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With this prolonged housing recession making both the private and public builders rethink their strategies and products, with the result being that many of them are leaving the Bay Area market altogether, what’s in store for BRIDGE Housing?

BRIDGE Chairman and co-founder Rick Holliday tells The Real Story that among the ways for BRIDGE to move ahead in its business of creating more affordable housing units is to look for ways to renovate and restore Bay Area buildings that are in foreclosure—in other words, get out of the building business in instances where that model doesn’t work, and develop a new model that lets BRIDGE apply both elbow grease and good management principles to buildings that have been over-leveraged and foreclosed upon.

In a nutshell, this kind of thinking would allow BRIDGE to take advantage of some of the banks’ underperforming assets, which might be resold at less than their replacement cost, allowing BRIDGE to convert some down-at-their-heels market-rate units into restored and retrofitted affordable housing stock.