Sycamore & Oak: A Thriving D.C. Retail Village For Black Businesses

by Daniel Johnson June 3, 2024 The retail space opened in June 2023. In June 2023, Washington, D.C.’s Mayor, Muriel Bowser, announced the opening of Sycamore & Oak Retail Village. The retail center would be owned by the members of the community and was intended by city leaders to be a space for Black-owned businesses to get the resources they are typically denied when trying to open and scale up their establishments.  As PBS Newshour reported, the experiment in D.C. has been a resounding success as Keyonna Jones, the owner of Soufside Creative, an art and apparel shop, describes the village atmosphere as “a tribe, like a Black Wall Street tribe.”  Jones continued, “Sycamore & Oak has been an incredible resource for myself and for my business, coming in here as a small business it has been an incubator space where we learn all the professional things.” Four years ago, Black-owned businesses were among the hardest hit by the disruption of the pandemic. In Washington, D.C., the @sycamoreoak retail space was created as a way to support local Black entrepreneurs. Morgan Hawkins from @ReportingLabs reports. pic.twitter.com/gHYxxdCtQ0 — PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) June 2, 2024 Sycamore & Oak is a community-led mixed-use...