2024 Staff Offsite Keynote: Lisa Cuestas on the Power of Community Led Design

In September 2024, the Momentus Capital team gathered in San Diego, California, for its annual meeting to discuss the organization’s strategy for the coming year. 

Lisa Cuestas, CEO of Casa Familiar in San Ysidro, provided the keynote address to staff. For over 50 years, this organization run by women of color has supported community empowerment and advocacy.

In her speech, she highlighted the importance of community led design, environmental justice, and wellness. These are key pillars in Casa Familiar’s approach to choosing and developing new projects. She also spoke to the value of Community Land Trusts as essential to supporting anti-displacement strategies and wealth building.

Lisa also noted Casa Familiar’s long-time partnerships with both Capital Impact Partners and CDC Small Business Finance in supporting their efforts to make connections and provide capital for their projects.

We invite you to watch her speech and read the accompanying transcript.

Introduction & Casa Familiar’s Mission

Lisa Grammer (Emcee): We’re so glad that you’re able to join us. So as you know, the theme of our [Momentus Capital] offsite is Powered By Us. 

Powered by Us includes more than just those of us who work for Momentus [Capital]. The real spirit of our theme includes our partners, investors, borrowers, and all of those with whom we work to achieve our mission. 

In that spirit, it is my honor to introduce our keynote speaker this morning, a true force in the nonprofit sector with nearly 30 years of experience. 

She is the CEO of Casa Familiar and award-winning community-based organization based right here in Southern California. The mission of Casa Familiar is to enhance the quality of life for people living in underserved and underrepresented communities. This includes providing a broad range of services from bilingual financial coaching to technology workshops to public benefits, enrollment assistance. 

And the fun fact is that Casa Familiar has worked with both Capital Impact and CDC Small Business Finance way before we came together as Momentus. So [a] full circle moment. So I would appreciate it if everyone could please give a warm and enthusiastic welcome to our speaker, Lisa,

Lisa Cuestas: How is everyone? Better situated here. And good morning. Let’s see, let’s make sure this works. All right, I think you can see me. There you go. Okay, I’m going to step out a bit, everybody. Let’s take a deep breath. How about that? Okay, relax, get comfortable in your chair and then all together, breathe in. I needed that more than you, but it helped for you to join. So again, my name is Lisa Cuestas. I am a San Diegan. I was just telling Chris [Lash] that I wasn’t born here, but I’ve been here long enough to consider myself now as San Diegan and I am the CEO of Casa Familiar. And as you heard, our mission, one of the very special things about Casa Familia is that it really has three defined pillars that we do our work in.

And I wanted to point that out because it sounds like you all have that kind of dynamic going on. So as a 50 plus year old organization, it very much started in direct services. So community services as one pillar and advocacy, organizing engagement as our second pillar. And as we grew and responded to the various needs in San Ysidro and the entire South Bay, we really started to lean into the community development space as well. And understanding that the built environment and what it does or doesn’t do for community has a huge impact on our quality of life. 

What you’re looking at here in this slide is our Fall Festival. And the reason why The Fall Festival came to be is that pumpkin patches became very, very expensive and families couldn’t afford a $20 pumpkin. How many of us can take four kids each get their pumpkin? They charge you now to go in. And as fall approaches, we said, you know what?

We have an empty lot. We’re going to do something really cool in the future with that lot and you’ll hear about that as well. But we’re going to do a pop-up event and so became Fall Festival seven years ago. So this is attended with about 200 kids and families a year, right in the heart of San Ysidro. They come, they play games and it’s a bit of a culture dive because things like cider and donuts and those kinds of things weren’t very common for the community. But when we get out of our community a bit and start to explore the culture plunges is exciting and it really helps to continue to build that foundation for us of engagement, connecting and not just getting together to fight the good fight, but getting together to celebrate and to experience new things.

San Ysidro: Community Overview & Challenges

A little bit about San Ysidro. So these visuals I’m going to go through pretty quickly because I want to think back as I continue to share my experience and the San Ysidro experience on things like this. So San Ysidro is a wonderful community of about 35,000 people. It’s right at the border. 

So how many have crossed that border? Let’s the raise of hands pretty good amount. So many of you know that this is a reality on a daily basis. The border wait times continue to dramatically get longer and longer. It’s unfortunately feels like a very militarized area and sad at times when you have so many tensions building up because folks have decided to really politicize that everyday experience that many of our friends family have to go through every day. If you live in this region and then you have San Ysidro, the heart of San Ysidro, this is representative of a lot of where we do our work.

