OAKLAND, Calif. _ 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 because of rising rents and home prices, the UCLA researchers said Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood has held on to its residents and its signature Mexican-American culture.
"It's the holy grail of urban planning to say we improved the place and the people who live there are better off," said Alexander Quinn, an economist with Hatch, who reviewed the study's findings.
But longtime residents, academics and elected officials question whether Fruitvale 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 Bay Area Rapid Transit's plans to put a parking garage next 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 Ordonez, 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 said. "There was a lot of crime, drugs."
The Unity Council landed on a vision for 47 one- and two-bedroom apartments, ten of which were designated as affordable, sitting astride a mix of shops and community service organizations that would be 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 catchphrase that's become the gold standard for building in dense urban areas and is the subject of a new bill in the California Legislature to encourage such projects across the state.
Today, the village includes a charter high school, senior center, public library, pediatric clinic, union office, Clinica de la Raza, 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 had higher growth in household incomes compared with similar neighborhoods in the Bay Area and California as a whole, and more residents graduating from high school and going on to earn bachelor's degrees. Across the state and the Bay Area, the proportion of residents buying their homes fell, while in Fruitvale, the number of homebuyers increased.
At the same time, Fruitvale lost only 1 percent of its Latino population, 4 percent of its black residents, less than 1 percent of its white residents and gained 6 percent of Asian residents. Similar Bay Area and California neighborhoods had increased concentration of 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 83 percent, compared with 71 percent in similar Bay Area neighborhoods and 66 percent in similar California neighborhoods outside the area. Carolina Reid, a faculty research adviser at Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, 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 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 it is 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 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 lower 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 build 181 more market-rate units and retails businesses, 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."
