Onay Payne
Managing director for real estate at Lafayette Square
When Onay Payne was working at Clarion Partners, a global real estate investment firm, she wondered why some of its $82.4 billion in assets was not pouring into majority minority communities like her native Hempstead, N.Y.
After nearly two decades at Clarion, Payne left in March 2022 to join Lafayette Square with a mission of creating investment opportunities in underserved markets.
“I had a great career there, and had been a partner there for over a decade, but I was feeling increasingly compelled to try to deploy more capital into neighborhoods like the one I grew up in on Long Island,” she said. “There were very few deals in my portfolio at the time in places like Hempstead.”
Over the past year, Payne has built the firm’s real estate division, which she compares to a start-up and which will soon provide financing to real estate projects that benefit a neighborhood holistically. That could mean an affordable multifamily project that includes a housing voucher component for future tenants, or bringing medical offices, grocery stores and fast-casual restaurant franchises as retail additions to a development site.
“We’re building our real estate platform to focus on equitable outcomes,” she said. “We’re not providing rental assistance but we’re providing tools for residents to support their financial well-being. We are a conduit through which services are provided.”
Payne has also sought to promote diversity within her industry and has been formulating a pilot program to lend out as much as $5 million per developer of color. Of the 112,000 real estate development companies in the country, only 1,000 are owned by people of color, a stat that Payne hopes to rectify.
So far, Lafayette Square has been looking at opportunities in New York City, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Nashville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. To get support for investments, Payne is working in tandem with local developers, church leaders and nonprofits to ensure the projects are welcome.
“Ultimately, if we were able to come in and say, ‘This is a solution,’ that’s not going to be readily embraced,” she said. “You have to build relationships. These are deals that take years to get off the ground. It’s not the typical 30- to 60-day deals that we’re used to.”
