Housing Trust has made a $6.1 million loan to Resources for Community Development to acquire a 0.6 acre site near the Ashby BART station in Berkeley, which will bring 87 affordable apartments – ranging in size from studios up to three bedrooms – and nonprofit commercial office space on the ground floor. The development will be named Maudelle Miller Shirek Community – after the longtime community activist and eight-term Berkeley city council member Maudelle Shirek, who first won her seat in her seventies and passed away in 2013 at age 101.
All of the homes will be affordable to those earning between 20% and 80% of the area median income (AMI) and the ground floor commercial space will be leased by local nonprofit organization Healthy Black Families, Inc. for office and programming space. The City of Berkeley has committed a total of $17 million to this development, including a $368,000 predevelopment loan and another $1.2 million loan for acquisition related expenses. This development is consistent with the development guidelines proposed in the Adeline Corridor Specific Plan.
Funds for the Housing Trust loan to Resources for Community Development originated from TECH Fund (Tech + Equity + Community + Housing), an initiative created by Housing Trust Silicon Valley to create opportunities for philanthropists and large Bay Area employers to provide resources to be part of the affordable housing solution. The fund began in March 2017 with an initial investment from the Cisco Foundation that has since been followed by investments from Google, Grove Foundation, LinkedIn, NetApp, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Pure Storage and Sobrato Family Foundation. To date, Housing Trust has raised $112 million for the TECH Fund while preserving or creating over 2,300 homes. For more information visit https://housingtrustsv.org/invest/