BERKELEY — The Strawberry Creek Lodge senior residence will celebrate its grand reopening Wednesday, a rare upbeat note amid an otherwise bleak affordable housing picture in this city.
The 53-year-old building, which houses 150 low-income seniors, was renovated and seismically retrofitted over the last 16 months, according to a news release from Satellite Affordable Housing Associates.
The rehabilitation includes an updated security system and emergency and exterior lighting systems. Eight units were converted, pathways were widened and the community garden was redesigned, all in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the news release. “Green” features include a photovoltaic solar roof that provides 40 percent of the building’s power, solar hot water, and drought-tolerant landscaping with native plants.
Strawberry Creek Lodge, at 1320 Addison St. west of Acton Street near Strawberry Creek Park, includes 120 studios and 30 one-bedroom apartments and amenities such as a movie theater, library and computer lab, recreation rooms, art room, dining area, lounge and bicycle storage.
It was acquired and rehabbed with $15 million funding from the city’s Housing Trust Fund, California Tax Credit Allocation Committee, Bank of the West, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Renewal and the Strawberry Creek Lodge Foundation. The rehab cost $7 million. Satellite manages the building and an affiliate owns it, spokeswoman Susan Friedland said.
Roger Friedman, a resident since before the renovation, said the residents are “a nice group of people,” many of them with a strong intellectual or artistic bent.
“We have a number of poets, professional writers and quite a few professional artists,” Friedman said.
Among them is the Tenants’ Association president, a muralist who goes by the single name STEFEN, whose many works visible in public areas of the East Bay include the Pinole Centennial Mural “100 Years of Railroad History,” and murals on pet hospitals in El Cerrito, Oakland, Alameda and Pinole, according to his website, www.stefenart.com.
Many of the residents lived in Berkeley before they moved to Strawberry Creek Lodge, Friedman said, while others are from New York, New Jersey, the Midwest and elsewhere.
All that diversity makes for “a more rounded (living) experience,” said Friedman, who started his career on an automobile assembly line in Detroit before working in commercial real estate in Houston, then as a computer programmer, and later as a professional massage therapist and gym owner, he said.
The minimum age for residents at Strawberry Creek Lodge is 62. As for Friedman’s age, he would only say, “I’m like Mel Brooks,” in a reference to one of the comedian’s most famous skits: “I stopped counting when I reached 2,000.”
Contact Tom Lochner at 510-262-2760. Follow him at Twitter.com/tomlochner.
