Page 18 of Lease to Love

Thirty people in a room built for twenty, and I was still somehow the most uncomfortable thing in it.

I’d walked into rooms that wanted me dead—boardrooms, mostly, the kind where people smiled with their mouths while their lawyers took notes—and always managed to leave with what I came for. I’d sat across from men who’d built entire careers around not giving an inch and taken the mile anyway, because that was what you did when you understood that no was usually just an opening position.

The Langston Park Block Association was a different kind of room.

These people weren’t trying to protect market share. They were trying to protect something that mattered, which made them considerably harder to move.

I’d been standing at the front of this community center for twenty-two minutes, presenting an initiative that could completely change the lives of the business owners and residents.

And it wasn’t going well.

“The proposal isn’t designed to bring new business into Langston Park,” I said, looking toward the man in the second row. He was older, arms crossed, a DC United cap pulled low over his forehead. “It’s designed to give the businesses and residents already here the ability to expand. To own more. To stop renting what they build and start controlling it.”

The most enthusiastic response I’d gotten so far was from a woman in the third row who’d uncrossed her arms long enough to write something in a spiral notebook before crossing them again.

A woman near the back raised her hand. "Who decides who qualifies?"

"The board that oversees allocation isn't appointed," I answered honestly, clicking past the organizational chart. "It's elected. By residents. People already in this room." I gestured to the small crowd. "I don't have a seat at that table."

“And why not?" DC United cap asked. Not hostile—but suspicious. "If you're funding it—"

"Because it's not my neighborhood to run."

I interrupted him before he could finish and pulled the next slide onto the screen.

"I provide the initial capital. I help structure the legal framework. I act as a silent partner. After that, it belongs to the people in this room. Full stop."

The spiral notebook woman wrote something down. The man in the DC United cap uncrossed his arms for the first time since I'd started talking.

Progress, I guess.

I clicked to the next slide and kept going.

"Then what do you get out of it?" Another man, this one in a Washington Commanders jersey, brow pinched like it had been permanently set that way.

“Long term, a robust portfolio and a healthier real estate market in a zip code I’ve invested significantly in,” I said. “Short term, nothing.”

I let the silence sit for half a second.

“I know how that sounds. But it’s laid out in black and white.”

Something shifted.

Barely.

The kind of movement you missed if you were looking for it directly. You had to catch it at the edges.

DC United cap uncrossed his arms. Spiral notebook was writing again. The man near the window who'd been conspicuously checking his phone had put it away.

Forty-seven days since I’d started pursuing this particular seat at the table, and for the first time, the room felt like it might actually be listening.

I pulled up the next slide. We’re getting somewhere.

"Mr. Sterling."

The room changed.

Not by degrees. All at once.