Preserving Low-Income Communities through Non-Profit Development Initiatives

By Michael Pyatok

Recent federal housing policy and conventional wisdom among a new generation of housing professionals assert that, to overcome problems of poverty in lower income communities, those communities must either be dispersed among higher income neighborhoods or injected with a massive dose of higher income households so that the lower income households become a minor presence in a newly ‘branded’ or gentrified neighborhood. Presumably, disadvantaged children gain from their association with children in educationally enriched households that are headed by working adults. These efforts, however, destroy existing functional social networks and dilute cultural identities within lower income communities, and much like gerrymandering or colonial occupation, serve to weaken the community’s potential political power.

Moreover, governments are increasingly looking to private developers to produce such ‘mixed-income’ neighborhoods, adopting inclusionary zoning strategies that require private development projects to include a certain percentage of affordable units. Yet these developments are generally guided by market criteria rather than the needs of low-income residents and can further aggravate the negative consequences associated with a ‘mixing’ of income groupings. When inclusionary policies are applied to older inner-city communities, where there is a long tradition of racially and culturally cohesive lower income neighborhoods with their own community-based development corporations, indigenous efforts can be undermined as governments shift some of the limited pool of public subsidies to private developers

Locally-based non-profit corporations can often accomplish the goal of providing affordable housing in a superior fashion to private for-profit developers for five reasons. First, the term of affordability is long since non-profit corporations have no intention of cashing out or refinancing in the future. Private developers, in contrast, seek to make the term of affordability as short as possible. Second, the housing is often ‘service-enriched,’ providing childcare, family counseling, job training and other social services that meet the specific needs of lower-income households. In market-rate housing, by comparison, everyone is expected to blend into the majority population; special services required by low-income, minority populations are not considered. Third, the housing is managed by non-profit corporations or for-profit corporations with substantial experience in serving the needs of lower income households. Fourth, the process of designing the housing is often inclusive and participatory, since the organizations use it as a political and community organizing opportunity. Market-rate housing, on the other hand, is often undertaken behind closed doors, restricting community input to the minimum public hearings required by Environmental Impact Reports. Finally, the housing is often designed to express the specific culture and pride of the people it is intended to serve. This differs from market-rate housing, which will often project either a bland homogenous image to lure the broadest population, or a hip, modern expression to target a smaller, higher income class.

To help illuminate these points, three case studies are presented below of projects designed by the author’s firm in Oakland, California. These projects illustrate how lower income communities, in collaboration with professionals, can organize their own non-profit development corporations and produce improvements in their communities that maintain income homogeneity. In the process, they produce places whose design character and programming maintain rich, diverse cultural identities that market-rate residential developments ignore, or even purposefully avoid.

Fox Courts The north side, with a child-care center on the ground floor, faces the main plaza and park of a new market-rate development. The top floor contains lofts for singles and couples, including formerly homeless. The middle floors are 2-story homes for families.

Photo: Frank Domin

Securing a Non-Profit Affordable Housing Alternative in a Climate of Pro-Market Housing Provision

In 1999, a national, for-profit development corporation wanted to build 800 units of housing in a downtown neighborhood. It voluntarily offered to include 20 percent as ‘affordable’ to households between 60 and 100 percent of the area median income (AMI). Then-mayor Jerry Brown believed that Oakland had too much affordable housing, so he actively discouraged the corporation from including any affordable units. The corporation’s policy, however, was always to include about 20 percent ‘affordable’ units, more in the income range of 80 percent AMI. It did so partly to improve its chances of acquiring subsidies, not exclusively for the affordable component but to underwrite the infrastructure costs associated with the entire development, thereby improving the profitability of the market-rate units as well. The corporation sought about $64 million in local public assistance, yet they proposed only 160 affordable units among the 800 and made no provision for special services for lower income households.