And it’s folks that some folks that live in the heart of San Ysidro don’t do this anymore because it’s become so difficult and they are fortunate enough living in San Ysidro, but fortunate enough to not have to cross every day. And there’s a lot of us that work like myself that I’m really picky and choosy now when I do decide to cross the border because I don’t have a century pass and because I can’t get across in less than an hour. So if you chose to go hang out on a Saturday and you came back on a Sunday, you could potentially wait up to six to eight hours.

That happened to me once. I didn’t come back on a Sunday anymore after that. But San Ysidro is so culturally rich and there’s so many cool things going on that I’ll continue to share more about, but there’s real roots. So people think of when they think of San Ysidro of just this, but you have schools, you have families that have been there now generations, and you have folks that have been historically underinvested and under prioritized by the region because when we think of what that community is, we think it’s a very transient community. But these folks have been living here for a long time and the 23 years that I’ve worked at Casa Familiar…Ellis knows I started when I was two.

And there’s so much more to San Ysidro and we’re not mad at it. We’re not mad that we host one of the busiest port of entries in the world. We’ve accepted it and we understand that we like to be really close to it for so many reasons that I’ll share more. And mostly because we have families on both sides. So there’s the milgrande that was separated by their family because the border happened and over generations that has an impact and you become border communities. 

And then there’s what’s been going on and what you see politicized of many hundreds and thousands people about a year ago. So September 13th last year is when we noticed something was odd and why is there so many people walking and looking lost in the streets? And that’s when they started dropping off late at night or really early in the morning, people that had no idea where they were – asylum seekers – and trying to figure out how to get to the airport. So those crossers, you saw the little note, 120,000 crossings a day, 70,000 of those are vehicles. And that happens in the morning and then that happens in the evening. 

And so we’ll talk about why is that going back to the community part and what Casa’s, the benefits of Casa’s pillars and influencing each other and intersecting with intention has created really innovative work for us. Work like the San Ysidro Community Land Trust. How many folks know what a community land trust is (CLT)? Great.

This is a space that I think we all need to start talking about more and learning about more because there’s at least 50 different variations of [land trusts] that I know of. And there’s about 320 some all over the country, a lot in the Bay Area, a lot on the East coast, and there’s definitely clusters. Southern California so far too. This is one of ’em. I got really, really, really frustrated, disappointed when we were doing our Living Rooms project. You’ll hear about that. And we were also partnering on another project for affordable housing and a total of 139 for that and 10 for us. And we invited the community to come learn more and sign up if they were interested. 700 people showed up, obviously they were not all going to get served and then half of ’em walked out when they saw what the affordable rents were and said, I thought this was for affordable housing.

So I said, we have to do something different and because of all of what we do and the different intersectional conversations and the different needs because of the services that we provide, because of the engagement that we’re doing and because of the development that should be influenced by that. We came to this and I learned about CLTs from a bank of all entities. Believe it or not, a bank introduced me to the idea of a community land trust. So we’ll talk more about that. And this is a great visual that I like to use to kind of simplify what a CLT can do because it can look like this, it can look like that, it can look like a single family home. But really what separates it and what separates the land from whatever is developed is a ground lease for 99 years. And that is what keeps whatever is above affordable in perpetuity or as long as we can pay for something, right? So we’ll talk more about that.

Casa Familiar’s Initiatives: Addressing Community Needs

Again, it’s really easy to work in silos, but when you make sure not to and what it starts to look like for Casa Familiar, when we do come together, all those different impact areas, it leads to community led design, it leads to conversations that go much, much deeper than do you like this project or checking a box and saying, this is what the project looks like, this is who it’ll serve. That was the engagement. That is not engagement. And Casa has been saying that for over 50 years because our work has led into the environmental justice space as well. About 15 years ago we asked the question of one of our partners at SDSU, the School of Public Health, and we said, Hey, you guys talk a lot about research and community-based participatory research and all those things. What research is out there on the impact of our health if we cross every day because the pedestrians have to cross, they’re standing for hours next to idling vehicles that are also there idling for hours.

