Designing A Socially Just Downtown

"Affordable housing is not a dirty word. Despite its association with the drug-infested, crime-ridden public housing projects of the past, there is a growing awareness that affordable housing increases property values. Downtown Oakland, California, is a classic example. Throughout the 1990s, on infill sites in the most risky areas, nonprofit developers were the first to produce attractive, high-density buildings...By the turn of the century, however, the tables turned. Neighborhood stability spurred a booming condo market, and gentrification and displacement became commonplace.

No project better encapsulates this turn of events than the Uptown project...Uptown is the keystone of Mayor Jerry Brown's 10K plan -- a New Urbanist planning effort intended to attract 10,000 residents into Oakland's downtown core. Uptown alone promises to add about 2,200 residents to the area -- about as many as all the 10K projects completed in the first five years of Brown's administration. Forest City's initial proposal in the late 1990s requested tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies to produce mostly market-rate condos and high-end rental apartments. But after years of organizing, protests, policy advocacy and community design work, affordable housing advocates won concessions: 210 affordable units will now serve a range of incomes from 30 to 50 percent of the area median income (AMI)."