08/17/2025
📣 BOOK DROP COMING…………soon 📣
Foreword
This is not some polite foreword with soft language to smooth the conscience of developers, politicians, and corporate executives. This is the truth written in blood, sweat, and hunger.
What you are holding is a book that begins with a letter—a letter written by Jim Holcomb of Millcraft, the developer who thought he could gaslight an entire Black community in Manchester, Pittsburgh. His words, written in careful, polished corporate prose, told us everything we needed to know.
Holcomb wrote:
“We take community concerns seriously and we want to assure residents that Millcraft’s developments bring long-term value, not harm.”
Read between the lines. That single sentence is the oldest trick in the corporate playbook.
Developers always say they "take concerns seriously," but their seriousness is measured in boardroom laughter, not in community survival. What he meant was: “We heard you, but we’re going to do it anyway. We will squeeze your neighborhood dry, and we’ll tell you it’s for your own good.”
Later, Holcomb insisted:
“Our Ferris wheel project is about creating joy and opportunity for the city.”
Joy? For whom? Opportunity? For which pockets? Because in Manchester, joy looks like an elder not having to choose between paying for blood pressure medication and buying fresh vegetables. Opportunity looks like a young Black man getting a living-wage job that doesn’t involve leaving his neighborhood to clean up after someone else’s wealth. A $740 million Ferris wheel does not feed a single child in our community.
This book is an indictment—not just of Millcraft, not just of Jim Holcomb’s hollow promises, but of every developer in every American city who hides behind the same bland, lawyer-approved rhetoric while tearing apart communities already stripped bare by redlining, gentrification, and systemic theft.
In fact, Millcraft is not unique. The playbook is identical across the country:
In Atlanta, corporate-backed “food innovation hubs” promised jobs and healthy food. They bulldozed local businesses, erased Black growers, and left behind overpriced salad bars.
In Chicago’s South Side, Whole Foods opened with ribbon-cutting fanfare, only to close a few years later, leaving behind an even deeper food desert.
In Detroit, developers dangled the word “revitalization” while driving out the very residents who survived decades of disinvestment.
And on, and on, and on.
Holcomb’s letter, with its careful denials and sugar-coated justifications, is not an outlier—it’s a template. Across at least 20 projects nationally we’ve seen the same story: developers promise “opportunity,” deliver exclusion, and then act shocked when the community resists.
This book, We Don’t Want a F**ing Farm on Our Street for Corporate America*, is written through the unapologetic voice of Lisa Freeman, but it carries the echoes of thousands of communities across this nation who have been told to be quiet, be patient, and be grateful while their dignity is stripped.
So let’s be clear: this is not a polite conversation. This is not about “seeking compromise.” This is about calling out the fraud, the theft, and the violence of development done without consent and without conscience.
We start with Jim Holcomb’s words, and then we burn through every single lie in the developer’s playbook.
This is our evidence. This is our testimony. This is our weapon.
Lisa FreemanChelsea Freeman-Washington Millcraft Industries Millcraft Investments
