Three Years In, America’s First New Black-led Bank In 20 Years Is Picking Up Steam

Adelphi Bank in Columbus, Ohio. (Photo by Oscar Perry Abello)

This week marks one year since the publication of Next City senior economic justice correspondent Oscar Perry Abello’s first book, “The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy.” But it also marks the start of the 100th Black History Month, so we’re checking in the progress made by one of the Black-led banks featured in his book: Adelphi Bank.

Last September, Lyneir Richardson got an unusual phone call.

Richardson is the founder and CEO of TREND, a Chicago-based company with a mission to revitalize shopping centers in predominantly Black neighborhoods while bringing on local residents as co-investors in each project. He spends a lot of his time calling up banks and investors and courting them to finance the organization’s small but growing portfolio of projects across the country.

But this time, Adelphi Bank – the Columbus-based community bank which in 2023 became the first new Black-led bank to be chartered in 20 years — was calling Richardson to see if he’d be interested in working with them on a deal.

By December, just three months later, Adelphi had provided his organization with a $1.3 million loan to acquire the Mount Vernon Plaza shopping center in Columbus, Ohio.

Back in 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter spoke at the ribbon cutting for Mount Vernon Plaza. The shopping center quickly became a hub of Black culture and commerce in Columbus. But, like the historically Black neighborhoods around it on the city’s Near East Side, Mount Vernon Plaza has since been through decades of decline.

Local Black civic and business leaders, including former four-term mayor Michael Coleman, have spent years contemplating how to restore Mount Vernon Plaza to its former glory while updating it to meet today’s needs, like adding new housing at prices that longtime residents nearby can still afford.

Read more: Community Investors Are Doing What Big Dollar Investors Won’t

Some of those local civic and business leaders are now board members, employees, or customers at Adelphi Bank. Based on the Near East Side, the bank celebrated its third birthday on Jan. 18. Since inception, Adelphi has already invested more than $90 million in loans for local businesses, commercial real estate and housing around Columbus, while also growing to hold $90 million in deposits.

The acquisition moved significantly faster than what Richardson has seen for similar deals done with larger lenders, even mission-driven lenders, whose underwriting teams don’t live or work in the same communities where the deals are happening.

“It’s interesting when you have a bank that says, ‘I have a project that we want to get done, it’s in our backyard,’” Richardson says. “They did the normal level of due diligence that any bank would do, but it was done in a way that I knew that the lender wanted to see the transaction happen at the end of the day.”

Three years in, Adelphi Bank’s early lending activity around Columbus shows how proximity, personnel and minority leadership can be strategic advantages — allowing the bank to move capital quickly into projects larger institutions routinely pass over, all while strengthening the local community development ecosystem.

Who you know still matters

In many ways, what Adelphi Bank does is the same as just about any of the other 3,900 community banks across the country — representing 90% of all federally-insured banks.

Community banks take deposits and make loans within a concentrated geographic area, such as a metropolitan region or single state. Because of their geographic focus, community banks “are best known for their emphasis on ‘relationship lending,’ where bankers leverage their deep knowledge of the local community to gather detailed, soft information about customers, including managerial skills and reputation,” per the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Relationship lending is particularly important in commercial real estate or small business lending, where lenders have to make judgment calls on whether the investor or developer’s proposed mix of tenants is a good fit for a location, or whether that location is the right fit for a particular business with a particular owner or management team.

The larger a bank is, the further its loan approval team is from a specific city or neighborhood or corridor, and the harder it is for a bank to make those kinds of judgment calls. Those 3,900 community banks combined have $596 billion in commercial real estate loans and $215 billion in small business loans in their portfolios, while the four largest banks (Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citi) combined have just $200 billion in commercial real estate and $119 billion in small business loans in their portfolios.

According to county real estate and federal banking records, as of January 2026, Adelphi Bank had made 48 mortgages, totaling $28 million, nearly all for commercial real estate in and around Columbus. Those mortgages ranged from $30,000 to $2.8 million, at an average of $593,000.

That includes $10 million in mortgages from Adelphi Bank for owner-occupied commercial real estate — deals that are fewer and farther between for bigger banks. That’s because it takes so much deep knowledge of local market conditions to determine whether a specific small business with a specific business owner in a specific location has a good enough chance to generate the necessary revenue to cover the mortgage payment every month.

