A Decade Later

On a recent walk through Tassafaronga Village in Oakland, Calif., David Baker, founding principal of David Baker Architects (DBA), watched as several children played and swayed on the park swings. A sight, Baker says, he wouldn’t have encountered 20 years ago when his firm first began developing ideas for the 7.5-acre property. Back then, the park didn’t feel safe. The community, acquired by the Oakland Housing Authority (OHA) in 1955 and comprising 87 units of outmoded public housing, was sandwiched between an industrial area and a single-family home neighborhood and isolated from the local library, recreation center, church and schools. “You couldn’t really walk from one to the other,” Baker says. 

Despite challenges, the project, completed in 2010, reads like a prototype for AIA’s Design for Equitable Communities–Framework for Design Excellence (DEC) developed in 2024. In addition, DBA was able to create a LEED-certified, architecturally beautiful community that in 2015 won an AIA COTE Top Ten Award. Judges commented that the “project proves that the highest levels of environmental performance can be achieved at very low budgets and still have a design agenda.” 

A decade after receiving a COTE Award, how has the Tassafaronga Village project held up?
 

A pioneering approach to urban development

The firm competed for a chance to redesign the area in what Baker calls “a New Urbanist project that we didn’t do completely by the New Urbanist playbook. We were just pioneering and doing all kinds of things just because we thought it was a good idea.” 

Their common sense “good idea” approach led them to participate in the pilot program for LEED Neighborhood Development (Gold) standards, a then-new designation, resulting in California’s first LEED ND Gold Plan, and LEED for Homes (platinum) certification for each housing type.

This was the first project for DBA that put them into urban-scale thinking, says principal Daniel Simons, who was the project architect for Tassafaronga Village. “One of the things about doing a first project of this scale is that we didn't know what we were doing, but we went forward anyway. We did a bunch of things that are actually really hard to do. Now, we would be a little more circumspect before we tried to do them. But it made the neighborhood really great and feel like a safe place for people.”

The project comprised several noncontiguous parcels. Along with the existing dilapidated apartment building there was also an abandoned pasta factory and a disused rail spur. Because of security concerns, DBA was nudged by OHA to make safety a priority. “There was even one person at the Authority’s Board of Commissioners who asked if we could build something like a concrete block wall around the whole thing,” Simons says. 

But Baker and Simons held fast, knowing instinctively that traditional public housing or a gated community wasn’t going to work, and they could still achieve their safety aims. They made a point of “putting eyes on the park,” Simons says, by surrounding it with townhouses so people could watch their children playing and create a community presence that discouraged crime and increased safety.

With support from the OHA’s own chief of police who, Simons says, “didn’t want the community to be like a fortress and wanted clear sightlines” in case of emergency, the designers were intentional about creating routes for residents to access the existing but disconnected nearby community amenities. A series of pedestrian paths and new streets make it easier for people to get to the library or the recreation center and back home. Simons points out that there are no fences, “which is a total anomaly for a project of this scale.” 
They designed tenant-only street parking, which meant less of the rest of the site needed to be dedicated to parking. This allowed for more “courtyards and places for people to hang out and barbecue,” Simons says. Streets are about 20-feet wide, which is somewhat narrow but still meet city and fire department regulations. Raised intersections help with traffic calming.

Creating a sense of place

They were also determined not to let the finished project look like traditional public housing. “The logical thing to do would be to lay out the streets and design one repeated townhouse and roll them out and keep everything the same. It's easier for everybody since you just have one façade,” Baker says. Instead, they designed a small but varied set of townhouse models — one two-story and three three-story designs — which were then distributed through the site organically and differentiated by color, material, fenestration, and detailing.

The scale of the site posed a challenge to creating a coherent but diverse neighborhood that “felt authentic,” Simons says. In this case, the design and development team's decision to undertake the adaptive reuse of the abandoned pasta factory “was such a victory. It made such a difference. When you lay out these neighborhoods from scratch, there's a certain sort of logic to them that can make them really generic. Having this existing building and having to design around it created a little quirkiness and makes the neighborhood feel more organic.”

Structurally, the concrete and steel pasta factory, essentially a warehouse, was in good shape. They were able to preserve over 90 percent of the original building. They removed old windows and cut holes for new ones.