In response to this, a coalition of advocates, the Workforce Housing Coalition, formed to challenge the proposed development. The coalition’s activism stemmed from a long tradition of community-based non-profits successfully completing thousands of affordable units in Oakland, assisted by the city’s tax increment dollars accrued from redevelopment efforts. They saw this form of inclusionary housing by a private developer as an incomplete solution if it produced only for households at 80 percent AMI and without services. Moreover, the project would drain limited local housing subsidies, which could be used to revitalize other low-income neighborhoods. So, the coalition demanded that the inclusionary component be increased to 30 percent, with the additional 10 percent (eighty units) built as a stand-alone affordable development that would be owned and managed by a local 25-year-old non-profit organization and would include social services, childcare and job training for residents.

After two years of applying constant pressure on the developer, the mayor and the City Council, the coalition succeeded. The resulting development of eighty units is on .9 acres, and families have their own two-story town homes stacked in four floors, so each dwelling has natural through-ventilation, with walkways only on every other floor serving the living levels of the homes. A portion of the building has a childcare center on the first floor, with two-story homes above, and on the fourth floor are lofts and studios for very low-income singles and couples, some of whom were formerly homeless. All of the households are linked to a series of social service providers facilitated by the non-profit owner-developer.

As the development is located in an Art Deco section of downtown, the non-profit developer hired artists to work with the local arts high school to design murals depicting the youth culture of Oakland for the building. The non-profit developer also retained an artist who enhanced the lobbies with mosaic portrayals of life in Oakland, and a tile artist who produced custom tiles, located along the base, which depicted the flora and fauna of the region stylized in a manner that reflects Latino, Asian, African and Native American approaches to pattern design.

Converting an Abandoned Site into a Culturally Diverse, Low-Income Housing Project

The second case is a community-based effort in the 1990s to redevelop a site in East Oakland that was an abandoned supermarket, in an area long ignored by the private market. A 35-year-old non-profit corporation, primarily serving the Asian community in Oakland’s downtown, recognized that many new Southeast Asian refugees were settling in East Oakland, where the African-American and Hispanic-American communities had settled over the last five decades. To achieve harmony between the racial groups, the Asian-serving non-profit elected to joint venture with a neighborhood-based non-profit that had primarily been serving the African- and Hispanic-American households in that neighborhood. Together they sponsored a series of participatory design workshops to include local participation in the project’s planning and design.

The resulting project includes ninety-two affordable units as well as a childcare center, a community center and 8,000 square feet for small, incubating retail businesses. The elevator-serviced front boulevard buildings contain the smaller households with few or no children. The other half of the units, for larger families, have their own two- and three-story homes located at the rear of the site above a parking garage. The retail space was included as an economic development strategy to help spawn small local businesses that could also serve the community. The clients and design team applied for and won $50,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to hire local artists from each of the racial groups living in the community. The artists embellished the development in a way that represented their histories and traditions.

The project, now fifteen years old, has won six regional and national design awards. It also required ten different funding sources, with a key source being the City of Oakland. If an “inclusionary zoning” requirement had been instituted at that time, this non-profit joint venture partnership would have been forced to compete with private developers, who typically contribute to local City Council and mayoral campaigns, for these local funds. A for-profit developer would have used the city funds to make just 20 percent of a market-rate project affordable, and would have served a higher income level. The housing would also not have been built in a low-income neighborhood, filling a vacant lot. Furthermore, there would have been no social services or childcare, no economic development component and no expression of a neighborhood’s cultural diversity and local self-help pride.

A Native American Mixed-Use Complex

The third case concerns a medical and dental clinic in East Oakland that was founded by the Native-American community more than thirty years ago and by 2001 had outgrown its facilities and needed a new building. Recognizing the value of inner-city land, the community realized that a single-purpose building within blocks of a BART station and on a boulevard with several bus lines should be converted to a mix of uses: a clinic with housing above. With no experience in housing development, they formed a joint venture in 2002 with the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation. Together they developed an infill parcel of .7 acres with thirty-six family units above a 20,000 square foot medical and dental clinic, and public spaces that served as a community center and forty-five car garage. While the facility distinctly expresses the presence of the Native American community in East Oakland, it serves all residents of East Oakland in need of affordable healthcare. It also includes two courtyards—one on the ground for the clinic with a kiva-like talking circle for outdoor community meetings and ceremonial dancing; and one located above the clinic exclusively for the residents.

