AllInOne: Incubating the Future
Can community centers evolve to bridge rapidly polarizing economic landscapes?

Core Problem: Repurposing vacant real estate for community revitalization poses various challenges in articulating ROI at all stages. Responsible activation in light of concerns regarding gentrification and neighborhood exploitation leads to investment and development stagnation.

Funding problem: Without clear articulation of revenue streams, community centers with a mind for social services (human and infrastructure rehabilitation, self actualization) struggle to launch and survive in a system that demands perpetual commodification and exponential profit.

By Kurt McVey

Ditmas Park, with its grand Tudor, Queen Anne, and Colonial Revival residences backing hundred-foot-tall London Plane companion trees, which cast wide cathedral-like swaths of cinematic shade over their charming grass-hewn driveways, wide streets and enviable wrap-around porches, is not its own neighborhood, despite the common misconception, but rather a historic district in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Newkirk Plaza, the next station in Ditmas Park after Cortelyou Road on the local MTA subway system’s BMT Brighton line, used to be called South Midwood, a reference to another Brooklyn neighborhood located further to the south. In 1908 this same station became Newkirk Avenue after the “Brighton Beach Improvement” project increased ridership on the line. This followed the 1903 legislative elimination of dangerous grade crossings, intersections where highways and major roads cross railroad tracks at the same level or “at-grade,” which led to considerable construction. The station’s name changed again in August 2011 after a $30 million dollar renovation initiative, spurred on by local business owners in or near the corresponding pedestrian-only shopping mall, from which the station borrowed its current name. This is all to say that one single subway stop in Brooklyn is a microcosm for the community-driven evolution of local infrastructure, over a century onward.

Improvements of this nature will continue to involve ongoing, oft-laborious cooperation between agencies like the Metro Transit Authority (MTA), the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Newkirk Plaza Merchants Association (NPMA), NYC Small Business Services (SBS), and other emergent citizen-run organizations like the Flatbush Development Corporation (FDC), which was formed in 1975 by a group of tenants and homeowners who were concerned about growing signs of deterioration in the neighborhood.

Newkirk Plaza, the oldest open-air shopping mall in the country (curb your enthusiasm), still replete with mom and pop shops and some drab corporate entities, remains bound by Foster Avenue to the south. Were one to pop up and walk several blocks east, they would stumble upon a closed, century-old, English Gothic-style church at the northeast corner of East 23rd Street with stale lightbox signage on the attenuated front lawn that reads, in faded blue lettering, FLATBUSH CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER: A LUTHERAN PRESBYTERIAN COMMUNITY. Lower on the same analogue marquee, individual black letter cards still add up to read, JOIN US, SUNDAY SERVICE 11:AM. There is currently no service of any kind planned on Sunday at 11am, but this could change and very well should, and quite dramatically, come Summer 2024.

A 1925 article in Architectural Forum (originally launched in 1892 as The Brickbuilder) lauded the church, which received a design makeover in 1922 by the architect Hobart B. Upjohn, as a marvel of Gothic architecture. It’s difficult to discern from the digital archive whether or not the author of the article, replete with cross-sectional blueprints of the clerestory and trefoil-style crowned windows, pointed arches, gothic tower with crocket-enhanced spires, and more, is the architect himself, but the writing feels too personal; somehow emotionally implied that it is. He wrote of the church: “Everything about the building is honestly and thoroughly built. There is no sham about it, no painting and ‘sanding’ of wooden trim to make it vaguely resemble stone.” It is real stone, by the way, “of a rich brownish gray, showing considerable iron.”

Several construction workers, dressed lightly for mid-December weather, still holding onto faint whispers of New York’s lingering autumn benevolence, are diligently mending if not replacing the long gray stone slabs that make up the steps to the main entrance of the church. Others are hammering, leveling, sawing, probably sanding and measuring somewhere inside, sending echoes outward for a few square blocks signifying “things are being fixed or possibly built here!”

A Google “Places” search of this particular 28,000 square foot plot of land (apparently the former site of a potato patch) at 494 East 23rd Street in Ditmas Park, doesn’t site the property as that old Flatbush Church of the Redeemer, but instead reveals, “AllInOne at the church.”

“AllInOne is a collaborative platform dedicated to fostering creativity and community through co-live, co-work and social impact centers in Brooklyn,” the AllInOne website states.

In January, 2019, the church building, previously owned by a real estate corporation headed by Donald Trump's nephew, one Fred III, before being purchased by AllInOne’s first investor, Joseph Banda of Ranco Capital, saw congregationalists, activists, and neighbors quoted in a few local press outlets lamenting the potential demise of the structure. Local blog, Patch.com, for instance, after speaking to unnamed representatives of the floundering congregation over five years ago wrote: “Redeemer Presbyterian Church told brokers they hope to remain on a portion of the premises, which could serve as a community center, while the remaining land is developed for housing, according to the listing.”

As an aside, Cushman & Wakefield asked Fred Trump III, who had been an executive director at the company, to leave the firm in January 2021 due to his relationship to President Trump post-insurrection, according to Business Insider. Fred’s LinkedIn says he still holds the position. Perhaps on a more relevant note, the church is on its way to becoming a community center, just as these churchgoers dreamed. But what does that even mean exactly, now, twenty-four years into the 21st century, in a bear market when money is tight, and after a pandemic, no less?

