Location: Oakland, California
Developer: BRIDGE Housing Corporation
Designer: Van Meter Williams Pollack LLP

Located in the heart of Oakland’s Fruitvale District neighborhood, the St. Joseph’s Campus comprises the historic St. Joseph’s Senior Apartments and Palmera at St. Joseph’s, which together form a unique, multigenerational, mixed-use campus. An underused historic landmark was leveraged to develop St. Joseph’s Senior Apartments, providing an 84-unit affordable infill housing development for low-income seniors and 3,200 square feet (300 sq m) of community-serving commercial space. Terraza Palmera at St. Joseph’s, the second phase of the redevelopment, provides 62 affordable family rental apartments—four units in rehabilitated structures that were part of the historic campus and 58 units in a newly constructed building designed in keeping with the historic context of the St. Joseph’s site.

St. Joseph’s Campus offers an example of adaptive use, historic renovation, and new construction coming together to create a multigenerational community with a total of 146 affordable urban infill apartments while preventing the loss of a 1912 landmark. The project demonstrates how a public/private partnership can be used to leverage funding for preserving a dilapidated historic site in a distressed neighborhood and converting it into affordable rental housing while retaining funding for the project through an economic downturn.