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Fruitvale

SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA

Turning Neighborhoods Around

With many different ethnic communities facing housing affordability challenges, the Bay Area has no shortage of active CDCs working to improve their quality of life. The Bay Area office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) is planning to expand its support for those CDCs with new funding from local public and private funders.

The Unity Council and Fruitvale Main Street

Fruitvale is the most heavily populated neighborhood in the Bay Area, thanks in large part to immigrants pouring in from Central America and Southeast Asia during the 1990s. The Spanish Speaking Unity Council, a CDC that was established in the 1960s to assist the largely Latino area, has been critical in revitalizing Fruitvale, which spent the decades leading up to the 1980s languishing, economically and socially.

The past 20 years have seen the area blossom, thanks in part to the launch of a branch of the nationwide Main Street program in 1993. LISC came aboard in 1996 and has helped make a success of Fruitvale Transit Village, located at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station. Today, Fruitvale Transit Village boasts 47 homes, a bustling pedestrian shopping mall and large public plaza, as well as a modern healthcare facility, childcare center, computer technology center, and public library. As City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente recently observed: “What was once a depressed East 14 th Street is now the thriving International Boulevard with a storefront vacancy rate of under five percent.” The visible success of the Fruitvale Transit Village has prompted many other CDCs to begin cooperating with their local municipalities to achieve similar goals.

Mission Housing Development

A non-profit CDC in San Francisco’s primarily Hispanic Mission district, MHDC was founded in 1971 to improve the lives of area residents, most of whom were poor or working class. A for-profit subsidiary, the Caritas Management Corporation, was founded in 1983 and now manages 44 buildings in San Francisco, mid-rise and high-rise apartments as well as townhouses and duplexes. The buildings boast low vacancy rates and Caritas has a good reputation in the community, despite grappling with an increasingly controversial debate over gentrification—one of the bigger challenges it and MHDC face. As the face of the Mission District changes with the arrival of more young professionals, artists, and musicians, advocates for affordable housing are as important as ever.

The East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation

Founded in the late 1970s, the East Bay Local Development Corporation has provided more than 700 affordable homes for families, seniors, and single residents. It has also helped numerous families, largely from Asia and the Pacific Islands, buy their own homes in West Oakland. One achievement was to reopen Swan’s Marketplace, a long abandoned historic site.