As the mid-December sun begins to drop mercilessly low in the sky, receding behind chimneys, shingles, and the aforementioned century-old, crown shy London Planes, several minutes after the clock strikes 3pm on a crisp Saturday afternoon, a small collegiate hatchback careens around the corner of Foster Avenue onto East 23rd and confidently lurches to a stop. Through the sparsely fogged passenger seat window, a familiar smiling face-sheepish, mischievous, hopelessly forgivable-stares up and out. Behind the glass, the eyes say, “Apologies for being late. I know you already know how busy I am. Thank you in advance.” This is one of the co-founders of AllInOne and its indisputable, perennial leader, despite any protestations from the notorious smiler in question herself or anyone else for that matter. This is Audrey Banks.

On the day before Christmas, 2023, a little over a week after this encounter, Miss Banks would turn 30. This is still objectively young to be placing even one major, multi-million-dollar New York City renovation project on one’s shoulders. Youth and its connection to a certain wiley ambition, fortitude, and remarkable precociousness has long been a part of the Audrey Banks narrative.

“YOUTH, it turns out, is not always wasted on the young,” is how the New York Times writer John Strausbaugh opened his 2011 profile on Banks, who was still in high school at the time, as she was about to launch the inaugural exhibition by her student-led and student-focused curatorial art collective, Teen Art Gallery (TAG), at a creative event space in Midtown, the New York Open Center. Out of 38 artists featured in that show (TAG received over 700 submissions), the oldest was 20 and the youngest, 15. For the last 13 years, Banks has, in one way or another-despite her age, despite the politics-brought people, primarily developing humans, together in joy and creativity to exert influence on a world full of grown-ups doing grown-up stuff. Though “YOUTH” has considerable currency, especially in America, while carrying a massive, press-baiting dollop of bright-eyed novel cuteness, Banks means business.

AllInOne at the church might be her most grown-up project yet, at least one that she can talk about at the moment. Audrey’s landscape sees “tech” rightfully waning in positive influence and good will while the commercial real estate market diminishes in relevance and utility. This is happening while human immigration, mass interior migration, unemployment, mental illness, homelessness and housing insecurity are in concurrent crisis domestically.

Office space decline denial is reaching critical mass if it hasn’t already. Even residential real estate is teetering on the brink of unsustainability. Miss Banks is in more demand than ever precisely because she exists in a rarefied space to solve the riddle of what can and should be done with real estate itself, as the post-shutdown, post-worship, post-novelty, post-affordability, post-shared-work ecosystem potentially collapses in some hybrid meta reflection of the early 20th century’s Great Depression and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in 2007, which in just a few short years spiraled into a domestic recession and a global, multinational economic calamity.

That same smile in the 2011 NYT piece’s feature image of a 16-year-old Banks fades slightly IRL as she stands by the main entrance to the church. Audrey, still 29 at this fleeting moment, is surveying the drab, brutalist landscaping on the church’s lawn, which is loosely encased by a rickety, rusty, disjointed black metal fence, the waist-high type with those pointy little spires. A bushy tree, leafless and gray, if only for the season it would appear, has been chopped up, quartered, bound and set aside for removal. A violent preemptive move, perhaps.

“Who cut that tree down?” Banks asks no one in particular. “I didn’t want that tree cut down.”

Moving into the church, one doubly marvels at how a barely 30-year-old woman found herself at the helm of such a massive undertaking, one among several simultaneous, compounding real estate revitalization projects no less. Even more intriguing, peradventure, is how someone is born or becomes the type of person to take on such a task, so frequently unforgiving in practice.

Sconces of the contemporary Art Deco style are being installed. Drywall goes up and down. Ladders are shifted and held. Masks come on and off. Garbage is bagged up. Sawdust and plain old dust become further acquainted. Things are seemingly coming together, it’s noted.

“So you’re correct, this is a coffee shop,” Banks confirms, leaning on a wide, dusty countertop.

Miniature antique cabinets with little glass windows that climb to the ceiling line the wall behind the counter. Two construction workers deliberate about these cabinets for a moment, but seem more interested in this young woman being interviewed. The mostly empty room, whose bones scream cafe, just after entering, is to the immediate right of the entrance. Though east-facing, sunlight makes itself abundantly welcome. Audrey points to the perimeter of the room, where tables and chairs need not touch. “This section might be retail. There’s a couple partners we’re looking at for each function. There are similar principles we look for within our value system for evaluating people and organizations. The first one is hyper-local, or people in the immediate vicinity of Flatbush or Community Board 14. Second, is Black-owned, and then, people representative of the cultures that are in the communities. After that, it’s mission-aligned.”

And what exactly is the mission, at its core? How does AllInOne work out what its responsibility is to this so-called mission and the communities the mission touches, for better than worse?

Joseph Banda purchased and now owns the church, so it follows, something needs to be done with it. The neighbors wanted a community center. Wish granted. The residential element doesn’t seem likely, though there will be an ongoing, multifaceted residency program, though this seems to involve strictly art and media studio practices, not long or short-lease housing.

AllInOne’s mission is not only revitalization, but re-contextualization. Audrey is indeed the face; the smile. She also takes on the lion’s share of the early emotional, physical, cultural, social, and psychological implications associated with a venture of this size. Audrey says the initial community outreach, the surveying, staffing, programming, and public messaging, was distributed as equally as possible amongst her team. For Banda and Ranco capital, investing millions in the renovation and repurposing of a church of course does not come without stress.

“If we’re finding we can’t find the first two, for instance, then we move to a partner that’s mission aligned,” Banks continues, further emphasizing the church’s commitment to the local Black community, which accounts for 71% of all Flatbush according to the latest government data. And what does this mean for the mission? “That means supporting accessibility and affordability to creatives while fostering socioeconomic development.”

