Urban Impact Birmingham

Our mission is to develop, implement, and drive creative community-based strategies and programs that enhance economic opportunity, build inclusive and equitable ecosystems, facilitate historic preservation, and ensures a dynamic, impactful framework for sustainable growth and development. We exist to create economic opportunity and impact for people, place, and business in Birmingham. We strive to lead, build and grow traditionally underserved and historic African-American commercial districts and communities.

Green Acres Cafe (2019)

In February 2019, we launched the pilot of our legacy business initiative, #firston4th, with Green Acres Cafe. Green Acres Cafe, founded in 1958 and in its second generation of family ownership, is an anchor business in Birmingham’s Historic Black Business District - 4th Avenue - and a dominant thread in the tapestry of Birmingham’s culture. A trendsetter, Green Acres Cafe became one of the first Black businesses in Birmingham to franchise and the first Black-owned business in Birmingham to have a formal supplier relationship with the Coca-Cola company.

Though they had been a successful take-out restaurant, they had not yet taken advantage of new technologies that could reduce wait times, and that could help to expand their appeal among young Black professionals downtown. In a two-step strategy, we encouraged them to reassess their current merchant services and we introduced them to the growing mobile food delivery sector. As a result, they saved $732 a month on monthly merchant services fees, and adopted Waitr, a mobile food delivery app. Within three weeks, Green Acres Cafe become the regional leader on Waitr, surpassing 1,000 orders. The increased volume and increased cash flow prompted Green Acres Cafe management to hire two part-time workers (from LMI neighborhoods) during the lunch hour(s). This targeted technical assistance resulted in real-economic impact in terms of job creation, increased revenue for the business, and increased brand awareness to a new generation of consumers.

Jessie Nelson/Nelson Brother’s Cafe (1992)

One of Urban Impact’s most long-running programs in partnership with the City of Birmingham was the Commercial Land Bank Program for the Historic 4th Avenue Business District (4ABD) and the Birmingham Civil Rights District (BCRD). This program, focused on increasing and preserving Black commercial property ownership (by the 1970s the district had fallen into decline and absentee ownership) as well as promoting owner-occupancy, created a pathway for longtime operators to own property through the city’s commercial land bank and a low interest loan.

Urban Impact, the administrator, packager and co-designer of the program, assisted Mr. Jessie Nelson, second generation owner of Nelson Brother’s Cafe, with the purchase of the building. The building, which is now known as the Nelson Building, was once home to Birmingham’s early Black newspapers, the Birmingham World. Today the building hosts the third generation of the Nelson Brother’s Cafe, a family-owned microenterprise, now in its 75th year of operations. Mr. Nelson is just one example of how this program, administered in the 80s and 90s, has helped to stay the hand of displacement and preserve “Birmingham’s Black Wall Street”.

Out of the 14 remaining buildings listed as “contributing” to the Fourth Avenue Historic District, 11 of them (78%) are owned by Black property owners, nine of which are owner-operators. Comparatively, this is unique to Birmingham as other such districts from the Jim Crow era either no longer physically exist or they no longer boast majority indigenous commercial property ownership.