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Erie’s Black Wall Street started off as a Facebook group to bring the area’s Black community together.
In the late 2010s, Kyra Taylor, co-founder of the group alongside her friends Angelica Spraggins and DaVona Pacley, used the page to connect local businesses and share events, the name paying tribute to the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
But when they saw a financial outlet list Erie as one of the “worst cities” for Black people to live based on certain economic stats, the trio was inspired to expand their community-building, Taylor told PA Local.
“We are the type of people … we’re not going to complain about a problem without offering a solution,” she said.
In 2020, they turned Erie’s Black Wall Street into a nonprofit, of which Taylor is currently the executive director. It has since “ballooned and blossomed,” she told PA Local. Its small staff — many of whom “donate their time” and put in work beyond the number of hours they work on paper, Taylor said — run initiatives that aid prospective homeowners, foster entrepreneurship, and more.
That work earned her a nomination for PA Local Heroes, a monthly feature sponsored by Ballard Spahr.
Taylor grew up in New Castle, about 90 miles south of Erie. The former behavior counselor and child welfare case worker developed a fondness toward Erie at a young age, as she frequented it with her mother, who worked as a minister, and with her father to go fishing. She later attended PennWest Edinboro, 30 miles south of the lakeside city.
She doubled down on her passion for Erie when she and her husband David decided to raise their family there. Putting her all into Erie’s Black Wall Street, she said, is a means of making the city “a better place” for her family and neighbors.
The nonprofit’s flagship initiative is its “Pathway to Homeownership” program, a free, four-week workshop that educates attendees on budgeting, mortgages, and other aspects of the homebuying process. They’ve also recently added a component that teaches some simple repair skills that may help homeowners avoid hefty upkeep costs in the long run. Participants must seek to own homes in Erie County, where around 10% of residents are Black. (In Erie city, Black residents make up 23% of the population.)
Racial disparities in homeownership are a longtime problem in Erie and beyond. As of 2023, around 45% of Black households in the United States own their homes, per the National Association of Realtors, as compared to 65% of American households overall.
The Pathway to Homeownership program — which is supported by sponsors including the Erie Community Foundation, Hamot Health Foundation, and BUILD Community Development Corporation — has educated around 200 people since it launched in 2021, Taylor said. The organization has also raffled off thousands of dollars in down payment assistance to participants who meet certain qualifications.
“Home ownership helps create community,” Taylor said. “It helps you have a stake in your community, which helps everything else come up. To see people who have gone through our credit workshops, our budgeting workshops, then to go through our homeownership workshop and to see them changing their own lives … it is very, very fulfilling and it really shows the true power of what happens when we collaborate on things.”
The org’s work doesn’t end at real estate. It also maintains a growing directory of Black-owned businesses, and runs a business development program called New Wall Street Ventures to provide tailored support to local entrepreneurs (regardless of race) who are looking to retool their business. Erie’s Black Wall Street also recently piloted a youth entrepreneurship program at a local middle school, Taylor said.
The work is important because it ensures access to a set of resources for people who often “have not been given the opportunities that everybody else has been given,” Taylor said.
And there’s another reason, she added.
“When you invest in your most marginalized communities … your entire community comes up,” Taylor argued. “So yes, my goal is to see Black Erie rise into this great, wonderful, booming population here. But also, my goal is to see Erie, the city that I fell in love with as a young child, reach its full potential.”
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