So what does the data say? And so they went and checked it out and they came back and they said, actually, there is no data. And so that is a huge reason why so many communities like San Ysidro get forgotten or underinvested because there’s not enough information to do anything about it. And so back in that day, there’s this thing called Calen Viro screen and it tells you how the air quality is all over California among many other things associated with that. And when we looked at San Diego and the border region, it was green, it was wonderful. Nothing wrong today because of our work and partnering with researchers, it has flipped that narrative because now it’s truthful in that we’re in the top 25% of the most impacted by vehicular traffic. And San Ysidro specifically is impacted by the most vehicles at one time in the entire state of California because of the border.

So therefore the health impacts that we deal with. Things that we can’t even see unless you grow fruit trees because you see the amount of black or in your window sills, the amount of black that is in the air and it settles, but everybody’s breathing that who lives there and there’s many schools up against freeways. So then we start to say we need to build things that will help to respond to that. And what does that look like? Everybody talks about climate resiliency. What does it look like? Well, for us, this is what it looks like. It’s going to have solar to battery because there’s a lot of outages around here. It’s going to have green space, greenhouse space to grow food and control the quality of the soil. It has water reuse, it has a plaza, it has really great lighting to make it a beautiful place to be in. It has EV charging. There’s very little infrastructure for EV charging even though we have these big climate goals in California. But in communities like San Ysidro, unless you’re going to the outlets, you can’t plug in your car anymore.

Only ways, I think for a lot of older communities can be dicey sometimes, right? And for San Ysidro, it is the front door to many homes and small apartment complexes. And it’s also adjacent to a property where we have where the fall festival is at. And we knew eventually we were going to do something there. So we knew we had to transform this alleyway, which is Cypress Drive. And we started calling it the Culture Corridor. The Culture Corridor is now recognized by the city of San Diego and it became a CIP project, a Capital Impact [Partners] project. And we’ll start early 2025, the construction of the enhancements of a $5 million investment. That’s what our engagement does. So when we lean really hard on engagement, we’re not only developing our own projects, we’re having an impact on the surrounding community and making sure all can benefit. So this will have be one lane because usually pedestrians are competing.

And Duke, that’s Duke. Oh there Duke has to dodge cars coming both directions and unfortunately a lot of older adults and kids get to school or public transportation because at the very end is how you get to public transportation. And on this other side it’s the business corridor. So when you can imagine something like this and show it to the city of San Diego and say, we’re not asking for big old sidewalks, we’re not asking to, we close it down because it’s the front door. We’re just saying put some greenery, get creative, slow traffic down and create safe space. And that’s what’s happening starting next year.

Importance of Collective Impact & Community Engagement

The important piece, the people piece, I’m also going to talk to you about that Casa has been led by women for over 50 years by women of color. Thank you. 

And the most engaged members of the community are the here. And this is a photo of a group of women who have gotten tons of training, have gone on to do things like open their own fitness center because they got training to be Zumba instructors and provide a lot of wellness free coaching and free wellness workshops for the community. They were in a rough spot when they came to Casa and now they’re leading conversations on their own without any help. They are now employed, some of them are employed by Casa Familiar, some of them were professionals in Tijuana and had a hard time figuring out how to use their skills on this side of the border.

And that is all the magic that happens in between. But if we don’t come together to hang out and to celebrate and celebrate community, it’s really hard to find out those things and have those conversations so that when we get to the workshop and we’re talking finances or we’re talking Resident Leadership Academy to be able to learn how you push decision makers to build the sidewalks. The only sidewalk to the high school, a $17 million investment was because of these women. And they asked us, Hey, how do you put a press conference together? He said, oh damn, okay, let’s do this. It took five years, but it was promised over 12 years ago that that sidewalk would happen. And the ribbon cutting happened because they said, we are going to put the information out there about the broken promises and are going to walk up a group of us. Sometimes it was 50 of them every week on a Friday to show how unsafe this is, but you expect our children to do it. So they got it done.

Thank you. All that props goes to them. 

And then we’re doing cool stuff like Living Rooms at the Border. So this project took 18, 19 years to happen, right? That shouldn’t happen anymore. But with folks like you all, groups like Casa, and the community, we need to be able to make it happen sooner and we will do that with the Community Land Trust. Living Rooms is an example of putting all of our leading initiatives, the things that we know help a community thrive along with the very basic need of stable housing. So the blue and the purple is the stable housing, three bedroom, two bath four. The one that’s sliced in half is workforce space where we were training baristas. And these are one bedrooms and two bedrooms. They have an awesome view of Tijuana by the way. 