AllInOne can navigate much of the bureaucracy and red tape that might prevent small businesses from launching in a standard storefront model (credit, capital, knowledge, discrimination, predatory landlords, etc.), let alone surviving and proliferating in one within its first year or after its initial lease run. Ranco, in this case, assumes much of the skeletal construction and renovation costs, allowing its partners to more easily plug in and play. AllInOne can be a more responsible broker and bridge.

“We try to include as many diverse work streams that speak to as many different creative and business practices we can possibly fit in one space,” Banks says. “And it’s curated based on feedback we got from the local community. We spent the last year and a half just speaking to people with these surveys, listing all the possible things we could fit in this space. What we concluded on was the cafe and the events and activations in the performing arts spaces, all based around what the local community values the most highly and actually wants in their community center.”

One of the problems AllInOne is trying to solve, as Audrey puts it, is “How to take out the silos,” essentially echo-chamber pockets of disparate, isolated businesses and creative endeavors. “Now that we know the activities the community wants to see, how do we remove those silos and open it up so there’s a lot more opportunities for creative problem solving, collaboration, co-creation, and learning between the types of businesses and workshops we’re supporting.”

Everything feeds back into the church, now a developing, interactive community center, while serving and feeding the wider community, starting locally. This means, not just running a cafe, but holding open training sessions on how to pull an espresso, make a cappuccino, and any other skill one could apply to any cafe position around the world, including management training. Members of the community center might witness pastries being created in real time in the church’s newly renovated basement-floor kitchen and commissary, then display, sell, and watch patrons enjoy the product, all on site. With AllInOne at the church, everything is integrated and everyone is being served and supported.

“The core part of the model is, we require from individuals that they commit three resources: a skillset, a tool or piece of equipment, or a connection,” Banks explains. “For any of the tenants or organizations, they have to have open office hours. So, let’s say you’re a non-profit, then you commit a certain number of community hours or do a free workshop.”

It’s about exposure. Good exposure. Not the kind that puts creatives on the bad end of a free gig. Rather than go to one droll office in one part of town for business development or workforce training, almost everything at the church is in-house. Things are more hands-on and explicit in that various activities and operations are running on their own day to day, creating opportunities for members to come in and be a part of that, or be hired into the ecosystem, or perhaps even take that skill somewhere else. This means investing in related, but expanded, extrapolated ventures out in the free and open market. This is the answer for both ROI and revitalization.

“The goal is for people to self-actualize,” Banks declares, moving into the church’s nave, friendly and familiar now she seems with its acoustics. The pews, still covered in a thin layer of dust, were meant to have hinged, laptop-friendly desktops installed for quiet-work hours, lectures, classes, and various workshops during the day. She notes this audibly. Much like the dissected tree outside, she’s a bit annoyed. An old box piano, ten paces from the altar, a relic, is covered in soot and old coffee cups. “We want to replace what houses of worship were traditionally: infrastructure for community around the world. Modern religion, especially in New York City and other cities like it-it’s not really the center of community anymore. We replace that with self-worship, not in a narcissistic sense, but discovering what your gifts and talents are. To discover those, you need spaces like this to expose you to different things.”

As Audrey sees it, the foundational principle and philosophy of the space, and all the spaces in AllInOne’s growing portfolio, are built upon Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. She too understands that to come into that self-actualized version of oneself, or to help others achieve this sort of matriculation, individuals and the community must first address survival needs, psychological needs, and the safety needs of a person. “So we create services that address all layers so people can become the most formulated version of themselves,” Banks says. “That’s why we have a food pantry, social services, which can tackle some of the direct issues the community has been telling us about for a while, like gang violence, food insecurity and drug abuse.”

“But the plan of the church is perhaps of even greater interest than either its design or the excellent use of materials which has been made,” the architect Hobart B. Upjohn opined, old-timey-style, in the aforementioned 1925 review in Architectural Forum. “As has already been suggested, the work of the church includes social service of many kinds in the neighborhood, and the buildings have been planned with this in mind. The main entrance, beneath the tower, opens into a vestibule, paved with stone, which leads directly into the nave at the left, while the hall, which is just ahead, also gives access to the nave and at the right to the administrations rooms of the church, the study and offices of the pastor and his secretaries, and several spacious and well lighted guild rooms which are used for meetings of clubs and societies of different kinds connected to the church.”

Seems like Upjohn would approve of what AllInOne is up to in his church, roughly a century later, as the space was redesigned in 1922 specifically to function in capacities well beyond Sunday’s religious services. What needs to be addressed now in 2024 are the shifts in culture and technology. Core human needs, under Maslow, haven’t changed that much in a hundred years. What has changed is inflation, interest rates, information access, global competition, threats of automation, and insecurity over the increasingly untenable general cost of living.

"Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, ...tell you...that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry," said President Franklin D. Roosevelt the night before the June 25, 1938 signing of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA), the judiciously unpopular and congressionally contentious act which banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum work week at 44 hours. Minimum wage in NYC as of January 2024 is $16.00.

Young Millennial ambassadors like Audrey Banks, even if she wanted to own a home instead of renting, face an astronomically more difficult market than Boomers did in the 1970s. The median home price in 2022, $370,600, is nearly double that of 1970 ($185,600, adjusted for inflation) as per the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) as noted by a 2023 Consumer Affairs report.

