A Mission to Build Better Neighborhoods by Design

Augusta Catalina Del Zotto was born in the Outer Mission, a working-class San Francisco neighborhood populated by a mosaic of first- and second-generation immigrants from many different countries. Except for a stint in a Syracuse, N.Y., graduate program, she has never lived away from her hometown.

Now Ms. Del Zotto, the daughter of a stonemason, is returning to the community-organizing work she began at age 14 in San Francisco, this time by taking the reins of Asian Neighborhood Design. The organization was founded in 1973 by several Chinese-American architecture students who sought to improve conditions in the city’s Chinatown by making apartments more livable through better design. The group, which has a yearly budget of around $3-million, still includes an in-house team of full-time architects on its 45-person staff, but now works throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.

For example, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake badly damaged a five-story, wood-frame apartment building in Oakland called the Madison Park Apartments, Asian Neighborhood Design served as the lead architect on a project to rebuild the structure as low-cost housing. The 98 units built by a nonprofit developer are now fully restored to their 1908 landmark design, except that they are also wheelchair-accessible and earthquake-resistant. The work received a preservation award from the California Preservation Association in 1996.

In addition to design work, Ms. Del Zotto’s organization offers job training for low-income people in cabinetry, carpentry, and other trades taught by veterans of those crafts. One hundred people — mostly unemployed youths — receive training every year, and the group plans to increase that number to 350 by 2004.

What’s unusual about the organization, says Ms. Del Zotto, is its emphasis on training with hammers and nails rather than keyboards and screens. “The September 11 tragedy brought blue-collar heroes out of the closet,” she says. Ms. Del Zotto evangelizes for the building trades, arguing that too many resources have gone toward preparing low-income people for white-collar professions, which are prone to the ups and downs of the information economy. The building trades provide a much faster and less risky path to self-sufficiency, she says, and have become more open to women in recent years.

In an interview, Ms. Del Zotto spoke about her plans for Asian Neighborhood Design.

Where did your interest in social work and multiculturalism originate?

I think the interest in multiculturalism comes from being born into a multicultural neighborhood. It wasn’t a “Gee whiz, wouldn’t this be interesting” decision. My work is more than social work. I look at it as community empowerment and economic development. My interest came from wonderful role models, people who developed innovative projects that affected me directly as a youth. I don’t have an altruistic motive to do what I do. It’s a common-sense one.

How does your organization’s multicultural focus affect your work?

At Asian Neighborhood Design we listen to the visions and logic of the communities we serve: They are constantly giving our agency direction. That makes for very exciting and very useful projects, whether it is designing public housing, public space, a recreation center, or a healing center.

What would be an example of a current project that came together this way?

Right now we are working on the Friendship House Healing Center, which will serve the urban Native American population in San Francisco. It’s a $5-million project that will be finished in 2003. We have a model, and it’s designed with a motif that represents different Indian nations. It will also include the first inner-city sweat lodge [which American Indians use for cleansing and purification rituals that involve steam produced by pouring water over hot stones]. The building will be child-friendly, with open spaces, washable carpets, and safe stairwells. The design came out of a series of meetings between the directors of the Friendship House Association of American Indians of San Francisco, potential clients, and our architects.

How does the mason work you did as a girl affect your work now?

My dad was a stonemason and I worked weekends and summers with him. I enjoyed it because I was making good money, and thought to myself, “This is something that girls can get into more.” Now, many years later, I’m back, mentoring young women and encouraging them to get into the trades. Right now there is only 3 percent female representation in the trades. But it’s the kind of employment that young women should look into, especially if they come from low-income communities and they have children to support. They can dramatically increase their standard of living in a short period of time.

How did your group’s programs grow out of its Chinatown legacy?

It started as a poverty-alleviation program that happened to be in Chinatown because most of the architects who started it were Chinese-Americans and they were concerned with that neighborhood’s squalor. They felt that their vision and their ability to be architects and activists was limited when they worked in mainstream architecture firms and were perhaps the token Asians there.

Do you plan to try your group’s approach elsewhere?

Residents everywhere are seldom asked what they want and what they need. We want to continue with the interactive model and share this model with others. I think our model would be useful in other parts of the country. But different parts of the country are very different. We can offer them a model and they can modify it.

Will you teach in your group’s job-training programs?

I share my life story with youth who participate in the training and encourage them to look at where they came from and where they are going. We also have a number of carpenters on board. One is Pete Henderson, who is an older African-American man. He’ll talk to the kids about the days when it was difficult for him, as a black man, to get a job in that field. He shares the history of the trades from a black perspective.

Will you focus on maintaining current programs or starting new ones?

Always both. One goal is to let the philanthropic community know that the building trade is an expanding field. It needs to be seen as a window of opportunity for many low-income youth to create a better future for themselves. Emphasis is too often placed on white-collar jobs.

What trends in the Bay Area will affect your organization and the people it serves?

Gentrification is one. There is now a much bigger gap between rich and poor, and the middle class in the Bay Area is dwindling. There is going to be a great deal of tension. We are already seeing some signs of that now. On some blocks you have people who own not one but two Jaguars. And next door there’s a family from Laos with people sleeping in one room. Job training will help to ease the tension that comes from extreme differences in socioeconomic status.

ABOUT AUGUSTA CATALINA DEL ZOTTO, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF ASIAN NEIGHBORHOOD DESIGN

Education: Earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in international relations from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in public administration from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Previous employment: Before starting college, she handled public relations for California Tomorrow, a San Francisco think tank. She has also served as associate director of the Center for Human Development, in San Francisco.

Charitable interests: Serves on the boards of Gendercide Watch, a Toronto group that monitors violence motivated by a victim’s gender, and Instituto Familiar de la Raza, a San Francisco mental-health group. Gives money to Friends of Recreation and Parks, the Asian Art Museum, and Friends of the Urban Forest, in San Francisco.

Regular reading list: Mother Jones, Tikkun (a Jewish magazine), Dr. Dobb’s Journal (about computers), Architectural Record, Lucha Libre (a Mexican wrestling magazine), and The Wall Street Journal.