community spotlight
Asian Neighborhood Design: Building Housing and Opportunities
by Emily Landes
Asian Neighborhood Design recently celebrated its thirty-fifth year of building housing and opportunities for low-income people. Though the nonprofit was started by architecture students at UC-Berkeley who were interested in using their skill sets to help newly arriving Asian immigrants, it has morphed over the years into a conglomeration of architects, planners, educators, case workers and project managers who serve an ever-widening community in constant need of job training and affordable homes.
Much of the group’s initial work was in Chinatown, where large numbers of immigrant families inhabited single-room-occupancy units originally meant for one person. It would not be uncommon to see a family of six in these spaces, recalls AND Interim Executive Director Steve Suzuki, an architect who has been with the organization for 26 years. AND worked with both the landlords and the tenants to make sure that housing was up to date and up to code, even in these tight living conditions.
But just renovating these spaces was not enough, AND staff soon realized. Tenants needed to be educated on how to maintain the units once they had been upgraded. Soon, a bilingual crew was providing housing counseling on a regular basis.
Keeping the SROs clean was one thing, but the organization figured out that its efforts might best be put toward helping people move out of these units and into their own apartments or homes. That meant confronting the “jobs aspect,” says Suzuki. Very often, recent immigrants had construction backgrounds that they had used in Taiwan or Hong Kong, but which they couldn’t seem to translate into jobs in the U.S. Language barriers were often to blame, as well as a lack of contacts in local construction companies. “They end up pushing a broom because they don’t know how to use their skill sets,” Suzuki explains.
AND’s job training program was designed to get these immigrants into better paying jobs that utilized their valuable skills. It was so successful that AND rapidly branched out into teaching construction skills to those who did not have a background in the trades, including former gang members looking to start a new life. It was clear that working with youth was an effective way to break the cycle of poverty that can keep generations of families living in unsatisfactory living conditions.
By the mid 1980s, AND brought its innovative training program to a wider audience, as it realized that the same issues facing the Asian community—access to low-paying jobs, poor quality of life—were coming up in other low-income communities as well. “We have our roots, but we took those roots and grew out to other communities,” says Suzuki. Today’s AND job
training program is approximately 50% African American, 30% Latino and only 10% Asian American.
Every 14 weeks, a new group of young people (mostly between 17 and 21) begins learning basic construction skills like using hand and power tools properly, making measurements correctly and nailing together window boxes, which are then used in AND properties. Suzuki says that even when other job training programs began emphasizing computer skills over manual work, AND never wavered from its construction-oriented focus. Office jobs simply aren’t a good fit for all people trying to get out of poverty, especially young people, he adds: “Sitting at a computer wasn’t what fit their energy level. Swinging a hammer in a vocational training program was best.”
But the organization also realized that these kids needed life skills in addition to work skills. That’s why one day a week is dedicated to nonconstruction topics like anger management, financial literacy, resume writing, conflict resolution and GED training. “It gives them a better chance of surviving in a job site, and surviving in the world,” Suzuki says. Often, guest speakers come in; an emphasis is made to bring in women who work in the trades to speak about the opportunities in this traditionally male-dominated field.
In fact, some of Suzuki’s favorite success stories are women who participated in the program. One recent trainee was living at Walden House, a substance-abuse treatment center in San Francisco where AND often recruits trainees. She was in recovery and had a child in protective services. At the end of the 14-week program, she was able to get a job as a carpenter’s apprentice making almost $20 an hour. (AND has an agreement with the carpenter’s union that its training program “all-stars” will have a guaranteed apprentice position in the union.) She is now in the process of trying to regain custody of her child.
About 80% of trainees are placed somewhere at the end of the training process. Others don’t enter the trades, but still credit the AND program with changing their lives. When AND went to Carnivale this year, a Latino woman came over to the booth and said she had gone through the training program many years before and that it had straightened out her life. She is now a police sergeant working with youth. “She’s not in carpentry, but for her it was a program that could help guide her along the way and could get her to where she is,” Suzuki beams.
AND’s training program is free, but the organization does charge for its architecture and design services. It has a contract with the Mayor’s Office of Housing to provide assistance in low-income projects and has good relationships with many nonprofits in the city. “We’re in a certain niche, so when people are looking for that, they’ll come to us,” he explains. That niche is planning and designing affordable housing that often comes equipped with services like childcare centers and job training.
One recent highlight is the Friendship House, the only certified and licensed American Indian alcohol and substance abuse recovery center in California. The AND-designed property on Julian Avenue in the Mission District provides two floors of licensed residential care, a top floor of offices, and a ground floor complete with a sweat lodge, basketball court, parking, a commercial kitchen and the “Great Hall,” where several-hundred people can meet for celebrations. AND has also worked with other nonprofits to build its own affordable housing projects, including family housing in the Tenderloin, live-work lofts in Potrero Hill and Minna Park Family Apartments, right around the corner from their Mid-Market office, which also houses the training workshop.
That workshop will get even busier this fall, when students from several San Francisco high schools will begin attending after-school training seminars there. Cuts to public education have meant the end to many vocational training programs in schools, Suzuki explains, which means that kids who have neither the means nor the inclination to go to college are limited in what they can do after graduation. In fact, part of the point of the program is to keep students in danger of dropping out engaged and involved enough to get their high school diplomas. Suzuki hopes that those diplomas, plus the additional education provided by AND, will be enough to get these kids on the path for “not just a job, but a career.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of the SFAA or the SF Apartment Magazine. Emily Landes is the managing editor of SF Apartment Magazine. Copyright © 2008 by Black Point Press. All rights reserved.