“The median rent is up 150% from 1970, and spending so much money on rent makes it difficult to save for a home, and even though housing prices dropped between 2005 and 2010 during the Great Recession, the median rent didn’t decrease,” the report states. This of course makes it not just difficult, but almost impossible to save for a home. Another straw on the camel’s back; college tuition rates have risen more rapidly than income rates over the last 50 years, contributing to one of the biggest debt crises in the U.S., with over $1.7 trillion owed by former students in 2022. On January 19th this year, the New York Times reported that the President, “...canceled nearly $5 billion in student loan debt for 74,000 people, the latest effort by the administration to deliver piecemeal relief after the Supreme Court struck down Mr. Biden’s more ambitious loan cancellation plan last year.”

Audrey graduated from Carnegie Mellon, a prestigious, creatively inclined private university which, based on recent published tuition prices, over four years, including living expenses, is estimated to cost roughly $309,896, assuming one graduates within the standard time frame. Cost of tuition over the standard four years at Carnegie Mellon in 1974 was $11,800.

Banks sees her AllInOne’s role as builders of bridges, not just between neighbors and neighborhoods, let alone cultures, races, and religions, but between her generation (smiling as earnestly as possible through their teeth with an almost manic, feverish optimism) and Boomers, especially the prevailing investment capital class, usually white and male, who may nebulously be concerned to some degree, but are strangely, criminally, negligently, almost embarrassingly out of touch with the realities on the ground; these waxing struggles many Americans are currently facing, not to mention how these same struggles are compounded in historically marginalized neighborhoods such as Flatbush, Brooklyn, especially areas east of Flatbush Avenue that differ widely from Ditmas Park’s quaint, pseudo-suburban grandeur.

“Education, wellness and social services,” Audrey says, pausing in the exact same main floor administrative area Upjohn hyped up generations ago. “At one point we were thinking about having therapy cubicles here. There’s lots of zoning regulations for that kind of therapy, so that might be a later thing. At the very least we know some local groups that do workshops and group sessions for people dealing with domestic abuse, gang violence and other real life issues, but also for things like business development workshops, intimate classrooms and such.”

Audrey slides into the church’s rear lobby lounge, which features a new ADA-compliant entryway and ramp for wheelchairs. She claims this area used to be “a real mess,” but it’s quickly turning into a rough design showroom with new floors, more modern light fixtures and a nearby bathroom, almost completed, with gold-trimmed emerald green tiling with hints of blue.

The church was built in 1892 and boasts 27,000 square feet over multiple floors. “Like a little town,” Banks says with a combination sigh and giggle. Beautiful and daunting. “There’s a lot going on in society outside of these walls that we don’t like. So how do we envision at least a test pool for what an alternative system could look like in a space that’s large enough to be a small ecosystem of a town? This is the minimum-sized space for that.”

In New York City, especially in Manhattan and certain gentrified areas of Brooklyn, square footage comes at a national premium. This means that New Yorkers, even socially, are renting time and space under serious pressure. This is why “upselling” in bars and restaurants has reached a point of belligerence. Servers have to raise the medium check tabs to raise tip percentages to pay rising rents and general living costs, including food, travel and energy utilities. People want a place to go; a “third space.” Church, as a valid third space, invites congregationalists inside, on average, once, maybe twice a week, if people have the time or inclination to go at all. But what happens if the church isn’t just a sanctuary or a vessel for social services, but actually a fun, cool place to hang out, as secular “dechurching” accelerates?

“People have infamously misused space,” Banks notes. “Everything is built for profit. We now see individual people owning huge masses of land, a human right, which is unreal. Same with food. Landlords exist and they charge you $3000 a month for shelter. People are moving out of that quite naturally.”

New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, threatened in late 2023 to massively cut the budgets of New York City parks and other services by as much as 15%, as the immigrant crisis was (and still is) effectively bankrupting the city and state, an issue that doesn’t seem to be improving anytime soon. These budget cuts threatened over 1,400 parks jobs, from preservation to sanitation. And it isn’t just parks, it’s pools, basketball courts, beaches, and recreation centers as well.

"We want to make sure broadly that every New Yorker has access to clean, green, safe parks and open spaces," Adam Ganser, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks explained in an interview with CBS News in December last year. "You're gonna see more trash in parks. Bathrooms, if they are open at all, are going to be places you're not gonna want to be,” he added. “We're gonna see cuts that are basically larger than what we saw during COVID.”

“The NYC Parks Workforce Development unit partners with various city agencies to create employment programs for all New Yorkers,” the agency’s website and workforce data portal states. Their signature program, the Parks Opportunity Program (POP), is a collaboration between NYC Parks and NYC Human Resources Administration/Department of Social Services (HRA/DSS), where eligible Public Assistance recipients are hired by Parks and where they also procure various services. POP Workers get paid work experience cleaning and greening parks throughout NYC, and earn $15.45/hourly for a 40 hour week. With massive budgetary cuts, these exact services and programs are in serious jeopardy. Ditto our valuable third spaces.

“The top down parental structure might not keep working the way it did,” Banks says, never betraying that bright, precocious kid who launched a gallery program strictly for teens and young adults. It should be intuitive at this point in human civilization that if people don’t feel respected within their environment, they’re not going to take care of their environment. Imagine our city parks overflowing with trash, security reduced, or landscaping scrapped. This has already become a crisis-level issue in some American cities, and others globally. Audrey and various private investors are trying, sometimes struggling, often quarreling internally, to subsidize what the government was already struggling to do, but now might not be able to afford going forward.

