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IntroductionThe Fruitvale Transit Village project is the result of a broad-based partnership among public, private, and nonprofit organizations working together to revitalize a community using transit-oriented development. Transit-oriented development is a planning concept that seeks to use mass transit stations as building blocks for economic revitalization and environmental improvement. In September 1999, groundbreaking took place on a $100 million mixed-use development adjacent to the Fruitvale Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) station in Oakland, California. Fruitvale, one of Oakland's seven community districts, is a low-income, predominantly minority community experiencing economic stress. This case study focuses on the incorporation of environmental justice principles into the planning and design of the Fruitvale Transit Village. The Fruitvale Transit Village is the brainchild of the Unity Council, a community development corporation formed in 1964 by activists who wanted to create a forum for working on issues important to Fruitvale's Latino community. The origins of the project date back to 1991, when BART announced plans to construct a multi-layered parking facility next to the Fruitvale station. Although the community agreed that new parking was necessary, the design and location of the facility did not sit well with Fruitvale residents and business owners. Members of the community were concerned that the proposed structure would increase traffic and pollution and further separate the Fruitvale neighborhood from the BART station. The Unity Council galvanized neighborhood opposition to the parking structure design and location, arguing that any development around the BART station should be guided by a broad-based community planning process. Faced with this strong community opposition, BART withdrew its proposal and agreed to work with the Unity Council on a plan for the area. During the next several years, the Unity Council engaged local stakeholders in a comprehensive visioning and planning process that laid out the parameters of the Fruitvale Transit Village. Plans for the Transit Village include a mixture of housing, shops, offices, a library, a child care facility, a pedestrian plaza, and other community services all surrounding the BART station. The project is expected to reduce traffic and pollution in and around Fruitvale because community residents will have access to a range of goods and services within easy walking distance of the transit station. The Fruitvale Transit Village project illustrates a number of key themes and effective practices that are central to incorporating the principles of environmental justice into transportation planning and design. First, it demonstrates an effective use of partnerships to generate funding and other resources necessary to plan and implement a costly and complex project. The Unity Council's success in building relationships with a wide range of key players helped overcome the formidable legal, regulatory, and financial hurdles the project initially faced. In addition, the project illustrates a strong commitment to public involvement by the lead agencies involved. Typically, either city officials or private developers represent the driving force behind large-scale development projects such as this. Under the best of circumstances, community residents are usually in the position of responding to plans that are initiated by others. In this case, however, the Unity Council's leadership role in the project helped ensure that the community's own vision for the transit station and its surrounding area served as guiding principles for the planning and design process. Finally, the planning effort behind the Fruitvale Transit Village represents an innovative strategy for using mass transit as a lever for revitalizing an urban community. While transit-oriented development has been successful in a growing number of affluent suburban locations, the Fruitvale Transit Village sets a precedent for such projects in lower-income, inner-city communities. "Transportation planning should be about more than concrete and steel. It should be about building communities and we are all looking to Fruitvale as an example of how that can happen."
The Region and the CommunityOakland is situated on the eastern shore of the San Francisco Bay. With a population of 395,000, Oakland is California's sixth largest city. A thriving port, an international airport, and major transit facilities have made Oakland the major hub for commerce, transportation, and international trade in the Bay Area. Oakland is a diverse community. African Americans and whites are the largest racial/ethnic groups, with 43 percent and 28 percent of the city's population, respectively. The other major groups are Asian Americans and Hispanics. Seventy-two percent of Oakland's population consists of minorities. Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood, by contrast, is over 90 percent minority, with Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans representing the neighborhood's largest population groups. Fruitvale earned its name in the 1800s when German settlers immigrated to the area to plant fruit orchards. The community developed a significant manufacturing base anchored by canneries that served local orchards. Fruitvale became a prosperous neighborhood, its vibrant business activity earning it a reputation as Oakland's "second downtown." This boom continued through World War II, when the area experienced an influx of war industry workers, bringing the first significant numbers of African-American and Hispanic residents to the community. Fruitvale's troubles began during the 1950s, when the construction of new freeways created opportunities for manufacturers to take advantage of cheap land and labor in suburban areas. Canneries and factories located in Fruitvale began leaving the area, accompanied by many of the community's white, middle-class residents. With the erosion of its customer base, the Fruitvale business district went into decline. By the 1960s, Fruitvale had become a distressed neighborhood, plagued by joblessness, inadequate housing, and other problems characteristic of low-income, inner-city communities. In spite of all this, Fruitvale retained a number of significant assets that represent potential building blocks for community revitalization. One such asset was the neighborhood's strong network of community-based organizations, including the Unity Council. Founded in 1964 by Arabella Martinez, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare under the Jimmy Carter administration, the Unity Council developed a solid record of success in bringing together residents, community-based organizations, and businesses to deliver important community projects. The Unity Council's programs include the development and management of affordable housing, business assistance, historic preservation, facade improvements, community festivals, home ownership assistance, job readiness and employment services, Head Start and Early Head Start child development programs, the Fruitvale Senior Center, open space development, and environmental programs. The Fruitvale BART Transit Village is the outgrowth of a growing interest on the part of the Unity Council in developing a project that would have a large impact on the community of Fruitvale. According to Arabella Martinez, "We felt we needed a project of scale, that a single housing project wasn't going to change the neighborhood." The Fruitvale Transit Village presented such an opportunity.
