Renting is often framed as flexibility. In reality, it is one of the most effective wealth-extraction mechanisms in the modern economy.

For Black youth, especially Black Gen-Alpha students, entrepreneurship often feels like a distant reality. That does not come from a lack of desire or ability, but because the social, educational, and cultural conditions around them work overtime to keep their dreams small, their risks limited, and their futures predictable.

You cannot separate Black consumer behavior from the systems that shaped it. After slavery, Black workers generated massive economic value but had little access to land, credit, or capital to build intergenerational wealth. Segregation forced Black communities to rely heavily on outside industries. Later, integration came and opened our consumer market to everyone except us, while closing the businesses we’d built for ourselves.