“Shared responsibility is power,” Audrey says frequently, speaking, she admits, from personal experience, some honest mistakes, and truck-loads of newly acquired, hard-won wisdom. “One person or a couple people, when not appreciated, if they’re carrying all the social burden and responsibility, they get fatigued. Shared incentive and shared power is essential [for all parties] to feel like they are defining the space.” Banks would reiterate, in a post-WeWork landscape, that she is not building out this unconventional physical space just so it can be used as a “shared” workspace. “We’re literally building it for the purpose of something that has to happen in-person, which is interconnection, community, co-creation and collaboration,” she adds. “At the core of every human being’s essence is someone who’s supposed to be creating something. Not necessarily something artistic. It could be a life with someone or a philosophy.”

In some perverse, sadomasochistic Millennial sense, people like Banks hope this “top down” approach fails. People “deciding things for people,” as she says, evoking patriarchal cogs who might dictate: “This is your thing; your definition; this is your spot and one simply fits into it.”

“No,” Banks states. “It should be coming from the ground up. It should be like platforms that replicate what systems in nature do, which is plants and animals defining themselves. Instead of us deciding programming or injecting our workshops here, the communities and members are deciding amongst each other, sharing and co-creating things together, based on their own will. The platforms that can connect and quantify this are going to be huge.”

Currently, AllInOne at the church is working out a sliding scale model for membership for those interested in the shared work component primarily, which could also come with access to other in-house events and services. Audrey says it will primarily be based on disposable income. “Anyone who makes 50k or under in NYC probably doesn’t have any disposable income,” she offers. “It’s extremely expensive here. Their membership is basically free. The 250k members need to come in to pay the higher tier to subsidize the rate for other people.”

AllInOne is also bridging the divide between smart, privileged, primarily white people in sweatpants who could presumably do their job from home, which yes, saves gas and leaves more time for the family, but perhaps can and should do way more for their community, its infrastructure, and their neighbors, who might not have the same set of Maslow’s resources.

At night, the nave will transform into a performance art space and will function that way, possibly, all day on weekends. What’s important to Audrey is that, “ At 7pm on the dot on a weekday, suddenly there’s a rehearsal or performance happening before your eyes. You have to stop and experience it.”

When Audrey and friends started AllInOne, they wanted to invite in artists or people working on social impact projects, while contributing to cultural diversity and solving quality of life issues. She learned that when you put people under one roof and they share resources, their projects happen at a faster rate and spill out into the community at large, enriching the landscape. “The feedback is, a lot of people leave the neighborhood and have to do all the artistic work outside of it,” she says. “They have to go to Williamsburg to hold their events or record their music. People who make it here move out of Flatbush because there aren't as many resources here to help them keep generating work. Now these facilities are in their backyard.” Banks, weary of gentrification concerns, pauses, sensing that “enriching” might be a “tough word.”

“They have plenty going on,” she says. “They, meaning people who feel like this is home. Flatbush. People here have a sense of pride and connection, and they’re building things with it and for it. Those who are paying attention and are deeply embedded, this is their renaissance.”

Within the cycle of gentrification, there’s a moment where the quality of life goes up. It’s how builders stave off that next phase, when people who feel that this is their home, get pushed out.

So how does Audrey Banks feel as a young, white woman activating a 27,000 square foot church in Flatbush, Brooklyn? It’s a multi-part answer. “I’m not representative of this community,” she notes. “I grew up in NYC, which sometimes helps. The optics are, it’s a wealthy young white lady coming to town. Who came from that? I didn’t come from that. I think it’s because I am educated. That’s a huge privilege. I’m not wealthy, but I am surprised with how much trust I’m afforded here. Maybe that’s just my affect. ‘Small woman’ helps and oh, I’m not a white guy.”

Banks does offer up that some folks have come into the church who “are viscous and grill me,” she says. “I’m also fine with people who are mistrusting. The difference is…first of all, I’m someone who has the right skillset to bring this model and idea to multiple spaces. There’s also an element of being in the right place at the right time. I’ve managed to access these resources, maybe because I have charm and vision. Whatever it is, where I am able to find this landlord and pull this capital and develop this project, am I the one who’s supposed to be in charge of this project? Absolutely not.”

“Maybe why there’s been less fear is because I do, even before I started these projects, listen, and kind of move around and talk to lots of people,” she considers. “My job in tech before I started building massive buildings was user research, which was figuring out what people wanted and then outputting that.”

After Ranco acquired the church, AllInOne hosted several block parties and community outreach events in Flatbush. They handed out cookies from local bakeries and gave out hand-written notes to local residents and business owners introducing themselves. “The output is honest. This is genuinely what we are and what we do.”

Just by virtue of taking on such a task, people seem to admire that. Perhaps Audrey and her specific political identifiers leading the charge in this respect, need not be so directly defined. The act itself, being in the space, speaking to the space, filling it with life, love and art is enough.

“This idea of pressure or burden or it’s my responsibility or my job,” Audrey pauses here, sharing an uneasy grimace, like she’s shaking off unwanted touch. “You really just have to remove all that and not label these things as such, but instead just be there. I think that’s where a lot of my trajectory in business has been quite spiritual, which I don’t think is so common.”

