How Do You Give a Lineage an Address?

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From Milwaukee’s Sherman Phoenix to Atlanta’s Gathering Spot, Black communities are experimenting with something the digital age cannot fully replace: physical institutions where commerce, relationships, memory and opportunity can accumulate.

There is a particular kind of building in an American city that can tell you an extraordinary amount about what somebody once thought a neighborhood was worth. A bank branch.

For much of American history, where banks invested—and where they did not—helped determine who could obtain mortgages, finance businesses, accumulate property and convert income into generational wealth.

So an old neighborhood bank building is not always just commercial real estate. Sometimes it is an artifact of an entire economic system. That is why there is one former bank building in Milwaukee that I cannot stop thinking about.

In August 2016, unrest erupted in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood after police fatally shot 23-year-old Sylville Smith. Among the properties damaged was a BMO Harris Bank branch on West Fond du Lac Avenue.

Two years later, people were walking through that building again. But they were no longer going there to make deposits or ask a bank for financing. They were buying food. Getting haircuts. Visiting retailers. Meeting entrepreneurs. Attending events. The former bank had become Sherman Phoenix.

The roughly $4 million redevelopment opened in late 2018 with 27 businesses. Contemporary reporting described a financing strategy that brought together public funding, philanthropy and community investors. Nearly 100 original equity investors ultimately participated in the project, according to developer Fix Development.

There is something almost too perfect about the symbolism. A building where capital had once been distributed according to the decisions of an institution had become a building where entrepreneurs themselves generated economic activity.

But Sherman Phoenix is interesting for more than its symbolism. Nearly eight years after opening, it has accumulated enough history to ask the more important question: Did the institution last?

It did. And that is where this gets interesting.

A Building Can Become Infrastructure

In August 2026, Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service reported that Sherman Phoenix had housed about 60 businesses over its lifetime, with approximately 16 businesses operating there at the time. Some original tenants remained. Others had moved on. Entrepreneurs interviewed by the publication described the value of operating beside other business owners and learning from their experiences.

That turnover should not be hidden. It is part of the story. Ribbon cuttings are easy to romanticize. Institutions are harder. Businesses succeed. Businesses fail. Entrepreneurs expand. Markets change. Leadership changes. Buildings require maintenance. Programming has to evolve.

Once an institution survives long enough for those things to happen, it becomes more useful as a model because we are no longer judging an aspiration. We are studying infrastructure.

And Sherman Phoenix has always attempted to provide more than square footage. Before the marketplace even opened, its development plans included mentorship and coaching for entrepreneurs. Its financing also challenged traditional development structures: community members could invest relatively small amounts in the project rather than leaving ownership entirely to institutional investors.

That matters because one of the recurring mistakes in conversations about Black entrepreneurship is assuming entrepreneurship itself is the scarce resource. It isn't.

Black America Does Not Have an Entrepreneurship Shortage

The latest Census-based analysis from Brookings tells an extraordinary story. In 2023, the number of Black-owned employer businesses in the United States surpassed 200,000 for the first time. Between 2017 and 2023, their number increased 62 percent. Those businesses generated approximately $249 billion in revenue, supported more than 1.8 million jobs and paid $69.8 billion in salaries.

Those numbers should demolish the mythology that Black economic development is principally a matter of persuading Black people to become entrepreneurial. Black people are building businesses. The structural question is what happens after the business begins.

Because despite that remarkable growth, Black people represented approximately 14.4 percent of the U.S. population in 2023 while accounting for only 3.4 percent of employer-business ownership. citeturn720600search0 That gap is where infrastructure enters the conversation.

Starting something is one challenge. Building something capable of employing other people is another. That transition can require financing, technical assistance, customers, contracts, real estate, professional services and something less quantifiable but equally important: relationships.

Someone who already knows which attorney to call. Someone who knows the banker. Someone who understands procurement. Someone who has negotiated the lease. Someone who has already made the mistake you are about to make. Someone who can say, “Don't do that. I tried it five years ago. Here is what happened.”

That is not simply networking. That is knowledge moving through a community.

And about 800 miles south of Milwaukee, another Black institution has built an entire business around creating the conditions for those exchanges.