And all in the middle is social impact space. We rent these to artists. This plaza shaded area is workshop space that we collaborate with UCSD. The box in the middle used to be the original Church of San Ysidro. We transformed that into a black box theater and a mixed use cultural space. And in the back is a shared plaza. So that’s everyone’s backyard or front yard or side yard, however you may see it. And we have concerts there. We have openings when a new theater production is coming in. And that’s what makes a place cool to live where you want to stay there, you get to know your neighbor and where your family is thriving, not surviving and making sure that if we’re doing work in that space and we care about those things and that should be reflected in our development work. At the end, and what I hope you continue to talk about is how do projects become real things, not just ideas.

And it was really hard for a Casa Familiar 20 years ago to imagine the kind of financing that was going to be necessary for living rooms. We had never done a New Markets Tax Credit. It’s a whole other language. You all know that. And we had never done anything like that on our own. It was the first time we were doing our own project, didn’t have a partner, new set of financing needed. The traditional loan, thank you. Capital Impact Partners and Kurt Chilcot. I think a lot of you know him. CDC Small Business was around when we were imagining living rooms at the border. But we had some challenges and we didn’t have the same budget back then, but we never lost hope. And what did CDC Small Business help us do? It was the relationships. It was supporting us at our fundraisers, it was introducing us to this group and that group.

And then when we had the wherewithal to do it, and it was scary. It was scary. But we took that leap of faith and we got ourselves in a position to where we were lendable, but it required all of that and a focus on where are we really going to keep investing? And that projects won’t be very helpful if the surrounding area is not supporting wellness and that the infrastructure exists to support the people that live there. And that is collective impact because it took all of those pieces in 20 years and making sure folks had their urgent needs addressed, which are the services. Because if they don’t have a job, if they don’t have childcare, they’re not going to come to your workshop and they don’t care why should they? 

Looking Forward: Sustainability and Wealth Building

And then having a long-term relationship going back to Fall Festival and saying sometimes you just want to hang out and have a good time and see happy faces on your kids. So that’s what Casa is about. That’s what we’ve been doing for a long time. And this structure here, there’s a park in San Ysidro that is in construction right now and took 50 years to get it done. But whenever the city of San Diego showed a map and the parks in San Ysidro, this big huge green blob would show up and we’re like, where’s that park?

Well it’s zoned for that and you can access it. Sure you can? Hills, and who knows what. Wildlife out there. Fenced by the way. It’ll be a park, it’s zoned to be a park, it’s planned to be a park. 50 years later. And it took a little bit of political will and seven years of organizing youth. Very, very intensely putting a lot of pressure. Casa going and finding a million dollars of its own. And when the opportunity came to build over a 10 acre park, because we’re extremely park poor in San Ysidro. They didn’t bother thinking about climate goals. So we said, well, we’ve been giving you all kinds of good data for the last 15 years. You know what the situation is, things aren’t getting any better. So are your trees air scrubbers? What? Well, so we had those conversations and the youth were like, and we want our skate park. It better be there. So when some budget things had to go away for like you better go make sure the skate park isn’t touched. And it was not. And it’s getting built first in phase one. So good job for them.

So we brought in landscape architects and had to get grant funding to do that and scare the city a little bit and say, actually you could build a forest, it could be a mini forest. They’re like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down. But they presented us with a 10 acre park that was going to have 60 trees…because, you know, maintenance. So then it went from 60 trees to 406 trees, a lot of shrubs, that kind of trees that actually do hard work in cleaning the air. We have a shaded skate park now. We have hydro stations. We have better efficiency systems to water all those trees and the shrubs and upsize the trees and the shrubs and to create spaces where cultural activities could happen. And if it weren’t for communities showing up even during the pandemic virtually and expressing this and us being able to support them with the technology needs to do so and going and finding the funds saying “Are you going to say no to a million dollars to do all this cool stuff?”

Because you yourself have city of San Diego have climate goals. And it’s amazing that we don’t take advantage of those kinds of opportunities when they’re there, but it requires community. And this would’ve been who knows what. And it only had 1% of the entire budget for an art installation. So he said if we kick in another 50,000, could we spend time with the artist and have them understand our EJ work and all we do. And this is a symbol of the need to do something and it’s a living piece of artwork, it’ll have a real live tree in the middle. And the community has been wanting a pool forever. So every time they talk to me they want more parking. That’s a whole other thing. Let’s not go there with the parking, but they want a pool or they want water features in the community. And so there’s going to be misters on the top of this that it’s going to help to water the tree and tries to incorporate all of those things. Messaging plus what the community is asking for. And so it’s a beautiful piece. It’ll be an iconic piece once it is built and I’ll make sure to share it with you all and let you know when that happens. 

