Ten years can feel like a lifetime in business. Markets shift, trends fade, and yesterday’s hot startup is tomorrow’s footnote. But in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood, a decade tells a different story. It is a timeline marked not by quarterly earnings calls, but by resilience and reinvention. The Sherman Phoenix Marketplace, born from the ashes of the 2016 unrest, has carved out a narrative that defies conventional financial models. It’s a story I’ve watched with keen interest, not just as a journalist covering economic development, but as someone who has walked the floors of countless corporate headquarters and startup incubators. This is something else entirely.
From my vantage point in New York’s Financial District, where success is often measured in basis points and stock splits, the Phoenix presents a compelling case study in community-centric capitalism. When it opened in a fire-damaged bank building in late 2018, it housed 27 small businesses. It has since incubated about 60. Today, it’s a stable home for about 16. That churn isn’t a sign of failure. In the high-stakes world of small business, a 70% failure rate within a decade is the grim norm, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Phoenix’s model appears to be bending that curve, creating a launchpad with a softer landing.
Take Alan Moore of 2 Kings Barbershop. He calls it “Black Wall Street,” a term heavy with historical significance and aspirational weight. His analysis is sharp. Unlike a standalone shop, being embedded with restaurateurs, artists, and retailers created a spontaneous, collaborative economy. “Listening to their experiences and watching them grow helps me grow as a businessman,” he told reporters. This isn’t just sentiment. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta have long documented the positive spillover effects of business clustering, particularly for minority-owned enterprises. Knowledge sharing, shared customer traffic, and informal mentorship networks are intangible assets you won’t find on a balance sheet, but they are critical for survival.
The model’s power attracted national attention, with visitors from New York and Chicago coming to study it. This is where the Phoenix moved from a local recovery project to a national prototype. It proved a concept. But as with any prototype, the real-world stress test reveals both its brilliance and its flaws.
Adija Greer-Smith’s journey with Confectionately Yours illustrates this perfectly. JoAnne Sabir, the project’s co-founder, saw her potential and offered a lifeline into a brick-and-mortar space. The initial momentum was tremendous. Then, the pandemic hit. Her response—shifting to a massive cookie donation drive—was more than philanthropy. It was a stark, savvy business survival tactic that built immense social capital. That capital later converted into the corporate catering orders that sustained her. It’s a textbook example of stakeholder capitalism in action, where service to the community circles back as economic sustenance. Her subsequent expansion to a second location speaks to a fundamental business truth. The Phoenix was a catalyst, not a cradle. Its highest purpose was to propel businesses to a point where they could outgrow it.
Greer-Smith’s reflection is perhaps the most crucial piece of financial analysis here. “The resources for businesses to sustain and grow weren’t all in place yet,” she noted. This is the sobering gap between vision and viability that every incubator faces. Creating space is one thing. Providing the continuous scaffolding of financial literacy, advanced operational support, and access to growth capital is another. The Phoenix’s leadership learned this in real-time, adapting to add those layers of support. This evolution mirrors the findings of a 2023 report from the Harvard Business Review on entrepreneurial ecosystems, which emphasized that physical space is merely the first step in a long chain of necessary resources.
- Incubated about 60 small businesses
- Created a collaborative economy
- Attracted national attention
- Exemplified stakeholder capitalism
- Adapted to support business needs
- Faced significant business challenges
The marketplace has faced its own very public business challenges, including leadership turnover and property tax delinquencies that made headlines in 2025. These are not signs of a broken model, but of a real one. Running a mission-driven real estate and business development project is a complex, cash-intensive endeavor. The appointment of an interim executive director focused on strategic planning—building internal capacity, expanding engagement, increasing tenant support—is precisely the kind of mature governance shift necessary for a seven-year-old institution.
JoAnne Sabir, now consulting on community development from Florida, views the Phoenix with a founder’s earned perspective. “We created an institution that lives beyond us,” she said. She describes it as an “entrepreneurial home” and an “ecosystem.” These are more than feel-good words. In economic terms, she’s describing a successfully established network externality. The value of the Phoenix increases with each business that passes through it, each relationship forged, each lesson learned and carried forward. Its alumni, like Greer-Smith, become nodes in a wider web of local economic activity that extends far beyond the original building’s walls.
As the Sherman Phoenix enters its second decade, its ledger has two columns. On one side, the promise. It has demonstrably incubated businesses, fostered a nationally admired model of cooperative economics, and become an anchor of community identity. On the other, the persistent challenges of sustainability, both for the marketplace itself and the small retailers and food businesses within it, which face a brutal economic climate of high input costs and cautious consumer spending.
But its greatest legacy, as Sabir hints, is intangible. It’s the proof that capital—financial, social, human—can be mobilized in a different way. It chose to build. For an economist or a business reporter, that’s the most powerful data point of all. The Sherman Phoenix is more than a marketplace. It’s a ten-year case study in turning a crisis into a covenant, demonstrating that the most durable growth often springs from the hardest ground.
