Diversity and equity are values most organizations desire to uphold, but at times they struggle to understand how to measure and track progress towards these objectives. Through ESI's Equity and Inclusion practice area, we marshal our analytical expertise and real-world experience to add quantitative substance and strategic nuance to diversity analyses in a wide range of sectors.

For this Present Value post, ESI President Lee Huang speaks with Tayyib Smith and Rija Beares on the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the real estate industry.

Tayyib Smith is a seasoned serial entrepreneur. He stands as the founding partner and chief strategist at The Growth Collective, an innovative partnership committed to dismantling systemic barriers in communities of color. Separately, at the helm of Smith & Roller Holdings, Smith actively involves diverse stakeholders in creating a vibrant, multicultural, and multi-socioeconomic tapestry within neighborhoods. His extensive portfolio and involvement in projects that address historical inequities underscore his commitment to social impact and community-driven change.

Rija Beares is the CBRE Market Leader for the Greater Philadelphia Region, which includes oversight for downtown and suburban Philadelphia, Delaware, Southern New Jersey, the Lehigh Valley, and Central Pennsylvania. In this role, Beares oversees more than 435 full-time employees and is responsible for driving the company's growth strategy in Greater Philadelphia and delivering integrated client solutions across the company's Advisory Services business, including leasing, sales, valuations, debt & structured finance and property management.

Huang: What challenges have you faced in an industry that remains predominantly white and male?

Smith: People of the global majority and the disabled face a confluence of intergenerational public policies issues, intrinsic bias, and structural racism. As an entrepreneur and real estate developer, Black and Hispanic real estate developers represent 0.56% of the total number of private U.S. developers, and only about 5% of owners in the real estate industry as a whole, according to a new study titled, Breaking the Glass Bottleneck.

To date, non-white identified citizens face a long and sustained structural commitment to both de facto and de jure state sponsored inequality and exclusion to civic, economic, and political participation. To paraphrase MLK, if the laws on the books were enforced you would never need another DEI initiative, program, or steering committee.

Huang: How do you approach your work in a way that advances Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

Beares: My approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace is to have DEI so immersive in our culture that it is embedded in all actions, processes, and practices.

Exposure and education about our industry are most important when establishing talent attraction programs aimed at entry-level and experienced professionals from diverse backgrounds. I joined the board of NAIOP and was appointed to head the DEI Committee. One of our initiatives is to expose diverse high school students to careers in commercial real estate through the NAIOP Drexel Summer Program. The program is a 10-day immersive exposure to commercial real estate over the summer. It has been hugely successful in attracting new talent that may never have known about the commercial real estate career path. Our committee determined that it would be beneficial to develop a programmatic way to increase touchpoints with the same student population and created an internship program as well as a one-day externship program. This created continuity from high school through college graduation.

Another endeavor is to create a culture of openness and learning. If we are willing to be vulnerable in accepting that we all hold unconscious bias, our employee training sessions become a bonding experience that creates trust and respect for our differences.

Lastly, meeting employees where they are and providing bespoke support creates a safe workplace environment. If every project, process, and action is approached with excellence in mind and viewed through the lens of imbuing diversity, we will continue to improve our solutions and create richer workplaces.

Smith: In my personal experience the lion's share of DEI initiatives, convenings, meetings, and panels have asked for free intellectual labor and time for me and my colleagues to engage in culturally incompetent dialogue with white led institutions. The outcome is usually an endeavor to make said institution or company look or feel better with no real transformative commitment to changing the status quo beyond the performative or cosmetic projection of progress.

My perspective is that the DEI sector was under assault before it was ever fully funded or standardized and is the only element of many tools that need long term commitment and structural support in order to heal deep cancerous wounds within our body politic and economy due to racialized capitalism.

Huang: What support did you receive along the way to help you feel you belonged in this space?

Smith: I am probably not the right person for this question. I cannot recall a time when I did not feel like, or know, I belonged in a space of commerce, influences, or civic engagement. I find myself more perplexed and dismayed by the firm commitment to exclusion and intellectual dishonesty we often witness, and experience through structural racism supported by Myths of Meritocracy and the white gaze of individuals and institutions who claim to want to make change and progress for a more equitable society.

The support I received was from my parents and a community of elders who instilled in me a worldview that demands inclusion.

I do recall two of the many conversations that had a transformative effect on my thinking and inspired me to start a real estate practice and praxis on how I approach projects. The first was with my friend and colleague David Grasso who told me I was smarter than the people he negotiated with in commercial real estate, and that the only difference was no one ever had explained or taught me how to do a sweat equity deal until I approached him about creating a co-working space. That conversation evolved into Pipeline workspaces in the Graham building in Center City Philadelphia.

The second was with my friend and mentor Theaster Gates. I asked him how he developed the business acumen to own and develop so many properties in Chicago on a site visit in 2014. He responded honestly and transparently and shared that he did not have the acumen I, nor anyone else believed, but assured me I could do the same, and if anyone asked, to tell them that he supported my concepts and to call him for reassurance.

Beares: Early in my leadership role, a mentor of mine suggested that I determine what I wanted my legacy to be. It was an easy response: I seek to diversify the commercial real estate industry by fostering a sustaining and diverse pipeline of talent. My core belief that diversity is imperative to success is something I strive to model to my sphere of influence. Diversity of thought and experience can be present when you bring together representation from varying generations, cultures, social mores, nationalities, and geographies. Neurodiversity, hidden disabilities or experience gained from special projects are also catalysts for successful outcomes.

Huang: What is the ROI case for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in your field?

Smith: None of this will change without deep work, commitment, innovation, and transformative long–term actions. Philadelphia being the poorest and most diverse big city in the nation, restorative justice to race-based economic inequality is the highest priority and the best use of focus in a region prioritizing being the cleanest, greenest, etc. (put your ones in the air Mayor Parker).

About this series:

"DEI" has turned into a flashpoint issue in the same year as what promises to be another contentious presidential election. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are, to some, a set of ideals worth striving for in response to historic and present injustices. From this perspective, efforts to block or ban DEI initiatives are anathema, a troubling retreat from recent progress. Conversely, those who support anti-DEI measures do so from a place of exasperation that DEI has seemed to become a sort of pseudo-religion seeking adherence without substantiation or question.

ESI has never shied away from contentious contemporary topics. Indeed, we pride ourselves in always striving to do the right thing in the right way, which in our field means investigating all angles of an issue in an honest and thorough manner. Only in that way can we provide our clients with guidance on where things are going, where things should go, and how we should get there.

From where we stand, DEI initiatives at their best are an important acknowledgement of systemic disparities and a necessary platform for successful organizations, industries, and economies. However, in order to galvanize sufficient support and execute sustainable (and legally defensible) solutions, the burden of proof lies in being thoughtful about identifying where barriers exist, what's the case for a better way forward, and which proven methods make the most sense.

Over the next few weeks, ESI will be running a series of Q&A-style blog posts in which we elicit the insights of industry professionals on the subject of DEI. Our goal is to join with these thought leaders to provide a balanced and reasoned look into how the challenges of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion play out in different fields. We look forward to engaging with additional voices in other sectors in the years to come.

Lee Huang, Principal | Huang@econsultsolutions.com

Lee Huang brings over 20 years of experience in economic development experience to ESI public, private, institutional, and not-for-profit clients. He leads consulting engagements in a wide range of fields, including higher education, economic inclusion, environmental sustainability, historic preservation, real estate, neighborhood economic development, non-profits, retail, state and local government, strategic planning, tax policy, and tourism/hospitality, and is a sought-after speaker on these and other topics.