Let's look at what FIU Village could look like and how the economy of the City of Sweethingyer could be benefited. But is this all a dream? Years from now, when traffic is all congested and gas is at $5.00 a gallon and Sweethingyer is still the same, we could look back and say if only the Metrorail had gone down 107th Avenue and the city was redeveloped to look something like this... a place of gathering with housing and businesses.
August 11, 2004
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE
Building a Village in OaklandBy MORRIS NEWMAN
OAKLAND, Calif. - Fruitvale Village may startle some visitors who see it for the first time from the platform of the BART train station. From that vantage, the festive "village" looks very much like an upscale suburban shopping center, set incongruously amid the brick buildings and dilapidated wooden houses of a once-fearsome neighborhood.
Beyond its good looks, the $60 million mixed-use development is also playing a catalytic role in one of the poorest neighborhoods of this Bay Area city, directly east of San Francisco.
Even before it was completed in May, Fruitvale Village - with 45,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, a nonprofit clinic, a child-care center for 300 children, a public library, 47 apartments for both low-income and market-rate renters and 45,000 square feet of office space - had already primed a depressed and neglected neighborhood for a blast of new development, according to Ignacio De La Fuente, the Oakland city councilman who represents the area.
"The village is already a success," said the councilman, who has championed the project in the neighborhood known locally as the Fruitvale.
City officials also report that the Fruitvale, a densely populated, largely Latino neighborhood of 53,000 people amid a city of 400,000 residents, now produces the second-highest level of sales tax among Oakland's neighborhoods, exceeded only by affluent Rockridge.
Along International Boulevard, the street that borders the 13-acre development, the vacancy rate in commercial buildings is 1 percent. About a decade ago, it was 40 percent.
In its boom period during the first half of the 20th century, Fruitvale was the industrial center of Oakland. Just a few miles from the city's port, the area was a hive of canneries owned by the Del Monte Corporation and others, before the industry moved out in the 1960's and 70's in search of larger plants in cheaper suburban areas.
Arabella Martinez, who grew up in the neighborhood, said she remembered the acrid smell of tomatoes being canned in the summer. "It was pungent," she said.
The Fruitvale Village project grew out of a spontaneous neighborhood protest in 1991, when BART - Bay Area Rapid Transit - proposed building a 541-car parking garage next to the Fruitvale station. Local residents particularly objected to the garage plan, calling it a bleak structure that would wall off the neighborhood from the commuter train.
As the founder of a group known as the Spanish Speaking Unity Council, Ms. Martinez, who was assistant secretary of the Department of Health in the Carter administration, began a series of talks with neighborhood groups, designers and city officials on the future of a two-block stretch between the BART station and the Fruitvale district's languishing commercial area.
In 1992, Ms. Martinez and her group began to conceive of a development that would provide badly needed new stores and housing for the neighborhood, while at the same time serving as a kind of pathway to the neighborhood's most commercial intersection, 34th Avenue and 14th Street (now called International Boulevard).
"We have a double bottom line," said Ms. Martinez, a white-haired woman with a firm grasp of real estate and public finance. The village, she said, had to be a success in itself, but it also had to bring success to the surrounding neighborhood. "After all," she added, "that was the whole point of it."
The project also had to be large enough to change the direction of the community. "If we were going to stop businesses from moving away, we had to build a project of scale," she said.
In 1992, the Unity Council decided to become a nonprofit developer and build the unusual project in partnership with BART and the City of Oakland. Even with those partners, Fruitvale Village was a complex undertaking for a novice developer.
"We had never done a mixed-use project before, and we were taking a real risk in doing this," Ms. Martinez acknowledged.
BART officials were not receptive at first to the idea of letting the group develop the area because its policy is never to sell land or use it for purposes unrelated to transit. Eventually, Ms. Martinez persuaded the transit officials to lease the land to the Unity Council, after the group found some nearby land for BART riders to park their cars.
Much of the complexity of Fruitvale Village lies in the financing, which came from nearly 30 different sources, including grants from private foundations and public money from the city, state and federal levels.
In one creative financial arrangement, the city agreed to rent nearly all the nonretail space in the project for 20 years and to pay for it up front - giving the Unity Council the cash it needed to qualify for a construction loan.
Eventually, Citibank agreed to provide both a construction loan and a mortgage, and construction started in 1999.
The design, by McLarand Vasquez Emsiek & Partners of Irvine, Calif., is centered on a walkway running between a pair of two-story buildings containing a total of 255,000 square feet of space. Lined at street level with shops on either side, the walkway, or paseo, leads from the train platform to the stores on International Boulevard. The library, apartments and office space are on the second level. At the center of the paseo is a fountain, playfully named for Mr. De La Fuente, whose name means fountain in Spanish.
The Unity Council has taken what it calls extraordinary measures to maintain the village, including regular cleaning crews and volunteers, known as Fruitvale Ambassadors, who field complaints from tenants and shoppers.
Among the first retail tenants of Fruitvale Village were a husband and wife, Genesta and Payam Irani, who opened an optometry office in May. Their decision was questioned by friends, according to Mrs. Irani. "They said to us, 'Fruitvale? What are you thinking?' " she recalled.
So far, the couple sounds optimistic, but sober, about the prospects for Fruitvale Village. Business, Mr. Irani said, is "meeting or exceeding expectations, and the foot traffic is excellent."
Still, Mrs. Irani said, "it is a very difficult thing to revitalize a community that has had problems, but it is much more difficult to change its reputation."
And life is not entirely free from peril in Fruitvale Village; a mugging occurred in July in a nearby parking lot. The Iranis, who also live in the area, said they planned to stay. "If you want to create change," Mrs. Irani said, "you must accept a certain amount of risk and still continue to believe" in the value of investing in the neighborhood.
The Unity Council, meanwhile, is planning a second phase of development with housing for the elderly on an adjoining site.
Land values have shot up sharply as the Fruitvale begins to attract urban pioneers seeking comparatively affordable apartments and lofts amid the stratospheric housing prices of the Bay Area.
"If we had bought our property in '93, we would have been rich," Ms. Martinez said. On the other hand, she added, "nobody would have helped us with developing this site."
If you look closely, the black dots are where the elevated Bart line runs:
See also:
www.fruitvalevillage.net/