Everyone was excited because they lost the house when our grandmother passed away. The fact that I now own it is crazy.”

Cheron Sudler

A special report by the Chestnut Hill Local and the Philadelphia Citizen

See our interactive map, which illustrates how close many live to the communities in which they invest.

A decade ago, Jordan Parisse-Ferrarini was already a successful contractor. A skilled carpenter, a licensed electrician, and a certified construction manager, his company, Ferrarini Kitchens, Baths and Interiors, was doing brisk business. 

He wanted to take the next step and become a developer, and went to some trade shows. But he struggled, and felt frustrated that the industry still seemed so white. 

“There were 50,000 to 100,000 successful people and really no people of color,” he recalls. 

Then, in 2015, he saw a Facebook post about a training program that aimed to help people break into the business. He signed up  – and has since used what he learned to build his own development company and complete more than 100 housing units. 

Parisse-Ferrarini is one of more than 3,000 graduates of Jumpstart, a  Germantown-based program that is fundamentally altering who benefits from neighborhood redevelopment in Philadelphia. In an industry where 99 percent of real estate firms are white-owned and, as a 2021 Knight Foundation study found, only 2.8 percent are owned by women, Jumpstart tells a very different story: 83 percent of the people who use its loan program are Black, five percent are Hispanic and 51 percent are women.

With this program now at its 10-year mark and expanding throughout the city and beyond, The Chestnut Hill Local and The Philadelphia Citizen teamed up to investigate its impact. Our analysis of 460 Jumpstart loans and an anonymous survey of 95 borrowers reveals not just these startling demographic results. It also shows that these new developers – 80 percent of whom are Philadelphia area residents – are largely investing in their own communities. Twenty percent work in their own zip codes and 95 percent of all loans stay within Philadelphia proper. 

Jumpstart, which has now loaned almost $60 million in neighborhoods across the city, is not just rehabbing properties. It’s building wealth for neighborhood residents and helping communities reap the financial benefits of redevelopment. 

Perhaps no one is more surprised at its success than founder Ken Weinstein, a developer who began investing in Mt. Airy and Germantown more than 30 years ago.  

“The program has just taken off beyond my expectations,” Weinstein says. “We just had no idea of the demand for the training and mentoring and financing that we were offering.”

Vacant houses and a vision

Jumpstart is not Weinstein’s first investment in Northwest Philadelphia. A child of the suburbs (he grew up in central Jersey), he remembers being surprised – and frustrated – by the extent of the blight he found in Germantown and the city as a whole.

“I remember first moving to Philadelphia in the mid-80s and being really surprised that there were just vacant, deteriorated houses,” he says. “I decided then and there I would not normalize that, I would not accept ‘that's just the way it is.’ I wanted to do something about it.”

His Germantown-based commercial firm, Philly Office Retail, set out to address some of that blight. It has since redeveloped more than 300 properties in Mt. Airy and Germantown, more than half of which are commercial. 

Still, there was far too much deteriorating real estate for one developer to handle. And he was being approached by neighborhood residents who wanted to know how they, too, could learn to develop property. They were interested; they just needed the skills. 

Weinstein realized that any time he invested in teaching future developers would pay off – for the neighborhood and his bottom line. Local investors would be more likely to keep their development dollars within the neighborhood, he reasoned, and benefit the community as a whole. 

“If local residents are doing the development, then the profit that they’re making stays within the community, which improves the commercial corridor and increases the quality of life within Germantown,” Weinstein says.

So, he launched a program. It started with Bruce McCall and Nancy Larcom O’Brien, who met with him in his office. Two people quickly became 10, then 20. The meetings kept growing in size, so Weinstein had to move them – first to the Mt. Airy CDC, then La Salle University, then Jefferson University. Now, Jumpstart trains 70 people at a time, and Weinstein has created a dedicated training room in his Germantown headquarters. 

Inside the program: How it works 

Jumpstart invests in parts of the city that, like Germantown, are “middle” neighborhoods — they’re not in complete disrepair, but neither are they experiencing the development frenzy that is happening in rapidly changing neighborhoods like Fishtown, so buyers and renters aren’t priced out by a crush of competitive demand. About 41 percent of Philadelphians live in these kinds of neighborhoods, per a 2017 report by the Reinvestment Fund, a city-based nonprofit with a mission of equitable economic growth.  

“If we renovated houses in Fishtown and Center City and Manayunk, the rental and sales price of the houses would be much higher,” Weinstein says. “We are producing housing that is more affordable than the general market.”

The program includes intensive instruction as well as financing and mentorship. 

