The BRIDGE Housing Corporation, a non-profit company considered by many to be the state’s foremost developer of affordable housing, has built more than 13,000 housing units since its founding in 1983. Although Bridge’s original focus was housing for working families, it has diversified and now has several affiliates and a staff of about 250, enabling it to handle every aspect of financing, planning, development and maintenance of the projects it owns and manages.

Although outreach to the community surrounding its projects has always been an integral part of BRIDGE’s approach to building housing in California, its scope has expanded to include the components of communities and to transforming existing neighborhoods.

This article focuses on the early history of BRIDGE, beginning with an account of its founding and its early projects, Holloway Terrace in 1985, and Parkview Commons in 1990. The recently completed Mission Walk development comprises two buildings on Berry Street in Mission Bay. The missing period of enormous expansion between 1990 and 2009 will doubtless be covered in the detail it deserves, but a blog post is not adequate for that task.

The impetus for starting BRIDGE in San Francisco, which remains its headquarters, was an anonymous gift of approximately $650,000 entrusted to the San Francisco Foundation in late 1980.

The funds were dedicated to creating affordable housing and came at a time when the Bay Area’s high costs of living threatened the stability of the workforce because its members were being priced out of the housing market.

The nine-page document that accompanied the gift contained the following statement:

“The donor has had and still has a strong interest in housing for persons and families of low and moderate income. However well intentioned, various federal programs, e.g., Section 8, have not delivered enough housing to either the inner cities or elsewhere to meet the enormous demand. This in turn suggests that what the private sector needs is a program for the construction or rehabilitation of housing for low and moderate income groups which would attract private investors interested in meeting a real national need and still make economic sense to investors and the business community.

Accordingly, this gift must be used to form a relatively small task force to study the problem, using all the academic disciplines from Bay Area universities at the faculty and graduate school level. Membership of the task force should also include enough experienced businessmen and bankers to avoid too heavy an academic orientation.”

The foundation asked Alan Stein, an investment banker, to chair the task force and select its members. Stein had come to San Francisco from New York City in 1971 to head the office of Goldman Sachs. In 1978 Governor Jerry Brown appointed him Secretary of Business and Transportation, which had ten departments, one of which was Housing and Community Development. Since the HCD department lacked a director at that time, Stein’s first task was to fill that position.

For advice in finding a new director Stein consulted Richard Bender, then dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. Bender recommended a faculty member, Don Terner, who was an ardent housing advocate and had worked successfully in affordable housing programs in New York.

In 1980 Terner was appointed director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development. He moved to Sacramento where he worked closely with Alan Stein and, according to Stein, educated him about the housing field by taking him to see projects throughout the state. Terner left the state government in 1981.

In 1982, to fulfill the donor’s stipulation that a task force be formed to administer the grant, Stein convened a group of people who were successful in various fields and interested in affordable housing. Rather than create another report, the task force chose to start building. The next step was to hire executives to run the operation.

Don Terner’s actions as Director of Housing and Community Development made him a leading candidate to head the organization. He had sponsored legislation which gave non-profit housing developers the first option to purchase surplus public lands and had also initiated legislation that included density bonuses that allowed selected developers to add up to 30% additional units to their projects, thus giving them extra units at no additional land costs.

Terner was hired to be the president of the new organization, which was then called Bay Area Regional Housing Investment and Development Group, later turned into the acronym, BRIDGE. A close associate and former student of his, Rick Holliday, was made vice president.

To raise the capital needed to start building units, Stein and Terner, supported by their board of directors, held fund-raising events for members of the business community. This use of the methods of private developers was a radical departure from the 1960s approach of community non-profit housing organizations which were oriented toward government funding and focused on individual projects.

A highly successful fund raising event in 1983 allowed the first project, Holloway Terrace, in San Francisco’s Ingleside Terrace to start; it was completed in 1985. According to Alan Stein, the success of this and other projects that followed came from diligent outreach to the projects’ neighborhoods, ownership of the projects and careful management, and the serious involvement of board members in the projects’ development.

The original task force members are Dick Bender, Gordon Chin, Ken Phillips, Tony Ramos, Alan Stein, Clark Wallace, Susanne Wilson, Gerson Bakar, Preston Butcher, Tom Flynn, Tony Frank, Dean Macris, Sunne McPeak, Ken Rosen, Mary Lee Widener. The picture on the right is of Alan Stein and Rick Holliday, 2009.

The Salvation Army’s Turk Street Center is that rare building which both honors the context of an historic district and stands out as decidedly contemporary.

The new building at 240-242 Turk Street was completed in July, 2008 after five years of programming and an intensive Planning Department design review process followed by 28 months of construction, which included the demolition of an existing building.

In designing a rippling facade of metallic bay windows the architects, Herman Coliver Locus, have capitalized on San Francisco’s vernacular building style and affirmed its functionality for the architecture of urban streetscapes.

Photograph by Tim Griffith

By coloring some of the window frames blue or yellow, as shown above, the architects sought to allow residents the possibility of identifying the location of their apartment and thereby lessening the anonymity of  the wall of windows.

The eight-story building has 113 apartments, 110 of which are studios with 358.5 sq. ft. Three are 2-bedroom units with 912.5 sq. ft.

