The Big Bad Bar - BlogPost 1

Our community partner is Chestnut Housing Corporation. This is a nonprofit that provides affordable housing to those in need by purchasing homes and then renting units out at below market rate. We met with Sue and Tashya to discuss Chestnut Housing's new bar - what they're planing on doing with it and how they want to proceed. We met at the bar with the board members and were very surprised regarding their lack of information with the area and what they wanted the bar to do. Here are some pictures of the bar:




The first picture is from the front of the bar to the back, while the latter is the reverse. It's pretty dark in the first picture, but there are two bathroom as well as a commercial standard kitchen in the back.

When spoke to them, the only thing we knew for sure is that they wanted the bar to serve the community in its own way. Some ideas we brainstormed about were:

  • Laundrymat / Computer bar
  • Organic Produce Store
  • Internet Cafe


We were told that they had certain demographic information about the area from 2011 but this information was pretty outdated. So we decided it would be important to learn more about the neighborhood before we determined what idea we can turn the space into. We plan on surveying the neighborhood to gather input from the residents about potential bar space ideas which would serve the community. Our current problem was that we didn't know what kind of community space would be beneficial to the area so we needed to solve this first.

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