Promise Zone provides COVID-related assists
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of San Diego’s 10-year program to revitalize underprivileged neighborhoods adapted to help businesses and residents connect with relief funds and services, city staff said in an update last week.
The update covered the first five years of the city’s Promise Zone program, which was established in 2016 by the federal government to revitalize key, underserved areas. In San Diego, that is a 6.4-square-mile swath of the southeastern corner of the city that is home to nearly 90,000 people, said Xiomalys Crespo, the city’s Promise Zone program manager, to the city’s Economic Development and Intergovernmental Relations Committee.
“Over the past five years ... the initiative has prioritized supporting and expanding the work of our partners, especially during the last two years in which the Promise Zone partners have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Crespo said.
The city’s Promise Zone program is one of four in California, Crespo said. Administered by the city and dozens of private, nonprofit and government partners, the program has gotten about $50 million in state, federal and local grant funds, to provide job training, boost neighborhoodlevel economic development, reduce crime, and improve access to health care, healthy food and affordable housing, according to a city staff report in August.
The zone covers such neighborhoods as Barrio Logan, Logan Heights and Encanto, where population density is three times that of the rest of the city and median household income is about half of the median income citywide, according to the program’s website. The neighborhoods also have high minority populations.
While the pandemic created many new challenges for Promise Zone program providers, it also opened the door to innovation, city staff said.
For example, the city and the Small Business Development Center created a community ambassador pilot project that “compensated business owners within the community to guide their peers through available relief funding,” for businesses struggling amid the pandemic.
In response to housing insecurity intensified by the pandemic, the Promise Zone program shifted efforts toward educating renters about the city’s eviction moratorium and rent assistance program, Crespo said.