So great work. Why I do my work.

And one of the things I wanted to make sure to share is that the CLT and what the CLT means for San Ysidro is it’s an anti-displacement strategy with wealth building opportunities. We are not trying to say that we’re going to make folks wealthy, but a lot of these individuals won’t even have an entry point if there isn’t something new. Some risk. This is really scary for us because we’re going to have a hundred families that might not agree on a whole lot of things. And this board will be a resident, majority resident controlled board. And when we were faced with, okay, do we do it and what is going to be the biggest challenge? Never mind the financing, it’s an 85 million project, never mind the financing. But people are people.

And what I don’t see enough of is when we take risks, when groups have the power to take a risk, they’re not doing it with folks like Santo Ysidro community. They’re not. And things fail all the time. But then we learn so much. Okay, let’s just spread that learning and that wealth. So that if the worst thing that happens, they’re building some wealth. They might be arguing about this or that, or we might have to have changed this or that. And everybody hates this regulatory thing, but people are benefiting. 

And so for Casa, I hated Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). I had said we’re never going to do LIHTC again. And I hate LIHTC projects because to me those are things that keep people poor, right? Section Eight, I’m not a fan of Section Eight. Am I saying do away with it? No. 

But what does it do? It keeps people poor so they don’t take the promotion or don’t take the extra hours or whatever may be. So then we organizations like Casa, when we donated the land for the CLT our land, we said sometimes we’re going to have to figure out how to keep ourselves sustainable and then we need to give wealth back. And if Casa can do that, anybody can do that. But be strategic about it and how are we going to work to do that with Living Rooms? That’s a great set of residents to have at the ready and in a pipeline to say, would you ever want to be a resident of the CLT? And in cases where those homes are sold, it’d be great to have the conversation that governing board of, well what residents do we want to prioritize in the surrounding community to be at the ready?

And that’s where it’s really cool to have the services part of what we do, the engagement part of what we do and the development part of what we do. It’s always circular and it only gets better the more it gets around and looking for that. And it’s always hard. Why? Because people. It’s always sometimes more costly at the beginning. So when we’re building the CLT, all the learning from the Climate Resiliency Center, all those technologies, guess what they’re going into the CLT. That’s why $85 million. But when you underinvest for so long, you want to give people access to the roof so that they have outdoor space. You want to give people access to some gardening spaces. You want to make sure that air filtration is top notch because we’re not going to get rid of 70,000 vehicles anytime soon. And so we’re building for the next a hundred years and the planning that happens and sometimes a partnership that happens is too worried about thinking what’s been working for the last 50 to a hundred years…and not enough about kids nowadays don’t even want to learn how to drive.

So when I get somebody really upset about parking, I said, most kids I know don’t have a driver’s license. I have to ask now, when we’re hiring young people, do you drive? A lot of people don’t. Right? So what does that community, and if you don’t build the community to be and foster wellness and to be healthier, then you’re never going to have those communities to do so. 

So I want to go ahead and open it up for questions on any of all of that. 

Q&A and Conclusion

Question: Why do you have issues with Section Eight?

Lisa Cuestas: Yeah. Why I hate Section Eight. Well, I don’t like anything that takes benefits away as you improve your stability and wealth, right? So does there have to be some kind of mechanism that, especially in a San Diego, where are you going to go find other housing? If it was there, then they might be inclined to do so. But when you have so much concentrated low-income housing and communities and that’s all it is, low income housing upon low income housing and nothing else happening, then it’s hard to imagine like, yikes, I’m going to get a dollar raise and it’s going to kick me up into this category. I’m going to have to pay more rent, but I don’t know if that’s going to also bring my food stamps down or this or that. And so it’s a big life-changing decision where we think it’s just this little thing. And why do you have to live off of Section Eight? Well guess what? I now do not qualify for a whole lot of things, including childcare and childcare. My lord, I have two. Half of my income was going to childcare.

Question: Are residents going to be required to contribute to the development, like the pride of ownership similar to Habitat for Humanity, that that owner comes in and does some of the construction work volunteer their time?