The education piece is a 10-session, 13.5-hour series of classes that teach inexperienced developers about property sourcing, deal financing, construction and the process of leasing or selling a property. It now trains about 70 people at a time in Germantown and also offers programs in Kensington, Tioga, and North, West and Southwest Philadelphia.

The cost for in-person training is $125. Jumpstart donates $80 of that $125 to local nonprofits, and also offers a virtual option for $75. After they graduate, Jumpstarters can continue their education through “Jumpinars,” which are mini sessions that dive deeper into a particular development topic, such as securing a rental license from the City or refinancing a rehab project.

Graduates gain access to Jumpstart's financing program, which has distributed 460 loans totaling $57,891,367 since 2015. Using Philly Office Retail's lines of credit, Jumpstart offers loans at about nine percent interest – notably lower than the standard short term loans used by developers, which range from 9.5 to 11.25 percent. The program will finance up to 85 percent of a project's total costs, including acquisition, with a maximum loan of $350,000 for single-unit properties. Because no principal is due until the property is sold or refinanced, and no interest is paid until the renovation is complete, the total cost of borrowing is just the $1,500 commitment fee, which covers the cost of four inspections. 

To secure financing, graduates must submit an online application with a business plan projecting costs and potential profits, along with information about comparable properties and a construction budget. 

The loan program has a success all its own, with its notably low default rate – just one default out of 460 loans. That’s a .2 percent rate, far less than the one percent that is typical for traditional construction loans. 

"I think any bank would love to have that success," Weinstein says. 

The final component of the program — mentorship — connects new developers with experienced Jumpstart grads, helping newbies avoid common mistakes and better manage their projects. 

And that mentorship, according to Jumpstart graduate Parisse-Ferrarini, turns out to be invaluable. 

“In real estate, one of the biggest challenges is having enough education to make an informed decision. As a newer developer, that can make or break you,” he says.

To keep investment in the neighborhood, Weinstein gives priority to people living in Germantown and the surrounding neighborhoods — East Falls, Mt. Airy, West Oak Lane, and Nicetown. If there’s room, he’ll open it up to people who live in other neighborhoods. People who live outside the city can sign up after that.

“I have absolutely no problem with outside investors coming in, as long as they’re doing the right type of development, as long as they’re talking to neighbors and they’re caring about the communities in which they develop and invest,” Weinstein says. “But I wouldn’t want it to be an overwhelming percentage.”

Balancing growth with community needs

The impact of Jumpstart can be seen all over Germantown, on blocks where once blighted buildings have been turned into shiny new homes. 

Some local activists are concerned that gentrification – and displacement of long-term residents – will follow. Redevelopment can reduce blight, they say, but it can also lead to increases in rents and housing prices, making the neighborhood unaffordable for low income earners. 

“There’s a fine line between trying to bring things back into use and making them safe, and then revitalization and gentrification,” says Lindsay Stolkey, a housing organizer with Germantown Residents for Economic Alternatives Together (GREAT). 

Activists also worry that developer-focused programs could inadvertently displace residents who can’t afford repairs. 

“What we’ve seen when we do outreach in the community is that people come up to our table and the first things they're asking for are resources to help maintain their property,” says Yonique Myrie, an organizer with GREAT. “Those people end up selling their properties for little money.”

These activists have reason for concern. The need for affordable housing in both Germantown and the city writ large is high. The Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) has not opened its waitlist for its subsidized housing since 2013; there are 40,000 people on the list. About 40 percent of Philadelphia households are cost-burdened, which means they spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. And Germantown incomes, on average, lag behind those of the city. Census Bureau data show the median household income is $45,727 – more than 24 percent lower than the citywide average of $60,698.

Jumpstart, operating without public subsidies was not designed as an affordable housing program. But it does include some affordability measures. Borrowers must rent their properties at rates that fall at or below 70 percent of the area median income (AMI). So, $1,400 for a studio, $1,500 for a one-bedroom, $1,800 for a two-bedroom, and so on. If a borrower decides to sell a property, they must do so for 90 percent of the AMI. That means $391,400 for a five-bedroom house. On average, Jumpstart homes sell for somewhat less than the Germantown average of $224,000, and significantly less than the citywide average of $260,000.

And some graduates do go on to focus on developing affordable housing. Four years ago, Jumpstart partnered with the PHA on a Property Sourcing Lottery program that allows graduates to purchase one of 45 blighted PHA properties for $10, so long as they promised to sell them to people making less than 80 percent of the area median income. The program has had three different rounds over the years; the last round of winners is in the final stages of rehabbing their homes. 

“Several of those PHA lottery winners were, in fact, former PHA residents who wanted to give back,” Weinstein says.