Throughout his busy career in architecture, which stretched from the early 1930s to the 1980s, Cliff May profited from and contributed to the ebullient spirit of the post-World War II era In California, his native state. He designed over 1,000 buildings, most of them houses, which came to symbolize “western living” for a national and even international audience.

May’s accomplishments were not confined to architecture, which he learned as an amateur by crafting furniture before turning to building houses. He was a dedicated horseman, a musician who in
college had his own dance band, an automobile collector, an airplane pilot, and a talented self-promoter. He seemed to live the idyllic life projected in his designs.

You might say that Cliff May inherited the archetypical Spanish colonial ranch house, which he adopted as emblematic of the California being publicized as an earthly paradise. His great, great, great grandfather was a member of the Estudillo family, builders of the San Diego adobe house that Helen Hunt Jackson made famous in her romantic novel, Ramona, an enduring best-seller published in 1884.

May’s early houses hewed to the character of the colonial adobes. Although they acknowleged the automobile by makng the garage an important element of the house front, they were low one-story structures with heavy tile roofs, uneven stuccoed walls, and other elements of the pre-industrial Hispanic culture that, while useful, also functioned as decorative features.

Although May had no architectural training, his wife Jean, had taken a college course in the subject. They collected the arts and crafts products produced by the Spanish colonial revival style and copied the furniture marketed in California in the late 1920s. But this nostalgic use of history never interfered with equipping their houses with the latest appliances. May even posed for a photograph scooping ice cream from the freezer of his 1937 rancheria.

The country’s acceptance of the modern ranch house began in the mid-1940s when this new vernacular style was presented as an alternative to the cool and hard-edged International Modernism showcased by Philip Johnson in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition, “Modern Architecture: International exhibition.” In 1944 Elizabeth Gordon, editor of the widely read magazine, House Beautiful, published a long article showing Cliff May’s house #3 on the cover.

Thus began an advocacy of California living that declared its anti-modernism in such statements as Gordon’s 1946 article description, “A House Can Be Modern and Not Look It.”

Above is the cover of the February 1947 issue of House Beautiful, which featured the Pace-Setter House.

Entering the national quest for the postwar house in the 1940s, Sunset magazine published designs by several young western architects, but ultimately adopted May’s approach as best representing the magazine’s vision for the future with its abundance of “new convenience ideas” that would make housekeeping joyful in tastefully designed homes. In addition to his continuous production of Sunset’s published tract houses, May created the magazine’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It was a roughly 30,000 square-foot ranch house–the crowning achievement of his long association with this so-called “Laboratory for Western Living.”

Below is May’s drawing of the proposed Sunset Magazine headquarters building in Menlo Park.

Although May’s ranch houses remained talismanic, their design was never frozen in time. In the mid-century decades the houses merged gracefully with Modernism, exchanging the overtly colonial features of the early work for the light-filled, open-plan house with glazed walls that minimized the separation of inside and outside and integrated the garden into the whole.

Photograph by Joe Fletcher

Gregory’s book follows this trajectory with gorgeous photography and detailed descriptions of the buildings. Excerpts from original publications recapture the changing colors and graphic styles of the times.

Author Daniel Gregory is highly qualified to guide readers through Cliff May’s work and the period’s history. Gregory was employed at Sunset for twenty-seven years. He served as a senior editor for fifteen of those years and is well versed in the history of the magazine. His grandparents built a seminal ranch house in 1928, designed by William W. Wurster. While Wurster never made a career of designing ranch houses, his influence on Northern Calilfornia architecture has a somewhat parallel course to Mays’s. Gregory’s account of the family “farm”, as they called the Santa Cruz property, enriches our understanding of the times.

Although Sunset magazine still publishes designs for living, Cliff May’s ranch houses no longer spread new wings over the California landscape. Instead, they are being restored and landmarked, as befits the legend they embodied.

The Glen Park Community Plan is one of several planning efforts underway in the City’s transit-served neighborhoods. Glen Park with its BART station is a piece of the Citywide Action Plan to meet the need for housing and jobs.

The Glen Park Community Planning effort seeks to make Glen Park a better place to live and to help Glen Park function better for transit. The long-standing Interest in a neighborhood planning effort for Glen Park increased in response to the 1998 fire that destroyed the local grocery. After the fire, the Planning Department identified grant partners and was awarded a Caltrans grant in mid-2002. After many unavoidable delays, the community planning was started and has culminated in the plan to give the Glen Park community the tools it needs to guide future development in keeping with the neighborhood’s values.

Related Sites:

• BART > Glen Park Station > News | Chronology
  The official site for BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit.
• The Glen Park Community Plan at the San Francisco Planning Department
  This community planning process sought to provide the opportunity to balance community needs and address planning issues facing the neighborhood. Planners tackle circulation issues important to the community, including pedestrian safety, traffic flow, access to transit, and parking. Planners also evaluate ways to respect the neighborhood character through zoning, design guidelines, and other city policies. Public improvement opportunities like the use and design of buildings surrounding the BART station, the design and character of streets, and connecting public open spaces and neighborhoods were also explored.
• Glan Park Station at Wikipedia
  This is the only BART station in San Francisco to have parking.