San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
An architectural rendering of the Living Rooms at the Border project
- Courtesy Estudio Teddy Cruz
Across the street, a more formal renovation is underway. The Monte Carmelo Catholic Church, built in 1927, is being gutted. Inside the white-plaster building with iconic seafoam-green- and persimmon-colored wood trim, David Flores, community design and development officer with Casa Familiar, a San Ysidro-based nonprofit, plugs in the cord of a large construction lamp so he can shine some light on the project, which has been 10 years in the making. He says that aside from a bad roof, he was pleasantly surprised to find that the old building had maintained much of its integrity and original floor plans.
“Do you see all this scaffolding that’s holding up the roof ?” Flores asks when the lights flicker on. “Once we opened this building up, we found that the roof needs a lot of help and the building needs to be stabilized…. But other than that, you can see the building is made of redwood lumber, which is so strong, really, that, after we fix the roof, these walls can be here for another 100 years.”
The church is the first phase of Living Rooms at the Border, a 10-unit housing project by Casa Familiar and architect / researcher Teddy Cruz and his Estudio Teddy Cruz. It and another Casa Familiar-Cruz collaboration, Senior Housing with Childcare Center, were featured as part of a dozen worldwide architectural projects exhibited in the Museum of modern Art’s Small Scale, Big Change exhibition, which came down in January. This week, the renderings from both projects will again go on display, this time inside the church itself in an exhibition Casa Familiar is calling MoMitA.
“We really just wanted to bring the exhibition to the community in San Diego,” Flores says. “How many people can go to the MoMA in New York and understand why the work that Casa and Teddy are doing is so important?”
The significance of both projects—the reason they were chosen for the MoMA exhibition, according to curator Andres Lepik—lies not only in the designs themselves, but also in the development model behind them. A decade ago, Casa Familiar, which runs everything from arts programming to social services, purchased the church and surrounding lots with the intention of building affordable housing. But rather than follow an existing affordable-housing model, they partnered with Cruz, a theorist as much as an architect, who wanted to take a closer look at things like density regulations, genuine affordability, the permitting process and the need for activated public space.
“The projects are really presenting a different model,” Cruz said in a phone interview as he walked across the campus at UCSD, where he’s a professor of public culture and urbanism and the founder of the school’s Center for Urban Ecologies. “It’s really a reversal in the equation of development because, usually, developers maximize units and minimize public infrastructure or social-service infrastructure.”
The community-development model used by Casa Familiar and Cruz began with Sin Limites, open public workshops during which Cruz had San Ysidro residents use wooden blocks to design projects themselves. Cruz likes to tell a story about a woman who grabbed the blocks, ignored property lines and built herself an idyllic little development. She called the traditional American household “selfish” and told Cruz that she didn’t see why people couldn’t blur boundaries and share more communal space.
“It was revelatory for me and really amazing; I stole her idea,” Cruz laughs.
The church will eventually become a community center or salon for live music, performances and other public programming, with second-story office space for arts programming at Casa Familiar’s The Front gallery. The surrounding housing project will include two live/work units where artists or musicians can live for reduced rent in exchange for helping with the programming and basic building maintenance. The project will also include community gardens and flexible open space meant to encourage the type of informal marketplace that commonly pops up in Latino neighborhoods.
A few yards behind the proposed Living Rooms project is a vacant lot where the senior housing and childcare center will be built. The idea of mixing the two groups of people came after several older community members in San Ysidro approached Casa Familiar with a specific housing need.
“We had seniors that were coming in asking us if we knew of places to rent that were affordable, bigger one-bedrooms because they had custody of their grandchildren or were taking care of their grandchildren for a period of time,” Flores says. “We couldn’t send them to a senior place because the kids aren’t allowed. So, we said, ‘Why don’t we design a project for that specific family type?’ What we found out is that they have similar needs that should be met—security, an open, easy-access floor plan….”
The design process began once the community feedback was gathered. Cruz says he approached it more as “choreographing and curating the community” rather than building static housing. He took the anecdotes and narratives gathered at workshops and started imagining the activities that would happen in the spaces.
“It became more about injecting programming into the community,” Cruz says.
One of the biggest challenges with both projects continues to be funding and rigid zoning regulations. Initially, Cruz and Flores took the blueprints to the bank in hope of qualifying for more traditional loans.
“But the initial conversations were confusion,” Flores says. “The banks all said our projects didn’t fit the model of what they had seen. They didn’t understand why we weren’t building as many units as we possibly could. It was frustrating.”
Casa Familiar has been lucky to receive grants and other foundation support to fund part of its unique method of community-driven development, but it’s still shopping for alternative ways to make the projects sustainable without relying on philanthropy. Ultimately, the nonprofit wants to pave the way for other community developers to follow its lead without relying on handouts. But partnering with private, for-profit developers has been challenging. Cruz says a partnership with an experienced affordable-housing developer would be the easiest way to qualify for significant tax credits, but those developers often want to build the maximum amount of units—something Cruz and Flores aren’t willing to do.
“We have to return to an idea of smaller development,” says Cruz. “Tax credits don’t recognize the little guys…. More and more I’m convinced that, in order to address the housing crisis, what marginal communities need is for people to represent them against institutions that do not give a shit about them. That’s the role Casa can really play.”
MoMitA opens from 6 to 10 p.m. Thursday, May 19, at El Salon: Living Rooms at the Border, 114 W. Hall Ave. in San Ysidro. The show will be on view through July 31. casafamiliar.org
