Guests wait to enter the crowded Bayview Community Center on Thursday. The Bayview Foundation estimates that roughly 400 people attended the event, more than double the expected turnout.
SAMANTHA MADAR, STATE JOURNAL
he community center at the heart of the Bayview affordable housing redevelopment on “the Triangle” Downtown has opened its doors to the public.
Bright and airy, with big windows and a beachy blue-and-tan color scheme, the $9 million, 11,500-square-foot center was created by and for the people who live there as part of the second phase of the Bayview Foundation’s $60 million affordable housing redevelopment. The foundation is now turning to the third and final phase of the project, which will add a playground, more green space and the last 44 of the development’s 130 total housing units. The expansion is aimed at low-income families who do not currently live at Bayview and is scheduled for completion in February.
As Madison confronts rapid growth and rising rents, those who directed Bayview’s resident-led transformation hope it will serve as a model for what affordable housing can be.
A place to belong
Bayview’s original 102 brick townhouses, built in 1971, had surrounded the old community center, making it difficult for nonresidents to see or access. The residential buildings that faced the road were nondescript and not especially inviting.
“That’s now all changed,” said Alexis London, the foundation’s executive director. “You drive by and you can’t help but wonder, ‘Well, what’s this?’ It looks so different from everything else that you see across the city. And then, right in the middle of it is this beautiful community center that’s double the size of our old center and in service of the entire neighborhood.”
The new buildings are over a dozen colors and adorned with large murals. The wood-and-stone community center stands out among them.
Inside, the center features a spacious lobby, a dining area that regularly serves hot meals, a food pantry, separate areas for elementary-age children, and middle- and high-school students, a craft-stocked nook for seniors, an art classroom, an artist-in-residence studio and more. It provides after-school programs, mental health support and other social services. The walls are filled with tapestries, paintings and other art pieces that the community has created over the years. Multiple sets of glass doors lead out to a covered porch, a basketball court, grassy areas and a garden.
Soon, the center will be outfitted with rooftop solar panels and a battery storage system, courtesy of a $500,000 state Energy Innovation grant. The center’s energy-efficient design puts it on track to become the first community center in the Midwest to receive Phius passive building certification, a third-party verification of its low electricity and fuel use.
The Bayview Foundation and the city of Madison were just notified that they also won a national community development award from the American Planning Association.
“All of those cultural things that often get left out of other developments, that’s the special sauce that makes Bayview so unique,” London said. “You have people showcasing who they are, where they’re from, what their language is, what their culture is. And you have representation in the community.”
Letting residents lead the way
At a ribbon cutting Thursday night, London and 10 others who each had a hand in its creation spoke to a packed room about Bayview’s value to Madison and the success it has had engaging and supporting its residents. About 70% of Bayview’s families participate in its programming. Its high school graduation rate last year was 95%.
Bayview “sets the bar for community facilities in the city of Madison and possibly much, much farther than that,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said. “I hope everybody learns from Bayview’s example.”
The Bayview Foundation was established in 1966 to house and support low-income families from a wide range of backgrounds. Fifty years later, the foundation realized that its apartments and townhouses had fallen so far into disrepair that it couldn’t afford to fix them. Cold winter air poured in through deteriorating windows. Water dripped incessantly from bathroom faucets. Mice and roaches abounded. It was left with two options, Board President Mary Berryman Agard told the Wisconsin State Journal. “Either we’re going to build new buildings, since repair is not an option, or all the people who live here will no longer have subsidized housing.”
The redevelopment was a tough sell at first. Residents, many of them refugees from the Vietnam War, were worried not only about being displaced but also about the impacts that construction would have on their daily lives. Bayview’s staff brought in translators who spoke Spanish and Hmong and learned that the top concern was that the heavy machinery would injure their children. So the staff incorporated extra fencing and other safeguards into the project. Over the past seven years, they have repeated that process many times: making plans, seeking residents’ input and adjusting accordingly. The foundation was able to build new housing for all of its residents without displacing any of them.
“We all were committed to blazing a new path forward, to showcasing a different approach to affordable housing and community development,” London said. “We had really high standards and high expectations, and we were really committed to achieving those goals as much as we possibly could.” Meeting those targets took more time and money than expected, due in part to the pandemic and rising construction costs, but the foundation managed to accomplish almost everything it had planned.
Next steps and new challenges
London credits the foundation’s success in part to the established relationships its staff already had with residents. “You’ve got the starting point,” she said. “And then you prove over and over and over again to the residents, or to the constituents, that you have listened.”
Residents “went all out” with their requests when they learned how the redevelopment would work, said Assita Diarra, a Bayview board member who moved to the United States from the Ivory Coast and has lived in the community since 1997. She is thrilled with the result. “We got more than we asked for.”
Not everything the foundation proposed went over well with residents. Basements were one such sticking point. People who had lived through food shortages in the past used the basements of the original buildings to preserve the food they grew. But there was no room for basements in the redevelopment budget. With the help of external facilitators, the foundation solved the problem by incorporating climate-controlled storage spaces into all of the new units.
The efforts are far from finished. With the community center done, an important part of the foundation’s work now will be figuring out how to incorporate dozens of new families into the existing community. To ease the transition, the staff is considering starting a mentorship program between old and new residents and moving some current residents who want to live in a different type of unit into the phase-three buildings. Those decisions have not been finalized, however.
“It always starts with us the same way,” Berryman Agard said. “We really have to meet them and know who they are, and hear what they want, and then see from there.”
-Nicole Pollack