Banks claims she’s also received a fair amount of ridicule from more traditional “old-paradigm start-up bros” for her non-dogmatic spiritual leanings, a conscience-driven mission operating on the socially conscious edge of venture capital culture. “You’re getting this feedback and instead of reacting to it from an egoic perspective, saying ‘This is a reflection of Audrey and me as a person,’ it’s taking that in and making that space what it needs to be, or this whole thing really. This is how I survived. It wasn’t always like that. I think the church has been a real test of actually practicing that, and it doesn’t hurt me, because it’s not me, it’s a larger thing. It’s someone else’s personal pain; it’s the system’s pain.”

Banks happily admits that she is someone who has a certain amount of privilege-someone who grew up a “cute white lady,” as she says uncomfortably, eyes rolling, and also one who grew up on the LES of Manhattan. “A lot of people assume I was wealthy,” she says, even more frustrated now. “I wasn’t. This is maybe a good segue into where I actually come from.”

Banks had previously been collaborating with The Canvas more actively. They’re a company that provides rising ethical fashion brands access to global markets via their stores & ecommerce, while bringing people to mindful fashion. “We believe the demise of fast fashion will be accelerated through a connected network of sustainability-focused businesses working together to stimulate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals,” it states on their website. If The Canvas creates malls of the future, AllInOne could design the church of the future.

Banks and her partners, those firmly on board emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually at least, understand projects like this, brought on by business and tech-savvy brokers of infrastructure and social services, are starting to emerge because the universe loves balance, and to have balance you have to have two. ‘“This is why there’s Yin and Yang,” Audrey shouts, climbing up the spiraling staircase to the apex of the church’s Gothic tower. “And what’s missing is, as we know, as a society we’ve had a lot of the Yang for a very long time and now suddenly it’s like, the Yin! That’s the hard infrastructure; the Yang, the container, and what’s going to be inside is the divine feminine or the soul within. Hopefully it becomes what it needs to become.”

Banks was born in Boston. She claims, asserting her New York-ness, that this was “kind of a fluke,” as her family just happened to be there celebrating Christmas. She was born on Christmas Eve. She’s now leaning on a ladder in the church’s highest room. “The best spot,” she acknowledges of the Gothic tower, which is reached after moving past several landings, also turning the corner on their own makeovers. What’s left of the sunlight floods in, a golden orange hue, washing, merging with Audrey’s hair. Eyes roll again when notions of princesses in tippy-top towers can’t be avoided, especially when Banks floats this might be AllInOne’s office.

“My parents already had an apartment in the East Village near Union Square by the time I was born,” she clarifies. “One of those rent-controlled spots they got in the ‘80s, which we still have to this day. We moved back there. I grew up in that neighborhood since I was one. My parents divorced when I was four. I also started living in the West Village as well, with my dad.” She would slide back and forth, east and west along 14th street. “I’m still on this circuit,” she jokes.

She eventually went to Bard High School Early College on East Houston Street Downtown, which was founded in 2001. She floats; she wouldn’t do it again, that is, growing up and living in New York City, navigating a “particularly congested and chaotic circuit, daily, for years.”

“If I were my parents, I would be very worried I would die any second,” Banks says. “2nd Avenue, 14th Street, these are two very giant roads. I was born in the early ‘90s (1993). Things were starting to get cleaned up. But there was still that element of the crazy LES, Alphabet City, ‘don’t go past Ave. B’ thing happening. I have memories of people screaming, trying to finagle me and take me places.”

Dad is a construction person. Mom is an administrative assistant for the Modern Language Association (MLA).

“She’s a lot more graceful; a quiet, ethereal person. She had a very clean, sort of gentle household. My dad, on the other hand, was a big project manager-person. This is like his dream project. Unfortunately he’s busy working on something on Martha’s Vineyard. But him being a constructor on this project would have been perfect.”

Banks is pushed further here, gently. Is she able at least to run things by him?

“He’s not really a mentor father,” she offers. “He’s sort of a genius builder in his own right. He just wants to build and work on his projects. Wherever he goes, he takes the apartment and dissembles it, then resembles it in a way that is glorious. He collects old antique tiles, makes mosaics with very tasteful materials then sells the apartment. He sold our apartment to Francis Alÿs, that (Belgian) performance artist. He has an extremely creative spirit, but it’s not exactly something he passes down. They only had one. Just me and they were like, ‘That’s it.’ ”

It’s mentioned that her parents align with this bifurcated Yin and Yang, masculine and feminine binary of infrastructure and social services, and that she, the only child, bridges these things.

Banks, nodding contemplatively, grew up around a lot of creative people. Gentrification had begun in her neighborhoods when she was young, but it hadn’t “gone all the way there yet.”

“I watched what people call ‘Old New York’ disappear,” she says. “Whole neighborhoods devoted to artists and activists, which I think is the right word; beatniks and all sorts of people coming together with social and political power, a being known as a certain kind of celebrity in these neighborhoods where these meeting grounds existed. Flags were put down. East Village, West Village, SoHo; local and connected networks again and again strengthened by these groups of people who could afford to live close to each other and have an established locale. So I was born into a world that watched that get pushed out and get destroyed. I don’t think that exists at all in New York anymore.”

Banks recently discovered that the building she lived in on Second Avenue and 14th Street was actually a “social impact arts community” center called Total Impact. By the time she was born it wasn’t quite branded that way anymore. Her best friend’s father, who lived in the unit downstairs, was one of the first purveyors of that space. “There’s a lot still left over in that building from that time,” says Banks. “I say all this to say that I was born with this nostalgia or feeling of something being lost, and although I was never a part of it or experienced it directly, I barely caught the very tail end of it, but felt I needed to bring it back.”