Jumpstart grad Antonio Cerqueira, who lives in South Philadelphia, did his first PHA project in Point Breeze, where he sold a house to a low-income family that  had been struggling to pay $1,800 per month in rent. With their new mortgage, they were able to save $700 per month and get the guarantee that their housing costs would remain consistent from year to year. And Cerqueira still made a profit from the sale.

“I fell totally in love with this model of affordable housing,” he says. 

Parisse-Ferrarini likes the model too, and is breaking ground on 10 more such projects soon. 

One of his recent buyers, Cheron Sudler, was able to purchase a home that her family had sold when her step-grandmother died for $170,000. She had been searching for a house for five years when a coworker referred her to Parisse-Ferrarini’s company.

“Everyone was excited because they lost the house when our grandmother passed away,” Sudler says. “The fact that I now own it is crazy.”

Still, activists say, the math doesn’t work for many Germantown families, whose incomes don’t match the regional average. 

They say pegging income requirements to regional averages – a standard practice by banks, government agencies, and housing programs – is a problem all its own. For Philadelphia, that income statistic includes wealthier surrounding counties and parts of Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland. 

"AMI is based on just such a large geographic scale that isn't relevant to the people who actually live in the neighborhood," Stolkey says. 

Jumpstart, affordable housing and building wealth

While Jumpstart homes may be out of reach for very low income earners, it is building wealth for people who participate.

The average Jumpstart loan is $125,578. With total costs averaging around $147,000, developers who sell homes at the typical $202,000 price point make approximately $55,000 in profit.

Tyra Childs, who graduated from the program in 2020, started with a property in the neighborhood where she grew up, West Oak Lane. She has since rehabbed two properties – one in West Oak Lane and one in West Philadelphia. She sold one and is renting out the other. 

“I learned a lot from meeting with Jumpstart and joining the program,” she says. “They gave me insight on how to scout for homes, and the full renovation process.”

Some graduates have built substantial portfolios. Palak Shah, a former mechanical engineer, parlayed her Jumpstart training into a 23-rental property portfolio worth $3 million by 2019. 

But the program’s most profound impact may be in the network of entrepreneurs it has created – developers who are now helping others transform their own communities. 

Parisse-Ferrarini, for instance, has helped longtime Germantown residents buy or remain in their own homes. His nonprofit training program, Trades for A Difference — which offers job skills, apprenticeship and an entrepreneurial education program — has offered free repair services to seniors. 

Cerquiera helped Jumpstart develop its Spanish-speaking training program. Because she understands the unique challenges women face, Shah has created a training program that helps women and LGBTQ people become developers. Hundreds of people have participated.

 “Women feel super uncomfortable asking a lender a question because they think that they should already know the answer,” Shah says. “When you see other women succeed, it feels more real.”

As Jumpstart’s success in building both housing and wealth has grown, it has caught the attention of urban development experts. 

There are few programs like it, save for those that have directly adopted the Jumpstart model, says Dr. Kevin C. Gillen, senior research fellow at Drexel’s Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation. Other real estate coaching programs that promise to teach similar skills cost between $500 and $10,000 per month and don’t teach the same depth of information as Jumpstart, he says.  

“Jumpstart has a social mission in addition to an economic mission,” Gillen says. “They’re not just mentoring in real estate, but promoting underrepresented minorities in real estate and focusing on traditionally overlooked, marginal, or distressed neighborhoods.”

That mission is now expanding well beyond Germantown, with the program now operating in 18 other communities in and around the city, and beyond. While Weinstein administers loans for most programs throughout Philadelphia, Jumpstart Kensington has partnered with socially conscious development firm Shift Capital to establish its financing system.

The model is proving replicable in other cities too. Prudence Browne launched Jumpstart Norristown in 2020, and the Wilmington program has become the most active location, second only to Germantown. Over the next several years, Jumpstart plans to expand to Washington, D.C.; Gary, Indiana; Dover, Delaware; and York, Pittsburgh and Chester, Pennsylvania. Jumpstart is even bringing the program to their first rural community in Meadville, outside Butler, PA.

"We would love to see 50 Jumpstart programs around the country in the next several years. And I think that's doable because we have now proven that our model is effective and can improve a neighborhood," Weinstein says.

Our analysis, based on Jumpstart loan data and an anonymous survey of 95 borrowers, does not capture development by the many program graduates who use their own financing. Our interactive map also illustrates how close many live to the communities in which they invest. 

The Chestnut Hill Local is one of 30 news organizations powering the  Philadelphia Journalism Collaborative. We do solutions reporting on things that affect daily life in our city where the problem and symptoms are obvious, but what’s driving them isn’t.  Follow us at @PHLJournoCollab.