Book Post, November 30, 2025, Meet Our Winter 2025–26 Partner Bookstore! Baldwin & Co
An Essence story on Baldwin & Co observed that a report from The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) had recently found New Orleans to be “gentrifying at an abnormally rapid rate” compared to other cities in its Gentrification and Disinvestment 2020 report. Baldwin & Co’s Marigny neighborhood was originally sold by Count de Marigny to a free woman of color, Essence learned from a local historian. Desiree Sennett wrote in the New Orleans Advocate that in buying the property DJ Johnson joined “a growing contingent of Black residents, in New Orleans and across the nation, who are ‘buying back the block,’ or becoming property owners and revitalizing communities where they live and work.” She continued, “city policy experts tout such investing as key in the revival of predominately Black neighborhoods, which often struggle with devaluation, speculative investing and other barriers to economic growth.”