Audrey now moves through the basement, where recording and podcast studios are being built, dance rehearsal spaces are being renovated, and a meeting room with a stage courts future bands and community theater productions. “It’s all acoustically isolated and sound proof,” she says, caressing bulbous, undulating vertical pads of charcoal gray foam board on the walls. “We’re looking at some major broadcasting partners, but usually, they find us.”

Audrey floats past what will become a tiny bar in what appears to be a closet, before moving into the kitchen and commissary, with new, thick-plastic-wrapped appliances, ready for commercial and community engagement. Audrey befriended an opossum (“kinda cute”) here, in this room, when they first secured the church. Now renovated, the opossum has since vacated.

“We want to do some dine-in, food pantry stuff,” she says, pointing here and there. “Our kitchen partner hopes to feed people for free during certain weekly hours, but treat it like a fine-dining experience.” It’s Soul Food for the People. Audrey is working with a Black-owned, female-led restaurant, Katie’s O’s, “a compact, unfussy eatery serving up classic soul food from fried chicken & fish, to mac ’n’ cheese,” says their website. Volunteer hours can’t be filled, for instance, if the same volunteer’s own basic needs aren’t met, especially a stomach in need of filling. “This is where people need to pitch in and show some responsibility for each other to redistribute resources, voluntarily, to, not equalize, but redistribute resources in a more equal fashion because our systems lead to this: (Audrey makes a top down polarization gesture.)”

Audrey went to public school her whole life before attending Carnegie Mellon for undergrad. “I went to PS234, and was in the thick of that whole day. By whole day I mean 9/11. I was seven and in second grade. I was weird. I went through puberty early. I was ready to move on. Everyone who didn’t get into middle school went to (Simon) Baruch MS104. Lots of mistrust and issues with race and gang violence. There might be a dance circle on a good day and a fight circle on another.”

Bard High School Early College is a specialized public highschool. “That was about developing how to think,” Banks says in a grateful tone. “Everything that I work on or try to work on, before AllInOne, proposed how do we take what’s broken in the system, or what’s creating unnecessary barriers to entry or inequalities, as some people have opportunities and some don't, because they don't have the resources to navigate the same trajectories that are laid out in the same way; that’s all the work that I do. It’s all about subverting systems, connecting pipelines, and finding better solutions.” Bard is like that, Audrey explains. Their solution was, as a public school, to take kids in and do four years of highschool in just two, via an expedited program. “To their credit they had an extremely diverse student body. Not just the same artsy fartsy kids in some other schools with some mild New York trauma.”

After completing two years of Bard High School's concentrated schedule, one could graduate early with an Associates degree, meaning, students seeking higher education would only have to pay for two years of college, which means the Carnegie Mellon debt gets cut in half. “They do that exceptionally well,” she says of her former school. “It’s all seminar style. You’re treated like an adult, which invites kids to start behaving like one.” Audrey said she and AllInOne are interested in opening up a dialogue to possibly collaborate with Bard on future joint programs.

After turning 13, Audrey investigated an internship with No Longer Empty, which specializes in turning vacant space into art galleries. “When I was 14 or 15, I started this internship and did it up to 9th, maybe 10th grade. TAG was the first thing I did on the heels of this. The Teen Art Gallery didn’t fully come to fruition until the space found me at 16. I definitely yelled about it in high school. A friend’s dad had a gallery in midtown. This was maybe 2009/10.”

The show lasted a couple months. That gallery wasn’t as established as more traditional galleries in New York City, but established entities like Rogue Gallery Chelsea and Salon 94 did follow. Major publications rushed to interview Audrey, this teenager interested in “intercepting” the centralized art market. “The idea that you have to go through all these financial steps, transactions, debt, to then get to this world and probably not even break even, this didn’t sit right with me. I remember speaking to my aunt, an artist, and feeling her frustration of being overlooked so three guys from the ‘70s could get more shine.”

Eventually, Audrey passed TAG on to three directors. All people under 20. That was the rule. “The quality of the work was insane,” she boasts. “First we started in New York. We get all this attention. I got a lot of attention. I did start to feel bad about wielding that much power and responsibility. And people were angry about it, at least my peers were. I finished the model, put the handbook together, and now every tiny detail is documented. One could replicate it over and over.”

Like so many ventures, TAG fizzled and faded when COVID forced everyone indoors. Audrey admits she lost touch with the project by the time she arrived at college, but not in a bad way. TAG went through three different boards of directors, all under 20, who Audrey says did an amazing job running it. Leadership can be tricky. So can hierarchies, clear or unclear. It’s weighed whether there is something in us humans that goes, ‘Cut that poppy down!’ Even in America, there’s a tall poppy element. Is it dangerous to have the attention of the world?

“Not unless you share that with other people,” she says. “The biggest difference between me then and me now, is, I did kind of do a lot of that on my own. Or at least it felt like I did. I thought it was my duty and my right to control this thing and do it alone and build it alone. That’s another manifestation of loneliness and control. And with this project, I came into it like that at first. I thought it was all my responsibility and I’ve been accused of hoarding that responsibility and I actually wasn’t trying to do that on purpose. In this case, I didn’t know any other way of operating other than, I have to handle it; my job, my responsibility; I gotta do it; I gotta control this; which was really just about, I have to make sure it’s all ok.”

Banks knows now that these projects are so big that she can't possibly do it alone. The mindset and approach of “You’re all alone in this” was destroyed these last two years, “Because I kept failing,” she admits. “I kept running into the same complaints over and over again, until now. I realized I’m building a community, and a community only exists if there’s trust. Trust only exists if there’s vulnerability and a willingness to be dependent on one another.”

