State and federal funding awarded to revitalize Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood

UPDATE 9/21/2017 5:40 p.m.:

The City of Salinas wants to turn Chinatown, the neighborhood that once housed the largest homeless encampment in the area, into a healthy and vibrant community.

On Thursday, city leaders, MidPen Housing and its partners unveiled plans for 21 Soledad Street, right in the heart of Chinatown. It will be a mixed use project with retail space, artists’ lofts and 90 units for housing.

The ground floor will have more than 10,000 square feet of retail space and nearly 2,100 square feet for artist work and exhibit space.

“They can really transform and create vibrant places,” said Megan Hunter, community development director for the City of Salinas. “So this is really an exciting opportunity to bring artists into Chinatown and start using the arts to really enhance and create interest from the rest of the city to come into Chinatown and I think there have been efforts made through the Asian Culture experience who does the Asian Festival.”

The 90 housing units are all affordable. 40 of them will be set aside for high-need populations, including the homeless. Services for them would be located feet away.

“It isn’t just housing, it has a social work component built into it so that people have an onsite case manager they can access whenever they need them,” said Jill Allen, executive director for Dorothy’s Place. “So that’s a really, really welcomed element here.”

“Residents of the community will receive an array of services designed to help them maintain their housing and help them integrate into the broader community,” said Betsy Wilson, director of housing development for MidPen Housing. “The services will provide support for physical health, emotional well-being, community building, recreation and increased socialization. Additionally for residents interested in joining or rejoining the workforce, they will have access to vocational training to help them with their re-entry process.”

It has been a labor of love for Salinas City Council Member Gloria De La Rosa, who got choked up talking about finally moving the project forward.

“I’m very emotional because I’ve been a council woman for a long time and this has been my district and I’ve represented these residents and a lot of them are ill with substance abuse problems and a lot of them are homeless because either they’ve lost their jobs of they’ve lost their homes,” De La Rosa said.

Chinatown has a history of being a hot bed for crime and homelessness.

“There’s a long history of isolation and segregation of this community from the rest of Salinas,” Hunter said. “It’s had a history of unfortunately public pushing what is considered “undesirables” into this area.”

But police have been routinely monitoring the area and have recently began reaching out to the residents.

“Making connections with the people, getting to know the people who have spent much of their lives living on the street and those connections, working with the people on the street with compassion, I think is going to find the exact approach that we need to take next,” said Salinas Police Chief Adele Frese.

But Frese believes populating an area with things that are positive can help drive out negative influences.

The project should break ground in about six months. Full completion is expected in Fall 2019.

Wilson said the development will cost about $39 million. But an estimated $31.8 million was awarded to MidPen Housing in the form of state and federal tax credits by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee for the development. The City of Salinas is spending $2.5 million and there was an additional $2.5 million grant from the Central California Alliance for Health.

ORIGINAL POST:

Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood will soon be seeing some changes thanks to millions of dollars’ worth of funding.

State and federal tax credits will generate an estimated total of $31.8 million in funding, which has been awarded by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee to MidPen Housing.

These funds will be used to build a mixed-use, affordable housing community in Salinas’ Chinatown neighborhood.

This represents the final funding needed to begin construction on 21 Soledad, which the organization says furthers the City of Salinas’ vision to revitalize a currently underutilized site and is the result of a highly collaborative public/private effort.

KION’s Mariana Hicks will have more on the layout of the new housing and just how many units are expected at 5 and 6.