Read more: First New Black Bank In 20 Years Breaks The Mold For Raising Startup Capital

Community banks make up only 11% of the banking sector, yet they account for 34% of owner-occupied commercial real estate mortgages. For the largest 25 banks combined, owner-occupied commercial real estate mortgages are less than one percent of their combined assets. For the 3,900 community banks, that percentage jumps to 8.5%. At Adelphi Bank, with $100 million in total assets, owner-occupied commercial real estate is 10% of its portfolio.

“We like those owner-occupied deals,” says Adelphi Bank CEO and co-founder Jordan Miller. “From our perspective, they’re a little easier to finance. Typically they’re going to operate business from the location, they’re almost living there, which is a lot different from an investor having to find tenants to pay the rents that cover the mortgage payments.”

Personnel is powerful

Given how important relationships and knowledge of local markets are to their lending, each community bank’s ownership, leadership, staffing and location are huge factors that influence where they lend.

Being a Black-led bank doesn’t mean Adelphi Bank only serves Black people. Like all banks, Adelphi Bank is legally barred from discriminating on the basis of race or gender. But it does mean that the relationships the bank started with and builds on over time started in communities that historically haven’t had as many connections to community banks.

Out of the top five ZIP codes by number of Adelphi Bank mortgages, three are majority-Black and a fourth is 43% Black. The top two ZIP codes have median household incomes of $23,527 and $33,912, compared with $66,082 for the Columbus metro area.

“What made it really different was who they chose to employ, which opened up the networks of possibilities,” says Otto Beatty III, a Columbus-based real estate investor and entrepreneur whose family first moved to the Near East Side in 1937. He’s also one of Adelphi Bank’s 75 founding shareholders.

“Where they go to church on Sundays, the fraternities they’re members of, the business circles they’re in, it all makes a difference. Because at least in the African American community, we have a lack of familiarity with community banks.”

Those networks influence who even chooses to walk through a bank’s doors. Which small or less-experienced developers or real estate investors walk into which banks if they need capital to fix up the homes or other buildings on their block and sell or lease them to their neighbors. Or which small business owners, operating in the same location for decades but need capital now to expand or move into a slightly larger or better location in the same neighborhood.

Read more: It’s Not Impossible to Start a Community Bank in a Disinvested Neighborhood During a Recession

The influence of a bank’s ownership or leadership deepens with where their loan officers seek out new prospects, how those prospects feel around those loan officers, and how their loan committees ultimately come to a decision about a project or business. In order for a community bank to make that commercial real estate loan or small business loan, multiple people at the bank have to believe in the combination of the location, the project or the business, and the developer or the owner or management team.

Out of those 3,900 community banks, only 130 have some kind of minority designation from the FDIC — meaning at least 51% of their ownership comes from the designated minority group or a majority of the bank’s board comes from that minority group and the communities the bank serves are primarily of that group.

The overwhelmingly white ownership and leadership of community banks shows up in terms of which communities they end up serving. Overall, as a group, community banks are the least likely to serve majority-minority neighborhoods compared to other lenders, including big banks.

“What I found dealing with community banks — I’ve been with at least four or five — it’s who they employ, who’s the management, where the physical branch or office is located. It’s definitely not minority friendly,” Beatty says.

But if you look at just the minority-designated institutions, they are the most likely to serve majority-minority neighborhoods — more than big banks, online lenders, credit unions or federally-certified community development financial institutions. Adelphi Bank is one of only 23 community banks that are also African American-designated minority banks by virtue of its board and target communities.

Community banks’ perceptions of certain neighborhoods matter. So do those neighborhoods’ perceptions of banks.

“Every time you go in for one of these loans, you’re exposing personal information and history,” Beatty says. “It can be a scary thing. It really matters to be able to do that with folks you trust and if it doesn’t work out they’ll give you a good reason why and a solution that might work in the future.”

Deals you can taste

Creole Kitchen wanted out of Mount Vernon Plaza, but not necessarily out of the Near East Side.

Chef Henry Butcher founded the deep south-themed restaurant in 2006, and still runs it today along with his daughters, Antoinette Parks and Tonya Butcher. Despite their best efforts making the restaurant into a local mainstay, it couldn’t stop the broader decline of Mount Vernon Plaza.