Lisa Cuestas: No. One of the reasons why we don’t want folks in there and building is just that that is a whole other level of expertise that we do not have and make something hard, even harder. And the folks that will have the opportunity to move into the homes, they’re not coming in with $5,000, $10,000 because they don’t have it. So they’re folks that are 30, 40 and 50% AMI. So I’m assuming everybody understands that, but for the city of San Diego, it’s like $120,000 for a family of four to get by. Folks that will be living in San Ysidro CLT are making $30, $40, $50, $60,000. So they don’t have the savings account. 

So why 15 years? Well one, because of the regulatory restrictions, it has to be rental for 15 years. So then we have those 15 years to hook up all of our case management services and our financial opportunity center to support them and support them in ways to build their wealth, get ready for yearly increments to the rent so that when the mortgage hits ’em, they’re ready for it and they can have that opportunity to do so. And we’re looking for ways, how can we help with down payment, what banks should be talking to right now that will be the lender. Are we going to be the lender? So many things yet to figure out because this is new and it’s hard, but they don’t have that savings right now.

Question: So when you think about the CLT model, I agree with you, there are examples of it in small places. How do you think about the scale? And besides the financing, LIHTC, not unlimited, but what are the factors that keep that scale from being bigger and more places?

Lisa Cuestas: Well, the land, right? Who wants to give up land? There are folks out there that are willing to do that, but it takes folks like the ones here, myself included, to say maybe this surplus land county or city should be dedicated for this. So I think that’s the true opportunity or this massive unused space because it’s a parking lot or because it’s right next to a school and the school’s only using half of their playground half the time. Could that be housing and could it support that community? So I think that’s the big thing. And what does the community want? So it took long hard conversations to say not 10 single family homes, [but] a hundred condos. And no you don’t have to live there forever. It will always be below market, that resale formula, but you will be able to sell it and use that wealth to go and buy something else 15, 20 years.

So it’s a matter of political will sometimes us talking about it, getting excited about it, innovating, what land could be used for that, how can we leverage, how can we work with churches more on models like that? How can we work with schools on models like that? Even community colleges. They don’t know what to do in that space in housing, they’re trying to get their feet wet, but that’s not what they do. So it takes the social impact and it takes money upfront. I’m going to be real with y’all. It takes that money upfront because we got $1.5 million for the county for pre-development and we got $1.2 million from the governor and that is grant dollars. So the first 10 million of the CLT is grant dollars, it’s not loan. So all of a sudden it was real easy to get the 34 affordable housing, sustainable communities loan and grant. We applied to tax credits in August. You listening? And we’ll be in construction next year. So that took seven years to happen. Living Rooms took 18, 19 years to happen. But because we didn’t get that love in the beginning, but it took a foundation to say, okay, I’m going to give you this much. Go find somebody to match it. All of a sudden we got momentum.

Question: My question was, is small business ownership entrepreneurship part of the economic development efforts now or do you see it part of it going forward as an opportunity to build wealth for the community?

Lisa Cuestas: Absolutely. It needs to be there. And when we hear from the community like, hey, 400 surveys later, we need quality jobs, we need more jobs and we need space to open up our businesses and not get in trouble for it. And so that learning in our next big project after the CLT, we have several properties. Land acquisition is so important for organizations at any opportunity that one can. So where we have property, it’s on the commercial corridor. So that whole first floor, we’re having those conversations of what should that be, who should it serve when it comes to businesses. What services should go there, what kind of housing? So all the engagement that we did for the CLT, all those residents involved, all the engagement we did for our climate resiliency, now they’re informing that next larger scale project to say what businesses do we want to see?

And the number one thing they said was a pharmacy. We don’t have a pharmacy in San Ysidro. You have to leave San Ysidro or go to Tijuana to go to a pharmacy if you’re not a member of the clinic there. But that’s only Monday through Friday. But we have all of these popup vendors and you see them moving all the time because they have no space and they don’t have the financing support to figure out what can they afford and be that incubator space. So we’re definitely thinking of that for sure. 

That’s our Boulevard project. That’s the name for now, the San Ysidro Boulevard Project. But it’s so critical. Again, what’s a thriving community look like? It’s got a lot of small business.

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. Congratulations on all the work that you all are doing, the coming together. This is my first time being a keynote, so thank you for that.