To be able to build further on his ambitions, Bah last year went through a six month program, called Associates in Commercial Real Estate or ACRE, out of Milwaukee which aims to provide training for minority and women developers in the state. 

“As an ACRE student, I decided to organize a weekend event to bring our whole class to come and explore Madison and meet the city leadership for networking purposes, including the mayor,” Bah said used as a launching pad. The trip was a launching point to start a similar program in Madison. 

That program, called Developing Equity for Emerging Developers, launched in March, said Ryan Zerwer, CEO of Forward Community Investments, a Madison-based nonprofit that provides loans, grants and advisory support to people and organizations looking to build on racial equity. The program included a cohort of aspiring young developers who come from a minority background, as well as programming to provide coaching and networking opportunities. 

“We have a strong and close relationship with Kaba,” Zerwer said. “He is the one who seeded this idea that Madison needs to do more to promote this type of activity and the one who facilitated the first event of bringing ACRE candidates to Madison to learn more about what we are doing here. He is a well regarded and well-established developer of color.”

Growing up in Gambia, Kaba Bah had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career in real estate. Instead, Bah came to the United States to study physics, eventually moving to Madison where he now works part-time as a research scientist at UW-Madison.

But after buying a duplex and renting out the other half in 2010, an idea was born. By starting small and working with existing properties that could be improved or subdivided, Bah could not only build a real estate portfolio but chip away at Madison’s stubborn shortage of low-cost housing.

He’s also become an influential voice in Madison’s real estate and development community by helping to create programming to foster more diversity.

Bah currently owns six units Downtown, as well as six residential units and three commercial properties in Columbus. The residential units are naturally occurring affordable housing, where the market — not public subsidies — keep rents lower. One of the two-bedroom units on North Butler Street, for instance, rents for $1,500.

Working with the city of Madison, Bah has applied to build four duplexes in the Owl Creek neighborhood. About 60 percent of the roughly $1 million project would be subsidized by the city’s Affordable Housing Fund and the target market would be immigrants, people of color and lower-income individuals, Bah said.

Bah said that if someone moves out of one of the duplexes, the next renter would also have to make 50-80% of the county’s median household income of roughly $78,400.

A future project includes working with Habitat for Humanity of Dane County, and other housing organizations, to build 100 single family homes in the county over the next five years, former Habitat for Humanity of Dane County CEO Valerie Renk said.

Bah is also in early talks with the city of Eau Claire to build affordable housing on vacant parcels of land there, he said.

‘There’s a void’

Bah is pursuing such goals in an industry that is historically white-dominated. According to a March report by social impact consulting group Grove Impact and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, out of roughly 112,000 real estate development companies in the U.S., 111,000 of them are white-owned.

Black and Hispanic developers together make up less than 1% of the U.S. real estate industry, according to the report.

There is a lack of local data to spotlight how this dearth of diversity is playing out in the city of Madison, but CEO of the Urban League of Greater Madison Ruben Anthony said “we do need more developers of color in Madison. There’s a void.”

“People like me are in this business to help build generational wealth,” Bah said. “Housing is at the center of wealth building. We as minorities have been locked out of this market.”
Bah’s background

Bah grew up in Farafenni, a small town in Gambia, Africa, in a family of six.

Upon graduating high school in the late 1990s, Bah had aspirations to study abroad. He said he applied to roughly 60-80 universities until being accepted to the now-closed Mount Scenario College, which was located in Ladysmith, Wisconsin. From there, Bah said he transferred to UW-Oshkosh, where he majored in instrumentational physics and had a minor in mathematics.

After graduating, Bah worked at a physics lab at Harvard University to study antimatter as part of a project with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Bah subsequently went to graduate school at Hampton University in Virginia to study applied physics, he said.

In 2008, Bah moved back to Wisconsin for a job offer at UW-Madison to work as a research scientist.

Bah said Madison officials and developers agree that the housing shortage is a serious issue.

“Then, we can start to think about finding solutions,” he said. “Now, we have to put our minds and resources together. It will be a long and painful path forward. I think we will get there.”