After they told Adelphi Bank about their desire to move, Miller and his team picked up their Rolodexes and got to work. They connected the restaurant to Metropolitan Holdings, which was just about to break ground on a new mixed-use development on Long Street, the historic main commercial corridor running through the Near East Side. The developer was looking for a restaurant to anchor the first floor of the new building, which is right across Long Street from Adelphi Bank.

“It was the perfect size for what they wanted,” Miller says. “The landlord wanted a restaurant, and with the foot traffic coming in and out of that theater it’s perfectly placed.”

On the next block over, kitty-corner from the bank, stands the historic Lincoln Theater. The theater had been built by a Black developer in 1928, ​​at a time when Black patrons were either forbidden entry to or relegated to the balcony sections of the Ohio capital city’s downtown theaters. The theater was closed and vacant from 1974 till 2009, when the city took over ownership, restored the property and brought it back into its original use.

Like many restaurants when moving or expanding, Creole Kitchen needed capital to fund the build out of their space. Nearly two decades of history and track record was a good starting point, but it wasn’t quite enough. While the old location did have a sit-down space, most of the revenue was from carryout service. The new location would be much more reliant on dine-in service, and it would add a bar.

Projecting the restaurant’s cash flow at the new location was a lot of work, but it had to be done before the bank could be sure how much debt the business could sustain. Miller turned to his Rolodex again and connected Creole Kitchen to the business students at Columbus State Community College, who worked with the owners to crunch the numbers.

“I had to sharpen the pencil on that one,” Miller says. “What they came out with was way way way beyond what I would expect from any restaurant in its first year at a new location with a different business model.”

Instead of backing away, Miller and his lending team just went ahead with more conservative revenue projections for the restaurant, and got back to their Rolodexes to figure out where to get the funding needed for the build out. Half of the financing eventually came from two local nonprofits and the developer itself, and the other half came from Adelphi Bank. After some delays due to inflation-related supply chain disruptions, the restaurant finally celebrated its grand reopening in December.

“I was over there yesterday for breakfast,” Miller says. “They have a veggie omelette, really nice spinach and mushrooms and tomato, broccoli, cheese, served with grits and home fries. Really good home fries.”

Weaving opportunities together

Back at Mount Vernon Plaza, Richardson is getting to work on stabilizing the property while also raising the rest of the $14 million needed for the project, which will add more commercial space as well as 47 units of affordable housing.

Of the 76 individual private investors who invested a total of $251,000 into the project, Richardson says 80% are from Columbus. Under TREND’s model, those investors own a 49% stake in Mount Vernon Plaza, while TREND owns 51%.

“For us the theory is if local people have a local stake, they’ll patronize and respect it in a different way,” Richardson says.

The lead architect working with TREND on Mount Vernon Plaza is Moody Nolan, one of the largest Black-owned design firms in the country, which happens to be based in Columbus. Current CEO Jonathan Moody took over five years ago from his late father, Curtis Moody, who founded the firm in 1982.

“In my grade school or high school days, I knew if I wanted a haircut because something special was coming up, I knew I was going to Mount Vernon Plaza to get it,” Moody says.

“We know that history is important and it matters to connect the dots of what it was and what it should be. All the people who live here and fought for this, they should have the opportunity, with a crowdsource model, to benefit from that.”

In its illustrious portfolio of previous projects, Moody Nolan also served as lead architect for the build out of Adelphi Bank’s headquarters. It was an obvious choice for Miller, who was born and raised in Columbus himself and previously spent 40 years working in regional offices of mainstream commercial banks in Columbus.

Adelphi Bank’s Rolodex is chock full of Black architects, Black contractors, Black accountants and other business contacts. The bank now calls upon those contacts often, sometimes to help get deals done, sometimes with an opportunity to get involved in a project, or sometimes just to help someone among its growing cadre of local business owner clients with something that might be holding them back.

“Think of it like a carpet in terms of weaving together all these projects and opportunities,” Moody says. “A community bank is a helpful thread to strengthen all the connections.”

This story has been corrected to reflect that TREND is not a nonprofit organization, though it does have a nonprofit affiliate. We regret the error.