Development without all the gentrification?
A new study from UCLA points to Oakland’s Fruitvale transit village as the model
OAKLAND >> The cluster of shops, community service organizations and apartments at the Fruitvale BART station may not seem all that different from other commercial plazas, but to some economists and urban planners, it’s the grand prize of development — at least, for now.
Researchers from UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Initiative say the transit village has been a boon to the surrounding neighborhood without resulting in gentrification. As many low-income and working class residents across the state are forced to leave urban areas due to rising rents and home prices, the UCLA researchers said Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood has held onto its existing residents, along with its signature Mexican-American culture.
“It’s the holy grail of urban planning,” said Alexander Quinn, an economist with Hatch, who reviewed the study’s findings, “to say we improved the place and the people who live there are better off.”
But long-time residents, academics and elected officials question whether Oakland’s Mexican-American mecca can continue to withstand the pressure of the region’s booming economy. And, to them, the tide may already be turning.
In the mid-1990s, the Unity Council, a Spanish-speaking community development organization based in Fruitvale, balked at BART’s plans to put a parking garage adjacent to the Fruitvale station. Its opposition sparked
roughly a decade of debate that ultimately ended with the Unity Council taking over the project’s development.
Ledy Ordoñez, who works at the Ecuador Imports stand in the transit village, remembers well what it was like back then.
“There wasn’t anything here,” she recalled. “There was a lot of crime, drugs.”
The council landed on a vision for 47 one- and twobedroom apartments, ten of which were designated as affordable, sitting astride a mix of shops and community service organizations that would serve as an economic anchor for the neighborhood, said Ignacio De La Fuente, a former Oakland councilmember whose district included the Fruitvale neighborhood.
It’s often considered one of the country’s first “transit-oriented developments” — a catch phrase that’s become the gold standard for building in dense urban areas and is the subject of a new state bill to encourage these types of projects across the state.
Today, the village is home to a charter high school, senior center, public library, pediatric clinic, union office and Clinica de la Raza, along with a number of restaurants and retailers. There’s also a weekly farmers market, vendors pushing carts who set up in and around the village daily and the annual Dia de los Muertos festival, which draws 70,000 visitors. By all accounts, the village is a success, luring urban planners and economists from across the globe to study and replicate it elsewhere, said Chris Iglesias, Unity Council’s CEO.
But, the researchers wanted to know if it was also a success for residents in the surrounding community.
To do that, they identified 12 other census tracts in the Bay Area and 12 elsewhere in California that had a similar demographic composition, household income and average rent in 2000, before the transit village was constructed. Then, using census data, they looked at how those neighborhoods changed in the subsequent 15 years.
Fruitvale saw higher growth in household incomes compared to similar neighborhoods in both the Bay Area and California, along with more residents graduating high school and going on to earn a bachelor’s degree. Across the state and the Bay Area, the proportion of residents buying their homes fell, while in Fruitvale, the number of home buyers actually increased.
At the same time, Fruitvale lost only 1 percent of its Latino population, 4 percent of its black residents, less than one percent of its white residents and gained 6 percent of new Asian residents.
Similar Bay Area and California neighborhoods actually saw an increased concentration of its Latino populations, which grew 5 percent and 6 percent, respectively, while they lost less than one percent and 4 percent of their white residents.
“We were interested in whether or not residents of certain ethnic groups were able to stay,” said UCLA researcher Sonja Diaz. “It’s surprising … the community stayed Latino, even with all these benefits.”
But, the data also revealed higher rising rents in Fruitvale than in the Bay Area or across the state. Rents in Fruitvale rose a whopping 83 percent, compared to 71 percent in similar Bay Area neighborhoods and 66 percent in similar California neighborhoods outside the area. Carolina Reid, a faculty research adviser at UC Berkeley’s Terner Center for Housing Innovation, cautioned that the data, which goes up to 2015, misses some of the recent years of growth, when the pressures on rents and home values only increased.
“Fruitvale is not immune to the larger forces impacting the Bay Area, and some of the results they are finding in this study might be partly a timing problem,” she said.
Nor is it clear the existing residents are the ones benefiting from higher incomes and better educational attainment, and not new, wealthier residents with a similar demographic profile, who are displacing their low-income counterparts, said Robert Cervero, professor emeritus of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley.
And, to many long-time Fruitvale residents, it does feel like their community is changing. Noel Gallo, an Oakland city councilmember whose district includes Fruitvale, sees affluent white and Asian families buying homes on his block.
“A lot of us in the Fruitvale area … have left Oakland altogether” for cheaper rents in the Central Valley, he said. “Within the last 10 to 15 years, it’s changed a lot, and it’s quite evident and visible.”
That’s why affordable housing and tenant protections are all the more critical, Reid said. The Unity Council recently broke ground on a 94-unit affordable housing tower at the Fruitvale transit village with plans to construct another 181 market rate units and retail businesses in the near future, Iglesias said.
“Even though we’re making strides, we’re still playing catch-up” from decades of disinvestment in the neighborhood, he said. “Investments are starting to come in and stuff is starting to happen, but we’re still making up for lost time, and it’ll take time to see the fruits of some of this work.”