Cisco In Talks To Establish Huge Midtown Atlanta Office

Kelani Blackwell joined CBRE as a commercial broker a month before the world shut down. She quickly came face to face with a challenge faced by other younger brokers and commission-based commercial real estate staff last year: how to stay alive when the deals disappear. 

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Until the 1960s, Claiborne Avenue in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans was a major commercial thoroughfare for the Black population of the city, home to a variety of businesses and shaded by hundreds of large oak trees. The avenue was also a community gathering place.

By the 1970s, the street was in the shadow of a new highway, erected in 1968 to facilitate the movement of cars through the city, as was considered important by the highway builders of the time. Most of the businesses and all of the trees along the street were gone. What was once an important part of the community had become blighted.

"The people of Tremé who bought houses, like my family, thinking that the neighborhood was going to remain beautiful and prosperous, had no idea that the government considered them expendable," said Amy Stelly, an architectural and urban designer based in New Orleans who lives in the Tremé neighborhood, not far from the elevated Claiborne Expressway, which is now the target of removal efforts.

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Joseph French is a senior director of the National Retail Group at Institutional Property Advisors, a Marcus & Millichap company. He started his career in office leasing in Manhattan — though he was told he wouldn’t succeed in the industry as a Black man. He persevered and moved into retail brokerage.

He now focuses on shopping centers and has been involved in the sale of over $1B of property over the course of his career. He told Bisnow about tough lessons, working through the worst of the financial crisis and the warning he gives to young people of color entering the industry.

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