As difficult as it was to raise the funds to produce the clinic, the organization went further and raised several hundred thousand dollars more to pay for artists from the Native American and immigrant communities. These artists included major works expressive of the Native American presence in the community and what the Native Americans have done to help all those who came to the Americas later as immigrants. This dramatic cultural expression would never be expected from private developers because their intentions are to develop a mixed-income project that serves a broad public, and thus they would fear that any special cultural expressions, particularly on the part of minorities, might alienate the clientele they seek to attract. In such mixed-income developments, minorities must assume a subservient role and accommodate themselves in cultural expression of the dominant culture.

Seven Directions The entry into the medical and dental clinic is flanked by two totem poles carved by a member of Alaska’s Tlingit tribe. They tell their tribe’s story of the birth of their people.

Photo: Mike Pyatok

Hismen Hin-Nu Terrace The central court is shared by families in townhomes, and singles and couples located in the elevator-served, stucco-clad buildings. A child-care center and community center open onto their own fenced areas.

Photo: Mike Pyatok

Conclusion

Many U.S. cities have proud, capable, lower income neighborhoods and networks of non-profits, both neighborhood-based and citywide. In Oakland, these non-profits are responsible for nearly all of the affordable housing produced in the last thirty years, many receiving national attention for their quality programs and designs. It is their successful performance that throws into question the assertion that such neighborhoods lack the ability to improve themselves unless higher income residents move into their midst in sufficient numbers to improve the neighborhood’s quality of life. Yet their programs are undermined when the limited supply of subsidies is redirected to private developers for ‘inclusionary’ projects. If there is to be inclusionary zoning, private developers should pay for such housing primarily from their own profits or pay in lieu fees to local affordable housing trust funds at sufficient levels to accomplish the task. Other compensation can be granted for those obligated to include their fair share, such as expedited processing, fee reductions or waivers and density bonuses. The financial support for self-determination and capacity-building in the non-profit sector, whether from local or state sources, should not be siphoned off to assist for-profit developers but should be directed to those organizations that can best serve the needs of low-income populations.

Michael Pyatok has been an architect and professor of architectural design for forty-three years. He is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Since opening his own office in 1984, he has designed over 35,000 units of affordable housing for lower income households in the U.S. and abroad, and developed participatory design methods to facilitate community involvement throughout the design process.

From and Toward a Queer Urbanism

By Kian Goh

“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationships to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.”
—David Harvey, “The Right to the City”

“. . . Queer space finds in the closet or the dark alley places where it can construct an artificial architecture of the self.”
—Aaron Betsky, Queer Space

“Our visions begin with our desires.”
—Audre Lorde

In early 2008, a group of parents  and children, parks  advocates and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth rallied together to protest the proposal for a large-scale retail and entertainment development at Pier 40, on Manhattan’s Hudson River Park. The LGBT youth, led by community organizing group FIERCE, had been working since 2000 to keep the park and piers safe and accessible. Carrying signs that read “Save the Village” and “LGBT Youth and Little Leaguers UNITE!,” queer youth and neighborhood advocates and residents formed an unlikely alliance of community opposition to large-scale privatized development.

For FIERCE, it was a particular triumph, a milestone to organizing work that had engaged and dealt with several years of tension between established West Village residents and the LGBT youth who call the piers home. From organizing in response to harassment and arrests of youth, to campaigning for later park curfew hours, to insisting on the right of queer youth to inhabit Village streets, FIERCE and their constituents fought for both a voice at the decision-making table and the right to public space.