The Gathering Spot and the Brick-and-Mortar of Social Capital

When Ryan Wilson and TK Petersen opened The Gathering Spot in Atlanta in 2016, they created a different kind of physical institution. The Gathering Spot is not a marketplace like Sherman Phoenix. It is a membership community combining work, dining, events and social space.

Its original Atlanta operation emerged from Wilson and Petersen's belief that young professionals needed something they had experienced on a college campus but found difficult to reproduce afterward: an environment where working, socializing, meeting people and exchanging ideas could happen in the same ecosystem. citeturn393028search8

A decade later, that idea has become substantial infrastructure. The Gathering Spot now has more than 12,000 members and four physical locations, including two in Atlanta as well as Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, according to Wilson's biography. citeturn393028search9

More important than its size is what happens inside it. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this year that the club has evolved into an important civic gathering place, hosting professional networking, community organizing, entrepreneurial activity and political conversations. Wilson told the paper that the intention was not to construct a private community so insulated that the surrounding community could not enter it.

That distinction is important. Because if Sherman Phoenix concentrates commerce, The Gathering Spot concentrates social capital. People. Information. Introductions. Reputation. Opportunity. Repeated encounters.

We have reduced much of this process to the word networking, which makes it sound like exchanging business cards at a reception. But functioning networks move resources. They move jobs. They move contracts. They move customers. They move introductions. They move political information. They move warnings. They move cultural knowledge. They move access.

And physical proximity changes the way those networks form. Meeting someone once at a conference is one thing. Seeing the same person three times a month for two years is something else entirely.

Eventually, you know what they are building. They know what you are building. You meet their people. They meet yours. You watch one another succeed and fail. The network develops memory. That is when a gathering place begins becoming an institution.

“The Black Community” Is Not an Economic Class

This is where the conversation gets harder. When we talk about “the Black community,” we sometimes accidentally describe millions of people as though racial identity also places them in one economic category. It does not.

Black America contains poverty and wealth. It contains renters and homeowners. Hourly workers and executives. Teachers and entertainers. Students and professors. Small-business owners and corporate officers. People creating their first emergency fund and families managing substantial assets.

The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances estimated median wealth among Black families at approximately $44,900. But mean Black family wealth was approximately $211,500.

That difference between the median and average is partly a reminder that inequality does not exist only between racial groups. It exists within them. The Federal Reserve also found that the typical Black family's $44,900 in wealth was only about 15 percent of the wealth of the typical white family.

So any serious conversation about Black institution-building has to hold two truths simultaneously: Black America experiences structural economic inequality as a group. And Black Americans occupy profoundly different socioeconomic positions within that group.

That creates a question I think we need to ask much more directly: Where do Black people from different economic classes actually encounter one another anymore?

Not employ one another. Not serve one another. Not follow each other online. Encounter one another.

Historically, a range of Black institutions helped create those encounters. Churches. Barbershops. Beauty salons. Bookstores. Restaurants. Nightclubs. HBCUs. Fraternal organizations. Civic associations. Community centers.

They were never classless spaces. But collectively they created a degree of Black social density.

A teacher might know an attorney. A barber might know a councilmember. A teenager might encounter a professor. A small-business owner might worship beside an executive. A musician might meet an accountant because somebody's cousin brought them to the same function.

It was imperfect. But it created opportunities for information to move between socioeconomic worlds.

A digital community can reproduce some of that. It cannot reproduce all of it. Sometimes community needs brick and mortar.

But Who Gets Through the Door?

The private-club model introduces an unavoidable complication. A beautiful physical institution costs money. Real estate costs money. Employees cost money. Programming costs money. Hospitality costs money. Maintenance costs money.

Black institutions cannot be expected to achieve excellence while pretending economics do not apply to them. But charging for access inevitably raises another question: Can an institution maintain economic standards without making economic status the definition of belonging?

The Gathering Spot itself seems conscious of that tension. It has developed multiple ways of participating in its broader community, and its leadership has emphasized that the club's role extends beyond exclusivity into civic and cultural life.

That tension should not be treated as a flaw unique to The Gathering Spot. It is the design problem facing almost every serious community institution. How do you build something financially sustainable while maintaining pathways for people who have not yet accumulated the resources of your most established members?

