I always get a thrill riding through downtown Pleasant Hill. Twenty years ago the community was a classical “there’s no ‘there’ there” kind of place. I was part of a team that developed a downtown area from scratch.

During the ten years I worked in Pleasant Hill redevelopment, my agency developed an assisted living facility and a hundred residential town homes. Our most ambitious effort was the Pleasant Hill downtown mixed-use project, which provided new homes, a hotel, entertainment facilities, shops, stores, fountains, and plazas.

By the time we finished our work, downtown Pleasant Hill had become a pleasant place, indeed, both to live in and to work in. Now I see people window-shopping in a place that formerly had no pretty windows, strolling in a place where there had been no paths, attending theater productions on land that had been littered with junked cars, and browsing in a bookstore occupying a site where desperate people formerly made illegal drugs.

How pleasant it is now to see couples holding hands in the sunshine while watching fountain mists drifting across lovely tree-shaded squares where decaying shanties used to squat miserably together.

And believe it or not, those lovely scenes don’t reveal what seems to me to be the best redevelopment outcome of all. I can go to Pleasant Hill and visit young couples or elderly people living in pretty little homes that they own themselves. Many of the current homeowners in that development used to pay rent to absentee landlords for the rundown unattractive houses that they formerly occupied.

So now I drive through Pleasant Hill with a sense of accomplishment and pride. I can take pleasure from the fact that I worked hard for a whole decade on something that people now enjoy. Any job is wonderful when you can take delight from the physical evidence of your hard work.

A Plan to Help
Everyone Win
I moved from Pleasant Hill to Brentwood and spent the past three years managing the Brentwood Redevelopment Agency. In the past, Brentwood spent its redevelopment funds on infrastructure improvements, such as water, sewer, and roadway projects. These kinds of improvements are very important, of course, even though they are invisible to the average citizen. But the agency recently has embarked on more visible, exciting, and hi-profile projects.

Our redevelopment strategy is to set up partnerships between our agency and private enterprises to share their risk in moving into the center of town. We leverage the ability of the government to provide things like resources and services that enable us to reverse the trends of decline and stagnation that are always taking place.

The Redevelopment Agency currently has three big projects in place. One of them, The Sand Creek Business Center, is a 40-acre mixed-use project that will include office buildings, townhomes, storage facilities, a business park, a 60-room Microtel hotel, and two restaurants.

Charity Ends at Home
Redevelopment activities carried out correctly provide direct return-to-source of taxes paid in the community. In other words, tax increments collected as a result of the efforts of the redevelopment agency are plowed back to the community that paid them. This is much different than BART, for example, that uses taxes collected from Brentwood to benefit people living in San Jose.

When complete, the Sand Creek project will provide 860 jobs, and raise property valuation by $61,000,000. It will generate $130,000 annually in hotel (transient occupancy) taxes, and will increase the city’s sales tax by about $45,000 per year.

Here’s the exciting part of the financial side of our plans: In less than eight years the $61M increased property valuation will generate enough extra revenue to repay the city Agency for its $1.5M redevelopment investment. After repaying the Redevelopment Agency’s costs, the continuing revenue stream from the increased valuation will subsequently provide revolving leveraged funding for future projects.

We plan to use this self-sustaining model for future redevelopment projects. We’re channeling the economic outcomes from these projects, which include increased jobs, increased sales tax, and increased property values, so that development projects can regenerate themselves over time.

That Thing We Do
An important goal for redevelopment agencies is to reinvest in inner city projects in order to provide residents with unique downtown shopping experiences. The Brentwood Redevelopment Agency has already done that in a number of ways, including:

• Contributing to the preservation of the Delta Theater Marque landmark
• Putting in almost 90 surface parking stalls
• Helping sponsor the free Concerts in the Park program during the summer months
• Partnering with the Chamber of Commerce to market the downtown

All the activities focus on retaining current businesses and attracting new businesses to the downtown, thereby enhancing the pedestrian experience and the shopping environment.

The processes of redevelopment tend to generate frustrations because projects don’t get finished very quickly. Partnering with private enterprise increases the time required to bring a project to fruition. The activities of coordination and partnership add another layer of complexity to the obstacles inherent in working in the inner part of the city.

There’s no short-cut around the fact that redevelopment takes a lot of planning and groundwork. There are many dependencies, and activities must proceed one step at a time. For example, we are in the process of redeveloping N. Brentwood Blvd. between Grant Street and Lonetree Way. We had to begin with a project to voluntarily relocate industrial businesses to the new Sunset Industrial Complex, which provides a convenient location in which industrial businesses can be located in an appropriately zoned area with new buildings and adequate paved parking.
After relocation is complete, the vacated locations can be developed for any one of a number of professional, commercial, or residential purposes. Every step of planning, designing, and implementing will require further extensive planning and coordination.

