I recently asked a real estate professional about a new company called Fundrise that’s built on the simple dream of selling small shares in urban real-estate projects to the masses. He told me he had three points to make:
- It’s a very cool idea.
- It’s totally illegal.
- It’s never going to work.
After looking into it, I agree with two-thirds of what he says. It is very cool. It is not illegal. And—unfortunately, it probably won’t work. But if it does work, it’ll work in an excellent way. Not so much by providing a new kind of financial product that makes sense for middle class investors, but by altering the currently toxic politics of urban real estate development. A huge network of small-time, commercial real-estate shareholders could provide a much-needed counterweight to the plague of NIMBYs strangling America’s cities.
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