Local investing model facing surging demand

√# Something Is Breaking Open

*And the people who’ve been ready for it for 14 years can barely keep up*

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I had a conversation recently with Chris Miller, CEO of the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), the organization that has been quietly — and now not so quietly — building the infrastructure for community investment funds across the country. NC3 helps communities create legal vehicles that let ordinary residents invest in local businesses and real estate, not as charity, not as crowdfunding for a t-shirt, but as actual equity and debt investors with a real stake in what happens on their block.

Chris has been doing this work since 2009. For most of that time, he was the person knocking on doors.

Now the people behind those doors want him to replicate his model in their towns. What it does is simple: put 60% of the capital raised from local people into commercial real estate and you can invest the rest into new or expanding local businesses at far lower risk. It links the ease of crowdfunding with real estate projects that are likely to appreciate, reducing the risk for local investors.

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## What Changed

It wasn’t one thing. It was five or six things arriving at roughly the same moment, and they’re not going away. That’s the pattern whenever there is a sea change, when a new wave gets momentum and spreads fast in towns across the country.

**Federal money is no longer a plan.** Community economic development ran for decades on federal grants, CDFI programs, and the assumption that Washington would hold the floor. That assumption is gone. Not weakened — gone. What’s interesting is that it’s not just producing despair — it’s producing creativity. Communities are asking, for the first time with real urgency: what can we do ourselves? Local innovators are looking for locally grounded solutions that let them invest in small businesses and collectively own appreciating commercial real estate — making bets on new entrepreneurs less risky and more doable.

**The extraction is visible now.** Chris puts up ten photos in a row of national chains that have moved into his community of 22,000 people. Dollar stores. Fast casual chains. On-demand health care franchises. Private equity-owned everything. And people in the room recognize it immediately, because it’s their town too. He told me a story that stayed with me: a colleague bought a Sears washer and dryer with an extended warranty. For a few years, great. Then the service collapsed. A private equity firm had acquired the warranty company and turned off the tap going out while leaving the tap coming in. Every person in every room Chris speaks in has a version of that story. Trailer parks. Doctor’s offices. The hardware store that used to fix things. The bank that used to know your name.

**Housing is the battering ram.** Every downtown, every Main Street organization in the country is facing a capital problem the existing system cannot solve. A leader at Main Street America — which works with 1,800 downtowns — told Chris: if Main Street doesn’t solve the problem of getting capital to businesses in their communities, they may as well close up shop. That’s not hyperbole. That’s scenario that is likely unless we do something now.

**The policy window has opened and it is real.** NC3 has introduced legislation in Michigan three times. This time it may actually pass — a state income tax credit giving non-accredited investors 50% back on investments in Michigan businesses, capped at $6,000. The state Department of Treasury, which opposes tax credits as institutional reflex, has agreed not to oppose this one. That’s the equivalent of an endorsement. The same legislation just landed in Rhode Island, with conversations active in Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Brookings just co-published a paper with NC3 making the policy case nationally. And there’s real precedent: Nova Scotia’s CEDIF program has run since 1999, raising more than $100 million from ordinary residents with a public sector return of nearly 1,000% on foregone tax revenue — and a fund failure rate of just 6.5%, versus 30–40% for high-potential startups generally. This is not an untested idea. It is a proven idea the United States has been slow to adopt.

**Real estate is the other half of the story.** The DCIF lets communities couple crowd funding investing in neighborhood scale businesses with real estate — spreading risk and improving returns for everyday investors. Across the country cities are replicating the DCIF to create vehicles that let ordinary residents become owners of appreciating local real estate: not speculators, not REITs, not absentee landlords, but community members with an actual equity stake. Ecotrust’s Community Investment Trust in Portland has been quietly proving this model for years and now has dozens of cities knocking on its door wanting to replicate it. The underlying desire is the same everywhere: local ownership that is fair, democratic, and open to all — not just the already-wealthy. For too long, the appreciation of real estate in revitalizing neighborhoods has flowed to outsiders while long-time residents bear the disruption and get displaced.

**The legitimacy infrastructure caught up.** In 2021, Chris visited over 100 Michigan communities that had already done successful donation crowdfunding campaigns. They had investors. He thought converting that enthusiasm to investment crowdfunding for local businesses would be easy. He got two projects moving. The problem: every time community leaders got excited and went to their local banker or attorney, they were told it was illegal and they’d probably go to jail. There were almost no securities attorneys in the country who understood this space. NC3 had to build the wraparound — legal, marketing, governance, registered investment advisors, real training for small businesses in how to take investment — through partnerships. Now they have it. And they bring it with them.

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## What the Demand Actually Looks Like

Chris spoke recently at an event in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — 100-plus CEOs, traditional economic developers, the kind of room that would have had nothing for him five years ago. He went on right after John U. Bacon, the NPR personality who’d just captivated the room with a story about the Edmund Fitzgerald. He joked it was like a garage band following a headliner. And yet — real follow-up. People who recognized that chasing smokestacks and competing for Amazon headquarters was broken, and were looking for something else.

At the Just Economy Conference in D.C. last month: standing room only, 120 people in a breakout on community investment funds.

NC3 is actively working in Detroit, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Macon, and a growing cohort from the Northeast to Florida to Colorado. They just launched a Kresge-funded program with the International Economic Development Council — 22 communities building funds over the next 18 months. The IEDC wants to build a branded accelerator to bring this model to all 5,000-plus of their member communities.

Four to six funds launching this year. Potentially three times that many next year.

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## The Honest Tension

The demand is outrunning the infrastructure to serve it.

NC3 is a small organization. Securities attorneys who understand this space number in the dozens nationally. Crowdfunding marketing experts who can message to people who’ve never made an investment decision — there are a handful. Chris told me they’re thinking hard about being ready for the wave: working on AI tools to extend capacity, building partnerships with organizations like Donna Harris’s Builders and Backers, and considering raising operating capital to meet this moment.

The history of this field is littered with innovations that peaked before they could scale — not because the idea failed but because the capacity to deliver couldn’t keep up with the moment of readiness. The community investment fund is not a new idea. It’s an old idea that — in light of the financialization of the economy through predatory private equity — has finally found its moment. The question is whether the people who have been building the infrastructure for 14 years can move fast enough when the doors swing open.

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## Why This Matters Beyond the Tool

I’ve been in community economic development long enough to know the difference between a tool and a shift. Most of what we celebrate as innovation is a tool. Tools are necessary. But they don’t change anything by themselves.

The demand is coming from two directions at once. Communities that want to keep businesses local, circulate dollars inside the neighborhood, and give residents a stake in their Main Streets. And communities that want to stop watching their land appreciate for outside investors while longtime residents get displaced. These are not two different problems. They are the same problem — the extraction of value from communities by people who don’t live there — and community investment funds are one of the few tools that addresses both sides simultaneously. The ask is simple and ancient: let the people who live here be the ones who own here.

Chris put it simply: it is all about democratizing capital. That’s the core.

The momentum is coming. Chris is bringing the whole NC3 board to Galveston. The city has expressed interest and we are going to focus on the DCIF model and the ecosystem they’ve put together to meet the surging demand for a way that average people can invest in their local economy.

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*Kevin Jones is the founder of Neighborhood Economics, a platform convening practitioners repairing local economies across the country. The Neighborhood Economics conference is September 15–16, 2026 in Galveston, TX.*# Something Is Breaking Open

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