How does an accomplished 55-year-old encounter a talented 25-year-old? Where does a first-generation student meet someone fluent in institutional power without first having to penetrate an elite professional network? Where does the entrepreneur with 30 employees encounter the entrepreneur who registered her LLC last week? How do we create spaces where socioeconomic difference produces exchange rather than distance?

Those questions are what brought me back to Rainbow Soul.

From Representation to Succession

Rainbow Soul: A Chosen Lineage of Black Queer Music, Memory, and Becoming is, on its surface, a book about music, memory and Black queer cultural history. But beneath those subjects is an argument about inheritance. Not simply financial inheritance.

Knowledge can be inherited. Relationships can be inherited. Institutional memory can be inherited. Access can be inherited. A person telling you, “Here's who you need to call—and tell them I sent you,” is transferring an asset.

Black queer people have demonstrated an almost unrivaled ability to influence American culture. Music. Nightlife. Fashion. Language. Performance. Popular aesthetics. But cultural influence is not synonymous with institutional ownership.

You can create the sound and not own the masters. You can create the party and not own the venue. You can shape the culture and still have nowhere to transmit the institutional knowledge that made your success possible. You can privately mentor one younger person while leaving behind no system capable of mentoring the next hundred.

That is the distinction between representation and succession. The ultimate test of representation cannot simply be whether I got into the room. It has to become: Did my presence change who could enter that room after me?

That question becomes even more significant when considering the economic circumstances of Black LGBTQ Americans.

Williams Institute research estimated approximately 1.2 million Black LGBT adults in the United States and found that 56 percent lived in households below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Nearly 40 percent reported household incomes below $24,000, and 37 percent experienced food insecurity. The underlying datasets predate 2026, so these figures should be read as evidence of documented structural disparities rather than a current economic snapshot. citeturn720600search6turn720600search8

The implication remains important. Representation cannot be the end of our institutional imagination. Visibility cannot be our economic-development program. Eventually we have to build mechanisms through which people acquire access.

Sherman Phoenix, The Gathering Spot and the Institution That Does Not Exist Yet

Sherman Phoenix and The Gathering Spot are not interchangeable models. Nor should either be appropriated as a ready-made blueprint for somebody else's institution.

Sherman Phoenix asks: What happens when neighborhood entrepreneurship has a physical home?

The Gathering Spot asks: What happens when professional, civic and creative social capital has somewhere to concentrate?

Rainbow Soul adds another question: What happens when we intentionally connect generations inside that infrastructure?

Perhaps the institution we need does not fit neatly into any existing category. Maybe it isn't solely a marketplace. Or a membership club. Or a nonprofit. Or a university. Or a cultural center. Maybe it is an ecosystem whose doors deliberately open into one another.

A marketplace creates opportunity for entrepreneurs. A professional institution concentrates relationships. A university contributes research. An archive protects memory. A community organization provides trust.

Established professionals intentionally sponsor emerging professionals. Businesses share contracts and procurement opportunities. Mentors and mentees enter relationships designed not simply to inspire but to transfer knowledge. Researchers follow what happens and determine whether these interventions actually work.

The person with capital contributes capital. The elder contributes memory. The professional contributes institutional knowledge. The emerging leader contributes new capacity.

And mentorship stops functioning like charity flowing downward. Knowledge travels both ways. Opportunity circulates. People who enter the ecosystem with less access should eventually possess more of it. That is what infrastructure is supposed to do.

A Question for the Book Club—and the City

If your book club, classroom, professional organization, employee group or circle of friends is reading Rainbow Soul, do something beyond discussing your favorite chapter. Look at your own city.

Ask: Where do Black people from different socioeconomic positions actually encounter one another?

Then ask: Which of those places allow relationships to last long enough for knowledge, memory and opportunity to move between generations?

And finally: If that place disappeared tomorrow, what would your community lose besides the building?

The answer reveals whether you are looking at real estate or infrastructure. Sherman Phoenix gives us one example. The Gathering Spot gives us another. Neither provides the complete answer.

But both remind us that community needs more than shared identity. It needs commerce. Memory. Relationships. Access. Institutions. And sometimes, community needs real estate.

We have recovered enough names to know that we have a lineage. The next question is whether we are willing to construct the mechanisms through which lineage becomes inheritance. And eventually, somewhere for that inheritance to live.