Memorialized in the documentary Paris Is Burning, the piers at the end of Christopher Street have long been an epicenter of queer congregation. Like the bodies that inhabit them, the piers epitomize a wary comfort on the edge and, like so many edges, especially water edges, a place of possibilities. The crumbling infrastructure, left to rot after the city’s shipping heyday, offered a perfect in-between space for those looking simultaneously for escape and belonging. The piers became not only popular cruising grounds, but important centers of community, where a boy or girl getting off a bus after fleeing from far-away oppression could count on finding support and an extended family.

In recent years the piers and adjacent Hudson River Park have reflected the continuing demographic and economic changes in the West Village. Piers and park are now smartly landscaped with popular jogging and biking paths, nearby residential towers are home to some of the priciest square footage in the world and the Stonewall Inn, a few blocks down Christopher Street, is now a gay tourist destination, a mere symbol of an uprising. Many streets in the Village barely hold on to their bohemian, countercultural history, and the signs that remain are as much due to nostalgia as any kind of radical agenda. But still youth come to the piers, motivated by accounts they’ve read, watched, heard about or even something more intangible—a shared history, a cultural memory of those places of possibility.

In his book Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, historian Aaron Betsky explores the making of queer space. He describes a space “not built, only implied, and usually invisible . . . useless, amoral and sensual space that lives only in and for experience.” Betsky’s queers, almost exclusively gay white men, through opportunism, innovation and desperation, “queered” spaces using actions, signs and symbols, particularly interstitial spaces of the city, areas of informal gathering not often in view—discos and clubs, bathhouses, bars or sections of parks at night. Queers invented, with limited resources, ephemeral spaces of display and experience within the city, new spatial and cultural permeabilities.

Early queer spaces were necessarily interior, where darkness and seclusion offered possibilities for remaking both the spaces between and the bodies themselves. Stonewall and the Castro proved decisive breakout moments—not the invention of queer spaces but the spilling out of queerness into public streets.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, queers increasingly occupied and queered public space and public imaginations. Gay pride parades grew and multiplied, slowly making the transition from protest to celebration. Groups like ACT UP stormed streets and institutions at the height of the AIDS epidemic, making demands for not just public visibility, but acknowledgement of gay bodies and gay acts in a time of crisis.

And gays enthusiastically went about the creation of distinctly gay neighborhoods in large cities across the country. From the West Village to Dupont Circle and the Castro, gays proved incredibly adept at revitalizing urban spaces. Emblazoning the exteriors in ways that reflected past splendorous interiors, such gay facades indicated when neighborhoods were safe for further exploration by less brave and foolhardy groups, often with the effect of stimulating gentrification.

Recent mainstream gay activism has steered far from its spatial repercussions. Both the gay marriage and gays-in-the-military movements constitute a desire for stamps of approval. From interiority to parades and protests to, now, efforts to get to do just like everyone else, it can be argued that, historically, the mainstream gay agenda was largely an assimilative one. It is then no surprise that public queer spaces remain ephemeral—signs and symbols remain, but the critical agenda, the instrumentality of queerness, disappears, covered and recovered by years of cultural and physical renovations.

Present-day Hudson River Park, with luxury condo towers designed by Richard Meier.

Young people on Christopher Street Piers, with Pier 40 in the background.

Photos by Kian Goh

Re-Queering

With gay neighborhoods established, tightly and seamlessly woven into the urban fabric, and pride parades not just celebratory but wholly commodified, is there still the possibility of a queer urbanism? Do queer actions still have the ability to reformat urban space?

Clearly, the demarcation of queer public space has not ceased. Even while pride parades lose their ability to shock, drowned out in thumping club music and rainbow ad banners, a number of other queer marches have sprouted in place. The increasing prominence of dyke marches across the country and the Trans Day of Action march in New York City attest to a renewed queer claim on public space.

