Gothamist, Mike Hayes, March 2, 2025

Nana Duncan says she was first inspired to become a real estate developer over a decade ago, at a time when she had a very different job: college counselor.

After college, Duncan was working as a free college counselor for high school students in Harlem when she noticed students’ housing was getting in the way of their work. They often broke appointments because they lived in crowded apartments and weren’t getting enough sleep, or were afraid they’d get jumped on their way to meet her.

“What I found was how much their living environment impacted their ability to access the resources that I had for them,” Duncan said.

This month, Duncan broke ground on a $100 million affordable housing project in one of the most underserved neighborhoods in the East Ward of Irvington, New Jersey. A native of Ghana who moved to the United States for college in 2004, Duncan is one of the first Black female developers to lead an affordable housing project of this magnitude in the state.

The development Duncan is planning would add multiple apartment buildings and houses and provide about 240 low- and medium-income families with homes in a New Jersey neighborhood that for the past several decades has fallen into decay. Duncan has successfully redeveloped more than 500,000 square feet of blighted property, generating more than $200 million in development since opening her firm. She said this project could take up to five years to finish.

According to Duncan, the property was home to a family neighborhood before the state took it over with the intention of building a new school. That project, however, fell through, and the property has been left mostly vacant for more than a decade.

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