In May 1993, the Unity Council partnered with the University of California at Berkeley's National Transit Access Center (UC NTRAC) to sponsor a community design symposium at which architects translated ideas of participants into a plan for the station area. One of the main themes articulated by participants was the need for revitalization of existing neighborhood businesses and a plan to better integrate businesses into transit station development. Some 60 people, including Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris and Oakland BART Director Margaret Pryor, attended the event. This was followed by a series of community planning meetings to further develop the plan. As the scale of the Transit Village project continued to grow by leaps and bounds, the project's three central players decided to formalize their relationship. In 1994, the Unity Council, BART, and the City of Oakland signed a Memorandum of Understanding establishing the Fruitvale Policy Committee to guide further planning and development activities at the station. The Policy Committee was a very different approach to project development for BART and one of several ways that BART exhibited flexibility and innovation during the planning and design phase of the project. The Policy Committee members included two representatives from the Unity Council, one representative from BART, the Mayor of Oakland, and the city council member representing the Fruitvale district.
At the third and final workshop, participants were asked to provide feedback on two alternative land-use plans prepared by the project design team. Once consensus had been reached on a site plan, the Unity Council initiated the technical phase of the project, conducting a final traffic study and financial feasibility studies. By this time, the project components of the Fruitvale Transit Village were more or less settled. The Village would be located on the existing BART parking lot, a nine-acre site adjacent to the station. The centerpiece of the project would be an elegant, tree-lined pedestrian plaza connecting the BART station entrance with the 12th Street business district one block away. The plaza would be lined with restaurants and shops and serve as a venue for neighborhood festivals and concerts. The surrounding area would include a mixture of retail development, housing, and social service agencies, all easily accessible by foot from the BART station.
Architects translated the ideas from community workshops into a plan for the station area.Overcoming Barriers. In 1996, the Unity Council established a nonprofit subsidiary corporation called the Fruitvale Development Corporation (FDC) to serve as the developer for the Transit Village and manage contracts. Normally, BART uses a competitive bidding process to identify developers for projects on BART properties. However, BART policy allows the agency to award sole-source development rights if such an arrangement is deemed to be in the best interests of the District. Given the Unity Council's stature in the Fruitvale community, its success in raising funds for the project, and BART's participation in the Fruitvale Policy Committee, the BART Board of Directors acted positively on a staff recommendation to award the Unity Council an exclusive negotiating agreement for the project. By the mid-1990s, considerable progress had been made on the planning and design of the Transit Village, yet the project still faced a number of significant hurdles. Chief among these was the issue of "land assembly," that is, the need to assemble all parcels of land within the development site under single ownership. BART still owned much of the development site and, due to a long-standing policy requiring the agency to retain ownership of land around transit stations for effective long-term planning, it could not easily part with the property. The challenge for the Unity Council was to persuade BART to make an exception to this policy and accept a fair market price for the property.
Transit Village streetscapes are designed to maximize pedestrian comfort, safety, and access to local businesses.Here once again, BART exhibited considerable flexibility. The land assembly problem was addressed in 1998 through a complicated "land swap" orchestrated by the Fruitvale Policy Committee, which awarded the FDC a 96-year lease on the property. In return, BART received a parcel behind the transit station owned by the Unity Council and several nearby vacant parcels owned by the City of Oakland, enabling BART to maintain the existing value of its land holdings in the area. The land swap gave the FDC and the Unity Council proprietary rights to the entire development site without reducing the value of BART's land assets near the transit station.