The recent queering of ethnic pride parades as well show a fascinating confluence of often complex issues of identity, visibility and representation. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, local organizers led by Q-Wave, a queer Asian women and transgender group, have successfully petitioned for and organized an LGBT contingent in the annual Lunar New Year Parade for two years running. Similar efforts are ongoing to ensure LGBT inclusion in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade and India Independence Day Parade in the city.

Beyond parades and marches, we can also observe what could be called a conscious re-queering of spaces. FIERCE’s work on the piers is a primary example. Not content simply to ensure that successive waves of queer youth retain access to spaces of community and safety, FIERCE has held numerous organized events on the piers, including film nights and mini-balls, revisiting the days of “voguing” balls.

This kind of re-queering goes on every day, but is particularly evident in the hours after the annual gay pride parade, when thousands of young LGBT people of color flood the Hudson River Park. Kept from the piers by police barricades, young queers enact a parade of sorts along the promenade. Police control is particularly evident at these times, a reality that itself has spawned a community-based counter-movement, a cop watch project run by various local community groups tasked with keeping a record of, and hence a tether on, police harassment.

Activists led by Q-Wave organized the first LGBT contingent in the annual Lunar New Year Parade in Manhattan’s Chinatown in 2010.

Organizers from the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Neighborhoods campaign hold a rally in Union Square.

LGBT young people led by FIERCE protest plans for privatized development at Pier 40.

Radical Queer Urbanism

Even in the age of post-queer liberation, the work of radical LGBT activists constitutes a new in-between queer space, between the increasing invisibility of mainstream gays and lesbians of television and movies, of townhouses and magazines, and the violence and discrimination that still confounds LGBT people in many parts of this country.

Distinct from previous struggles, these activists work in a space that is still relatively new for LGBT movements, carving out new spaces not only of visibility, but of safety, resilience and in public urban space, oftentimes far from established gay centers. In New York City, in addition to FIERCE, groups like Queers for Economic Justice (QEJ), the Audre Lorde Project (ALP) and Make the Road New York work to address the most critical lapses of urban services and safety.

QEJ’s Shelter Project organizers work in the city’s homeless shelters, reaching out to homeless LGBT people, offering support and community, and making connections to additional social services. QEJ’s work not only permeates the interior space of the shelter, but creates tangible connections to wider networks in the city. This work brings to light the issue of homelessness, a particularly fraught queer space all too prevalent among urban LGBT youth.

The Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Neighborhoods campaign is creating a network of safe spaces in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, without police intervention. In a country where one in every one hundred people is in the criminal justice system, ALP organizers are aware that the increased criminalization of young people of color helps no one. By establishing visible safe spaces among local businesses and gathering areas, and conducting trainings on homophobia, transphobia and ways to prevent violence without relying on law enforcement, the initiative attempts to create a new model of community accountability for safety and welfare in urban neighborhoods.

Make the Road New York’s GLOBE initiative, working largely with immigrant communities in Bushwick, Brooklyn, engages neighborhood schools as partners in creating supportive environments for LGBT youth. Sited at the intersection of immigrant and LGBT rights and safety, the initiative negotiates and pulls apart spatial and social boundaries that are complicated and operate on multiple levels.

Each of these initiatives asserts that the safety and welfare of LGBT people in cities cannot be divorced from the social, economic and spatial conditions of urban environments. From direct acts aimed at changing discriminatory bureaucratic policy to the more consuming work of changing prevailing public opinion, these campaigns literally broaden the possibilities of movement for queers in the city. They map, both literally and otherwise, paths forward for urban social movements that are critically inclusive.

Kian Goh, AIA, LEED AP, is an architect, educator and community activist, and a partner in SUPER INTERESTING!, an architecture and sustainability consulting firm. She teaches design and sustainability at Parsons The New School for Design and the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. She is a former member of the board of directors of the Audre Lorde Project and collaborated with FIERCE on its Pier 40 campaign. She was also one of the organizers of the first LGBT contingent in the New York City Lunar New Year Parade in 2010.