Challenges and Rewards
Not enough people are aware that redevelopment presents communities like Brentwood with truly awesome possibilities — along with numerous challenges. It is far easier to carry out new development on the fringes of the community than to do any redevelopment at its heart. For example, it is much easier to develop a 200-acre peach orchard into homes and businesses than it is to revitalize aging and sometimes blighted inner city areas.

Redeveloping inner city areas is much more satisfying, however, than traditional development projects because redevelopment offers the potential of helping more than just the businesses or families that move in. When done correctly, redevelopment also helps the people and businesses occupying the areas to be developed and, therefore, they are most affected by the changes.

As happened in Pleasant Hill, properly planned redevelopment can transform old rundown neighborhoods and seedy commercial properties into community areas where people enjoy visiting, living, and working.

Putting Downtown Back Together
The biggest resistance to redevelopment comes from people who fear change. A core of people in any community or neighborhood will fight passionately to keep things as they are. The unavoidable problem for all of us, however, is that things never stay the way they are.

The inescapable truth is that “things fall apart; the center does not hold.” If all human beings suddenly disappeared forever, a person could casually walk through Brentwood 3,000 years from now and never know that a town had ever existed on the site. Without expending energy and resources on redevelopment efforts, ‘quaint’ always sinks to ‘seedy’; ‘rustic’ finally collapses into ruin.

Our biggest challenge, therefore, is to educate people, not only about the need for continual redevelopment, but to help them understand the real benefits that come from what our Agency does. Too many people regard redevelopment as an attack on personal freedom when, in fact, redevelopment, when carried out properly, provides freedom for people to improve the quality of their lives.

Serving People
We carry out projects but we really care about people. We will do anything reasonable, or even marginally unreasonable, to smooth the transition for affected individuals. For example, one elderly woman who was being relocated by the Pleasant Hill redevelopment project stubbornly resisted all efforts to get her to agree to the move.

We spoke with the woman to find out the basis for her resistance, and learned that she couldn’t bear to part with her beloved rose bushes growing in the yard around her decaying house. So we contracted with gardening specialists to carefully relocate the bushes to the yard of the pretty little home that we had prepared for her.

The woman was, of course, reassured concerning the move by having her roses waiting for her at her new home, but I suspect she was even more reassured by the fact that we obviously cared for her and were concerned for her feelings. I feel good every time I think about that elderly lady and her beloved bushes! This is a good example of the way government and industry ought to work!

Redeveloping without Losers
A common criticism in the past was that redevelopment projects sometimes resulted in community “gentrification,” which was a process by which wealthy people would buy up refurbished properties and force out of a community the original less-wealthy residents who could no longer afford to pay the increased prices.

Such displaced people were understandably outraged when neighborhoods that they might have lived in for years became too expensive for them to remain in. They lost their properties at the very time that the locations finally provided opportunities for a really decent lifestyle.

Modern redevelopment projects build in safeguards against gentrification. In fact, we are now required by law to set aside 20 percent of our tax increment for affordable housing. My Agency is working with developers to provide very low and moderate income housing for qualified people.

For example, the Pleasant Hill redevelopment project relocated 60 houses, only one of which was owner-occupied. We were able to educate the tenants on home ownership, help them to clean up their credit, and prepare them for home ownership. At the end of the move, a full 36 percent of the renters from the old neighborhood were able to buy lovely new houses within the community.

Sycamore Place II is a project that we’re doing in partnership with Christian Church Homes, which will create 40 units for very low income seniors. The new site will be next door to Sycamore Place I and will be a mirror of that pretty little development.

We carry out people-centered redevelopment projects by carefully identifying goals and strategies that assist communities in growing inwardly in ways that really meet the needs of all the involved residents and businesses. We seek to attract businesses and jobs to the inner part of the city by partnering private enterprises with government resources to make change happen.

Payoff that is Worth the Extra Effort
There is a risk in speculating for any kind of development, but the stakes are higher in developing in the center of town, because of such issues as contamination, inadequate infrastructure, lack of public utilities, multiple ownership.... The list goes on and on. The risks imposed by such issues create fears about the loss of economic investment that keep private enterprises out of the inner city, so we partner with companies in sharing the burden and the risks involved in these projects.

Interior projects are more complex and, therefore, more challenging and satisfying when complete. Because the projects are so difficult, it is very rewarding when they finally get
finished.

We encounter resistance throughout the process of redevelopment, but almost everyone appreciates the results when we get finished. Hardly anybody ever misses the junk yards, dilapidated warehouses, and meth labs that the new homes, parks, and businesses replace.

The same cannot be said of many of the traditional development projects carried on around the borders of growing communities, since, of course, many of us regret the orchards and pasturelands that are continually disappearing all around us.

I’m looking forward to driving through downtown Brentwood, at some not-to-distant point, and feeling the same sense of satisfaction and fulfillment that I now get from driving through Pleasant Hill. That is a personal goal worth fighting for! °