This is the essence of AllInOne, right there in the title. Banks believes this is what humanity is working towards and acknowledges that other species have achieved this oneness. “Other species are much more evolved,” she states. “They work in tandem with each other. The parent child dynamic is healthy when it’s clean and pure. You’re only developing that child so that it can become equal to the parent, where it can continue to self-actualize alone.”

Banks casually states that she worked in aerospace after Carnegie Mellon. She was a Human Factors Engineer, which turned into User Experience Design and Development as well as Human-Computer-Interaction. This means building an interface that human psychology can trust, from desktop operating systems to yes, flying cars and autonomous air vehicles, which was her role at Boston Aurora Flight Sciences, until the company was purchased by Boeing.

“I wanted to get back to New York,” she says, adding that she eventually got a gig at a fashion B2B start-up with roughly 100 employees. “I started doing real estate on the side. I was a broker for all of two weeks. Mostly residential apartments. I flipped a couple. I really had a knack for it, and then the landlord of a mansion in Clinton Hill, Joseph (of Ranco Capital), called my boss at the time and said, ‘I have this mansion. Do you know anyone who would want to run a community out of it?’ My boss was like, ‘Yeah this weird girl just started. She’s always done things in the arts. You should talk to her.’ ”

The “Mansion” was AllInOne’s first property and project. It was initially designed as an affordable housing initiative. “We might be partnering with another group that does co-living or live-work space for artists and activists. It was like 10-12 people who actually live there. The rest work there. So, 30 people in total (the mansion has 20 bedrooms) each and all working on an arts project or community activism project.”

“I thought that was just a passion project,” she continues. “As I mentioned, I saw a lot of the artists I grew up with displaced out of the LES. A lot of them were actually homeless. With this mansion, we could house people in a way that’s sustainable and we can actually afford the rent because there’s so many rooms and you divide the space.”

Audrey thought this was where AllInOne was going to stop. She was now managing this property while working full time at her UI/UX tech startup jobs. The mansion was a volunteer-based project and it wasn’t turning a profit, she admits, as it was designed to function as a non-profit affordable housing initiative and it did that well. The mansion helped develop the notion that shared resources and collaboration and putting people who are like minded, collaborating and building things that contribute to culture or quality of life in one space, that a lot of things could be born out of that. “Just like we wanted.”

The New York Times came calling again in September, 2021, after Ranco Capital put another property, a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) brownstone under Audrey’s care. These types of units, which are all over NYC, are tough to fill because as Banks states, “the zoning laws are ridiculous.” Banks placed five highly unique young artists in the space. Several are highlighted in John Freeman Gill’s NYT piece.

“I think when we first started, Joe had buildings he didn’t know what to do with,” she adds. “Everything started purely from a business standpoint. There simply was no one creative enough or no one had a solution to repurpose these properties. For instance, landmark mansions are so difficult to sell, and you can’t rent them out to a single family. An SRO brownstown with problems? A huge church? What are you gonna do with that? I’ve had the habit of taking a lot of his problems and solving them.”

Ranco Capital was apparently going to demolish the church and the land it's on in order to build condominiums. “The community said ‘No you’re not’ and he actually listened,” Banks says. “He went in and was like, ‘This is gorgeous. ‘There’s all this tradition here. ‘There has to be someone who can use it.’ ”

Audrey, with the mansion up and running, created a budget for the church all the way back in April, 2021. She had only named AllInOne two months earlier, an “accidental name.” Joseph would provide the startup capital and become the first investor. Audrey would be the owner and structural collaborator. The AllInOne Collective, now with investment funds, became an official business. Audrey didn’t hire her first staff until 2022.

AllInOne’s status as a Public Benefit Corporation, will likely become official sometime in 2024. “We were operating as an extension of Ranco for much of last year,” she says. “We tried for months and months to become a non-profit, then pivoted to PBC February this year (2023).”

Musings regarding construction at the church began in January 2022, but those workers-hammering, sawing, measuring-didn’t get going until October 2022. “Pre-design took forever actually, but it’s almost done. It’s crazy.” Audrey hopes to officially open in July, 2024. “We might do a soft launch, have a community ambassador program installed first and then run the space.”

It’s all about space, not up in the stars, or in heaven, but on the common ground, here with the people, looking for healthy food, clean air and water, and maybe some neighborly love. For Audrey Banks, “space” is about community and personal empowerment. At the church, one can expect a model that's able to create a system for almost every community and community member to do this on their own in any space in any city, in any environment, across the world.

“We should be able to finish a model that’s so clean and clear that people reach out and ask if we have a playbook or an open source model that we can give to operators, whether that’s in Dallas or even a rural area in Vermont. We’re building a platform or a tool kit, and maybe Radiical Systems is a part of that.”

It’s floated, hours after failing to swerve comparisons to an ethereal, but practical princess in the prime of her adult life, yet ever in the flower of youth, in a once beleaguered but now invigorated castle tower of her own making, looking out on the surrounding villages, filled with all walks of life, each experiencing their share of joy and strife, now at a bar and restaurant just a few feet from Newkirk Plaza, in need of some well-deserved rest and sustenance after spending many fatiguing, on-the-record hours at the church, that Audrey, this flesh and blood Zelda, has all the earmarks of a young Barbara Corcoran, perhaps with an evolved value set and less shark DNA.

“I don’t know who that is,” she admits, over fries, again with that same unimpeachable smile.