During the next several years, the Unity Council and its partners were able to secure two more significant federal grants to financially anchor the project. In 1999, BART received $780,000 from the FTA in flexible funds transferred from the FHWA to construct the pedestrian plaza portion of the Transit Village. BART was also awarded a $2.3 million grant through the FTA's Livable Communities Initiative, which uses sustainable design concepts such as transit-oriented development to strengthen linkages between transportation services and communities. This grant provided funding for construction of the project's child care center, which will be developed by the Unity Council. FDC architects finished the comprehensive plan for the Fruitvale Transit Village in 1999, and groundbreaking for the project took place later that year. To date, FDC has secured over $82 million of public and private financing for the $100 million venture.
9 The Transit Village will feature a mix of uses - including child care and other community services, retail, and housing - within easy walking distance of the BART station.Flexibility and Innovation by Project Partners. Project partners acted in creative and sometimes unorthodox ways to overcome key barriers. BART entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the Unity Council, agreed to a land swap and relocation of its parking facilities at the Fruitvale station, and worked collaboratively with a community on a project initiated by the community. The City of Oakland capped parking in the Transit Village and relinquished a portion of its right-of-way on East 12th Street. The Unity Council provided the vision for the project, demonstrated effective leadership, and helped to orchestrate the necessary public support. Use of Creative Financing. The Unity Council and its partners tapped diverse sources of public and private funds. For example, a housing complex for seniors is being funded through a combination of grants, loans, and land and equity capital from seven different entities, including private banks, the City of Oakland, a federal housing program, and the Unity Council. Project partners worked effectively to overcome constraints on the use of certain funds. For instance, since the Unity Council was not an eligible recipient of FTA grant funds for construction of the project's child care center, BART agreed to accept the funds and allocate them to the Unity Council. Effective Public Involvement. It is noteworthy that the Fruitvale Transit Village began as a proposal for nothing more than a simple parking facility, an idea opposed by the community. Without the strong and sustained public involvement effort that followed BART's proposal, that would have been the end of the story. The Fruitvale Transit Village is an unusual development project in the sense that a community-based organization - the Unity Council - eventually served as the lead agency and developer for the project. The planning process led by the Unity Council featured creative public involvement strategies such as community site planning meetings, workshops, and a community design symposium. This process helped to articulate a broad set of concerns focused around traffic congestion, air pollution, and the need for neighborhood revitalization. Once such concerns were effectively incorporated into the planning process, the project moved forward with enthusiastic community support. Use of Transportation Assets as a Community Building Tool. The Fruitvale Transit Village is based on the proposition that public transit facilities can be used to stimulate economic development and promote environmental improvement in a low-income, urban community. Transit-oriented development, a planning concept that has been used successfully in various suburban locations, is largely untested in the inner city. Since central city neighborhoods are often better served by mass transit than suburban areas, the Fruitvale Transit Village may hold valuable lessons about the potential for using mass transit as a tool for the revitalization of low- and moderate-income inner-city communities. Challenges AheadThe planning and design phase of the Fruitvale Transit Village featured strong community participation, effective leadership by the Unity Council, and a willingness on the part of BART authorities to participate in a community-based planning process. As the project moves into the construction phase and beyond, a number of key challenges lie ahead:
Lessons Learned
"Community
input equals community support. Without community support we don't
-- Gary Penman ContactsArabella
Martinez Patricia
Hirota Cohen Shanna
O'Hare ReferencesAbramson, Ronna, "Fruitvale Transit Village Is a Go." The Oakland Tribune, October 1, 1999. Arellano & Bernick, "A Potential Transit Village in Fruitvale: A Review of the UC Berkeley NTRAC Symposium on Fruitvale Transit Based Development." Berkeley, CA: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, June 1993. Lisa Owens-Viani, "Revitalizing Oakland's Fruitvale District: From Parking Lot to Community Center and Transit Village." In Brownfields Redevelopment: Meeting the Challenges of Community Participation, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, May 2000. Olsen, Laura, "Mobility Partners Case Study: Transit-Oriented Communities." Surface Transportation Policy Project, 1993. Shutkin, William A., "Fruitvale Transit Village: A Sound Vehicle for Neighborhood Revitalization." Orion Afield, Summer 2000. The Unity Council, "The Fruitvale BART Transit Village Community Development Initiative." The Unity Council Website (http://www.unitycouncil.org/html/ftv.html), 1999. "Transit Villages for BART Stations," The Oakland Tribune, July 1998. FHWA
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