The story of San Francisco’s Fillmore District is, at the highest levels, the same as so many other historically Black neighborhoods around the country. Black families that settled there during the Great Migration built a vibrant, culturally rich neighborhood that thrived until the city decimated it by way of eminent domain during the redevelopment era of the ‘50s and ‘60s. That’s where Fillmore’s story diverges.

In 1967, Fillmore residents formed the Western Addition Community Organization, or WACO for short. WACO sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and won the right to be included in the neighborhood’s redevelopment process. WACO’s win helped stem the tide of the displacement taking place, but rebuilding is, in many ways, still going on. Just 5.1% of San Francisco’s residents are Black today.

As often happens when a community gets left behind, the necessity of making something out of nothing leads to entrepreneurship thriving. Just look at In The Black, the brick-and-mortar and e-commerce Black-led marketplace launched by the city in the Fillmore neighborhood in 2022.

Pia Harris, the chief economic development officer for the San Francisco Housing and Development Corporation (SFHDC) who spent most of her life in Fillmore and passed away last year, was connected with a group of Black entrepreneurs who were selling clothing out of their cars in a Safeway parking lot.

“When the pandemic happened, these informal businesses didn’t have the same opportunity to access emergency support grants that other formally established businesses did,” explains Jess Mataka, SFHDC’s fund development manager. “So Pia put together a whole set of comprehensive small business services.” These included helping the entrepreneurs formally register a business, develop a business plan, and access microgrants. “Along with that, Pia was like, we’ve got to find a place for these businesses to see their products.”

That’s how In The Black came to be.

With around a dozen stores that sell clothing from t-shirts to pantyhose, beauty products like soaps and body oils, and more, In The Black was launched in less than a year and just in time for the 2022 holiday shopping season. Each of the space’s businesses pay between $350 and $450 a month in rent depending on their footprint.

The idea was SFHDC’s, but commercial space was outside the affordable housing nonprofit’s wheelhouse. So they brought Viscera Studio on board to take the project from inception to launch.

“For 10 or 15 years, the space was a check cashing place. So, very literally a space that was very extractive from the community,” says Ari Takata-Vasquez, Viscera’s founder and creative director. “We were able to get the space and transform it into something that invested in the Black community.”

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From naming and branding to managing the construction and design as well as helping entrepreneurs photograph their products, Viscera handled it all with the expertise that comes with a familiarity in the area.

“Prior to starting my studio, I had a brick-and-mortar shop. I worked with a lot of small entrepreneurs. Landing your first wholesale retail client is a big challenge because the industry is complicated. You often have to be able to pony up more money and other things that keep it out of reach for entrepreneurs,” says Takata-Vasquez. “So we designed In The Black to be a bridge between hustling and doing it on your own and getting into retail.”

Accomplishing that required designing a flexible space. The marketplace can be reconfigured and adjusted to accommodate retailers who might just need some shelf space and others who want a whole store area.

The main piece of advice Takata-Vasquez gives to others looking to do what SFHDC has done with In The Black is to use a studio like hers that knows what it’s doing. “Construction and architecture is a really high-cost area to learn. In marketing, you can try something low-stakes, do experiments, and it’s not going to cost you a lot. But in construction and architecture, one bad choice can lead to a $100,000 change order,” she says.

While In The Black has been up and running since 2022, Mataka is open about the challenges the marketplace still faces. “It took $970,000 to convert the space. Roughly $300,000 came from grants and the rest was self-funded. We’re still trying to fundraise to recoup that investment.”

Even though all of the entrepreneurs in the space go through SFHDC’s Minding My Black-Owned Business course, a 12-week business development program, there’s still kinks to work out. Some businesses have great clothing, but not enough sizes. Others wrestle with replenishing products quickly enough. “In the first month, we did like $23,000 in sales. People bought a lot of gift cards,” Mataka recalls. But since then sales have slumped to around $11,000 a month.

The project also had grant funding from the city that helped subsidize In The Black’s $9,000 monthly rent, but that ran out on July 1. “Retail really is a specialized skillset. We haven’t been able to quite figure it out yet,” she adds.

“The fact that it’s this hard for us as a non-profit that’s been around since 1988 with a full team of people shows that doing something like this is pretty impossible for a small business owner without a significant capital investment,” Mataka notes. “And we know Black-owned businesses have a lot of barriers to accessing capital.”

Plus, she says, other funding challenges that have hit SFHDC naturally ripple out to In The Black. “The city has gone through funding cuts in the last year. They cut our funding with like two weeks’ notice, which really impacted our team,” Mataka says.

For those seeking to build something similar, Mataka’s advice echoes Takata-Vasquez’s. “Make sure you have people with technical expertise — whether that’s staff or partnership or consultants or really amazing volunteers — who have the ability to coach the business and check in with them on their sales projections, sourcing and marketing, and continue to provide that ongoing support,” Mataka says. With their reduced funding, that’s been a challenge. “That’s an ideal scenario we’d be doing [ourselves], but our staff is just so stressed right now.”

This post was originally published on Next City.