They brought the building up to California’s seismic code and designed 20 loft-type apartments, Initially, these were reserved for households that included a family member living with HIV/AIDS. They also designed a small health clinic inside the former factory. As a bonus, the grandchildren of the pasta factory founders attended community meetings and “were so excited that we were keeping the building and getting painters to refresh the historic sign on the outside wall,” Simons says.

The clinic space has since evolved into the management offices for Acta Non Verba Youth Urban Farm Project, a non-profit community farm that sprang up on the underused park immediately adjacent to the Tassafaronga site in 2011, drawn by the newfound safety and promise offered by the new housing development. The farm is now a thriving community fixture, closely entwined with the housing and neighborhood residents. 

The rest of the community includes 77 affordable townhouses scattered throughout and 60 affordable one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments in a newly built three-story low-rise with structured parking. Twenty-two of the townhouses were in”micro-neighborhoods” within the site that DBA designed pro bono for Habitat for Humanity, which used its residents-and-volunteers build model to construct. These townhouses are owned by the inhabitants. The other 55 townhouses are rentals designed by DBA and owned by the OHA. All the living spaces were designed to prioritize natural light, and where possible, the townhouses have windows on two sides.

Communities, of course, need buy-in from neighbors and soon-to-be residents. Before breaking ground, DBA and OHA held talks with locals. “We had an extensive process of talking with the leaders of the OHA tenants at the existing housing project. They were actively engaged in a very positive and friendly way,” Baker says. “Their number one concern was that the townhomes have in-unit washer dryers, not a community laundry room. They were adamant about this, and that makes sense to me as a real amenity of day-to-day life.”

Impact of Market Timing 

While the terms affordable housing, equitable or sustainable design are nearly commonplace now, in the early 2000s, they were not. What DBA was doing by inclination was truly pioneering. But Baker and Simons admit that the usual budget challenges were actually dampened by the poor economy at the time. “The economy collapsed right as we were going into construction, so construction was ‘super cheap.’ In fact, one of the federal bailout programs was really eager to have shovel-ready projects, and we were at a place where we were ready to go,” Simons says. DBA got good pricing on labor and materials and were able to add in things “such as $250,000 — in 20-year-old dollars — worth of photovoltaics, that we didn’t think we could afford,” Simons says. Baker adds, “The project was significantly under budget— and that was all luck.”

Neither believes that what they did back then would pencil out today. “The current world of affordable housing is so budget constrained by comparison,” Simons says. Even the density is very different, he points out. Where this community is 25 units per acre, “The things we're doing now to make it pencil are more like 100- to 150-units to the acre. It’s much denser and has a really different feel.” The other bit of luck for DBA in Tassafaronga Village was that the OHA at the time “was being run by somebody who was really pro development,” Simons says. “They had good leadership, they had money, and they were open to our ideas. So it was a convergence of lots of wonderful things.”

Growing forward

Two years after the new affordable community opened, Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times visited the development. He wrote about the previous tough neighborhood and quoted Bridget Galka of the Oakland Housing Authority, who had been the developer’s project manager, as saying how in other places the bad guys just move back after redevelopment but that hadn’t happened in Tassafaronga Village. Kimmelman wrote of seeing neighbors gathered outdoors, chatting together, and walking in courtyards. He reported that within the new project, “the Oakland Police Department [in 2011] recorded a 25 percent drop in crime compared with 2007 in the old housing complex.”

Today, OHA’s Chief of Police Luther DuPree III, says (via email), “Though facing similar challenges as other Oakland neighborhoods, Tassafaronga Village’s spirit of neighborly camaraderie forms the foundation for residents' sense of safety and community ownership—qualities we consistently observe during our interactions with families.” 

In 2012, a 15-year-old resident of Tassafaronga Village reached out to DBA's office with this message: “I love many things about the house that I call home. I can see how the buildings were designed to bring neighbors together and to develop safer neighborhoods for every resident of this beautiful city. One day I would be honored to do for others what you have done for me. I want to be able to design houses for the less fortunate.” The firm offered an internship to the high schooler, who went on to receive a college degree in Sustainable Environmental Design and a career in community development.

DBA’s vision has given dignity to those living at Tassafaronga Village and raised the profile of the surrounding neighborhood. In hindsight, Baker and Simons say there was one thing they really wish they could have done. “European-style narrow streets where people would have to slow down if they were going to pass each other going in opposite directions,” Simons says. “Still, I think the traffic calming strategies that we did worked, and the new housing, open space, and connections truly transformed the larger area.”