July 4 - Wachovia gives donation to MEDA

This is from July, but given this blog's focus on The Mission, I thought it worth noting....

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/07/07/tidbits1.html

From the San Francisco Business Times...
On the face of it, one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders and a San Francisco activist group hell-bent on blocking development would seem like strange bedfellows.

Yet snuggled up together are $36 billion Wachovia and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition (MAC), with a $500,000 philanthropic donation from the bank acting as matchmaker.
The money was donated last year to the Mission Economic Development Association, which provides financial, housing and employment services in the Mission. The funds will go toward creating the San Francisco Immigrants' Center, which is a new HQ for MEDA and nearly a dozen nonprofits affiliated with it.

Among them is MAC. The development association is the largest of the nonprofit groups that banded together to form MAC a decade ago.

As its web site flatly states, MAC "fights to stop market-rate development in the Mission District." Originally formed to beat back loft conversions and dot-com encroachment into the Mission, it has lived on to frustrate a string of projects. It fought the expansion of Slanted Door restaurant and battled each of the various attempts at redeveloping the ancient Armory (which, as a result, ended up as a pornography studio). Still, there's no doubting MAC's political pull: It was a major driver in the Board of Supervisors' 2006 decision to place a moratorium on market-rate housing in the area, a move that put several dozen projects in deep freeze.

All that would seem to put it at odds with the "economic development" in the middle of MEDA's name, but Luis Granados, executive director of MEDA, sees no conflict between the two groups' efforts. Market-rate housing in the Mission is geared to affluent singles who can afford a $700,000 condo, he said, and has nothing to do with economic development on behalf of working class Mission families.

"We can argue the supply-and-demand thing, but the housing built in the Mission has not been affordable and it's been studios and one bedrooms," he said. "There is nothing a teacher and someone who works at a biotech company could afford. The facts are the facts."

Rey Ocañas, Wachovia's community relations executive for the region, is sanguine that the mortgage-heavy bank is indirectly bankrolling an organization that effectively exists to eliminate mortgage opportunities.

"Our foundation is targeting low-income needs," he said. "We're not going to tell them what issues to align with. We want to support the work they do in the community. If they take an unpopular position now and then, so be it."