Jerrod Delaine (SPS ’12)

Jerrod Delaine’s interest in housing kicked off when he was 6 years old and drew his mother her dream home. “That’s beautiful,” she said, adding that one day he could be an architect. From that point on, he was focused on doing just that.
     Then, after earning two degrees in architecture from Florida A&M University, a developer walked into the firm where he was working. “He’s like, ‘We’re going to have this many units. We’re going to have this many parking spaces. We’re going to have a water feature,’ ” Delaine recalls. “I realized, I want to do that. I want to be the visionary of how to improve communities. As an architect, I’m the artist painting the canvas. I want to be the person who’s owning the canvas.”
     So Delaine moved from Orlando, Florida, to New York and earned an MS at the School of Professional Studies’ Schack Institute of Real Estate. (Today, he’s an adjunct instructor there as well as a professor at the Pratt Institute.)
    His career trajectory was inspired by the realization that he was a lucky outlier. His parents, and two generations before them, owned their homes, but for so many other Black families, it was virtually impossible to do the same.
    This year, he established his own company, making him one of the less than 6 percent of real estate professionals in the country who are Black. He’ll focus largely on developing affordable housing, but he also wants to “work on housing policy initiatives that will facilitate financing structures that incentivize developers to create more Black homeownership opportunities,” he says.
    The business is built on connections with investors, institutional partners, and lenders, but its most important relationships are with the people he works for. “These are my cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my neighbors in church,” Delaine notes. “I have family members in public housing. A lot of developers can’t say that.”
    He has a challenge on his hands. Though once on the upswing, Black homeownership rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1960s. Delaine seeks to reverse that trend, and he firmly believes that Black-owned companies like his are key to getting those numbers back up. His goal is to inspire trust in those he seeks to help, who feel they haven’t been heard enough. “They see me as one of them,” he says. “And I have a vested interest in their success. I want other Jerrods out there to be successful.”

His career trajectory was inspired by the realization that he was a lucky outlier. His parents, and two generations before them, owned their homes, but for so many other Black families, it was virtually impossible to do the same.