Community-based Initiatives for Neighborhood and Community Rehabilitation
Community-based Initiatives for Neighborhood and Community Rehabilitation

Author: Francesca M. Gallardo

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13:

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Through the case study of San Francisco, CA's Mission District, this research project addresses how community-based affordable housing development is operationalized to rehabilitate communities and neighborhoods experiencing effects of gentrification, mass displacement, and cultural dilution. My goals were to identify how the processes of building a sense of community, trust, and cohesion- rehabilitating and critical to affordable housing development efforts in the Mission District? And, how are nonprofit community development organizations engaging with these processes in collaboration with citizen and community partners? The final objective is to provide evidence-based strategies to assist other at-risk minority communities and neighborhoods in the built environment. I partnered with the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA)'s Community Real Estate (CRE) department to implement and test community and trust building, and cultural place-keeping strategies. The strategies were influenced and shaped by the Mission District's rich history, Latinx and artistic cultures, and activism. Co-facilitated with Precita Eyes Muralists, we conducted ten-week mosaic workshops at three of MEDA's Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) properties; I designed survey activities to encourage engagement and create spaces for community participation; and, conducted semi-formal interviews with MEDA's CRE teams, and the architect's creative design teams. Through an affordable housing development lens in gentrifying neighborhoods, it is evident that utilizing creative and cultural place-keeping practices to engage with neighborhood community members is an empowering and rehabilitating strategy; moreover, it prompts community and relationship building, has mental and physical benefits, and addresses specific design needs of low-income, working-class residents.

Making the Mission
Making the Mission

Author: Ocean Howell

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 022629028X

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In the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, residents of the city’s iconic Mission District bucked the city-wide development plan, defiantly announcing that in their neighborhood, they would be calling the shots. Ever since, the Mission has become known as a city within a city, and a place where residents have, over the last century, organized and reorganized themselves to make the neighborhood in their own image. In Making the Mission, Ocean Howell tells the story of how residents of the Mission District organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood and how they mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong, often racialized identity—a pattern that would repeat itself again and again throughout the twentieth century. Surveying the perspectives of formal and informal groups, city officials and district residents, local and federal agencies, Howell articulates how these actors worked with and against one another to establish the very ideas of the public and the public interest, as well as to negotiate and renegotiate what the neighborhood wanted. In the process, he shows that national narratives about how cities grow and change are fundamentally insufficient; everything is always shaped by local actors and concerns.