full.”
Since then, Adams’ 360 Detroit has been leading a multi-phase affordable housing initiative that began with a cluster of duplexes and quads. His team is currently wrapping up the last four of 28 units. The work is deeply collaborative — he’s partnered with other local community development corporations and nonprofits to collectively redevelop more than 30 properties on Euclid Street.
Development in Detroit can have its challenges and for Adams, among the obstacles he’s faced has to do with site control — the legal right to develop on specific lots — which allows him to raise the funds needed to pursue such an ambitious project. “It always came down to, ‘do you have site control?’” he says of conversations he’d have with funders. “Eventually, we got a notification, like, around Christmas 2022” saying they would be closing the following week, which turned out to be January 2023.
Having site control opened the door to new financing opportunities, and Adams began assembling a complex capital stack to move the project forward. The first phase of the project was funded by the Gilbert Family Foundation and a line of credit through a community development financial institution, while the funding to redevelop the next 20 housing units has been pulled together from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the Detroit Housing for the Future Fund, Michigan State Housing Development Authority, and other sources. It was a crash course in project finance, and one made possible, he says, by the technical assistance he received through Building Community Value.
Earlier in his development journey, Adams says Building Community Value kept coming up in conversation, whether he was out networking or having conversations with funders. Going through the program helped him sharpen his financial analysis skills and better understand how to make his deals bankable. “I got a lot out of it, particularly the pro forma, which I was familiar with to some degree, but sometimes you don't always put those things into practice, so taking a deep dive into it, and then having the technical support to go along with it, was phenomenal.”
Looking ahead, Adams wants to push community ownership even further. “We have a history in the Virginia Park neighborhood, where we have a plaza at Euclid Street and Rosa Parks. The Community organized after the [19]67 uprising, pulled our money together and developed this plaza,” he says. “I would love to have some type of co-ownership model for development in the future of the Virginia Park neighborhood, where we can do that again, or something similar to that, where multiple individuals in the neighborhood can come together, pool our resources, and develop some of the properties that are vacant right now.”
It’s a vision rooted in inclusion and legacy. “I definitely want people to [have the] opportunity to participate in the development of their neighborhood, particularly Virginia Park, and have some ownership, so [it’s] not just a community meeting where I give you input, but actually where I can provide some resources and get a return on that investment,” he says.
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