Though surprised, Flowers welcomed the request. "I love being around other artists," she says. Flowers speaks in a soft voice and has a smile that begins hesitantly but quickly gains momentum. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Michigan native has spent much of her time over the past few years writing rap lyrics and shooting music videos and short films—all of which the impossibly youthful-looking great-grandmother says are made to supply positive messages to African-American kids, especially the great-grandchildren that she helps homeschool.

While a lack of artistic credentials isn’t disqualifying, the 29-unit Temple Art Lofts are designed to provide an inspiring and affordable home to as many writers, painters, sculptors, and musicians as possible. The project combines two meticulously preserved and modernized buildings: the former City Hall, built in 1872, and a Masonic temple dating from 1917. Its opening speaks volumes about how Vallejo, pop. 118,000, is turning to its history-filled past in order to define a brighter future.

For nearly a century and a half, this waterfront city an hour’s ferry ride northeast of downtown San Francisco didn’t have to worry much about renewal. After operating briefly as California’s state capital, Vallejo benefited from the U.S. Navy’s decision in 1854 to establish its first permanent West Coast installation on the city’s Mare Island. David Farragut, who went on to become the Navy’s first admiral, served as the original commandant of Mare Island, a sprawling dry dock and industrial boat-building and repair facility. During World War II, the city bustled with activity as more than 40,000 workers outfitted the Navy with vessels.

And the steady stream of revenue that poured into city coffers due to the Navy’s presence bred complacency. “For years, the mindset in Vallejo was that we would always have the Navy,” says James Kern, a longtime city resident and the executive director of the Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum. “If there was an idea of a new business coming in, people would say we don’t need it because we have the Navy.”

That is, until they didn’t. As part of a raft of base closures nationwide, the Navy shut down its Mare Island operations in 1996, leaving the city with a huge revenue hole and insufficient plans for replacing it. Proof that the Navy’s departure was an unresolved existential crisis came in 2008, when Vallejo declared bankruptcy. Quickly, this once-vibrant cog in the nation’s military operations grabbed headlines for all the wrong reasons: foreclosures, vacancies, and above all, crime. “Vallejo has had a difficult few years,” says city manager Daniel Keen. “Bankruptcy and recession hit our community hard.”

Yet things have begun to change, thanks in large part to an enviable stock of historic buildings and an influx of artists fleeing the astronomical real estate prices in other parts of the Bay Area. The marriage of these twin forces becomes particularly apparent throughout Vallejo’s downtown core. The ground floor of the 159-year-old Odd Fellows Hall, one of the city’s tallest buildings, is now jam-packed with paintings, sculptures, and other work by local artists. Appropriately dubbed “The Hub Vallejo,” the space has become a gallery where the burgeoning creative class comes to work, network, hold events, and plot new ways to build the community. Next door to the Temple Art Lofts is the Beaux-Arts Empress Theatre, built in 1911 by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal society. After sustaining severe damage during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Empress was recently restored and now hosts a steady schedule of performances.

Businesses are popping up in a downtown that has endured commercial vacancy rates approaching 50 percent. Newcomer/artist Rar Farmer recently opened Koham Press bookstore, a self-described “home library” that offers an eclectic selection of books and hosts readings and art shows. A short walk from downtown, at the ferry landing, winemaker and brewer Kent Fortner plans to open a taproom where the thousands of commuters who pass through on their way to and from San Francisco can stop and enjoy a drink. Eventually, patrons will be able to simultaneously sip beer and see where it was made: Fortner plans to locate his Mare Island Brewing Co. production facility in an old coal storage shed visible from the taproom.

Even where new businesses haven’t emerged downtown, art still has a presence. Through a program called Vallejo Art Windows, vacant and derelict storefronts become showcases for work by both Temple Art Lofts residents and other local artists, such as Jean Cherie, a former Hollywood studio sculptor. “The art community here is getting so vast, and there are so many things happening, that there is a critical mass to make this an art renaissance,” says Sean Murdock, a Temple Art Lofts resident who helped launch The Hub Vallejo and curated the 2013 edition of the Vallejo Art Windows project. Murdock, who was a fashion photographer in Miami and now focuses on street pop art, thought Vallejo would be just a place to sleep when he first came to town nearly two years ago. “Moving here, I expected to live here and only come back at night,” he says. “Now I never leave. I give up the opportunity to do shows in San Francisco to do them here.”

With their restored facades and carefully renovated interiors, the Neoclassical Masonic temple and the Italianate City Hall radiate the strength of athletes in their prime. They clearly demonstrate that a project like the Temple Art Lofts can help reinvent a place as close to collapse as Vallejo.

The complex’s serene appearance makes the full story of its emergence as a downtown catalyst all the more unexpected. Temple Art Lofts took shape, as these things so often do, around the stubborn vision of a single person: Meea Kang. A founding partner of Irvine, Calif.–based Domus Development, Kang has built her career by taking on projects most people wouldn’t touch. Her track record includes a pedestrian-friendly, net-zero-energy apartment complex in car-crazy Sacramento, Calif., and affordable workforce housing in ritzy Lake Tahoe.

But even Kang describes the Temple Art Lofts rehab as “really hard.” Vallejo’s leaders hired her in 2009 to utilize federal funds targeted at foreclosure-heavy areas while simultaneously helping settle a lawsuit requiring the city to build more affordable housing. “They wanted someone to come in and solve their lawsuit problem and do it quietly, without any ripple effects,” says Kang. This quick fix was not an option she even considered. “I didn’t want to buy some foreclosed apartment building at the edge of town. I wanted to affect downtown.”

Her desire to take the difficult route led Kang straight to prison. Not an active prison, mind you, but the abandoned jail that remains a preserved part of the 1872 City Hall. On a gray, rainy October day, she made her first visit to the two foreclosed buildings, which the Freemasons had long ago combined into one parcel. Kang found herself standing in what was at the time a dank, musty cell. “Water was just gushing into it,” she says as she leads a tour around what is now a very dry complex.

The rest of the property wasn’t much better. Since the Freemasons moved out in the 1970s, the building had become a site for illegal rave parties, a refuge for people who were homeless, and a nesting ground for hundreds of pigeons. Shattered glass covered the floors.

In other words, it was a pretty good representation of what was happening to Vallejo as a whole. But Kang believed that turning these two longstanding pillars of the community into affordable artists’ housing was worth the struggle, despite vocal opposition from some residents. To make the project happen required an investment of $12 million, and constant uncertainty and stress. “When we were in the middle of this, it was like a body lying on an operating table with its chest cavity opened up and vital organs removed,” says Robert Lindley of YHLA Architects, the project’s designer. “We typically have construction meetings once every two weeks. In this case, I was on the phone daily and I was up there two or three times a week, just to solve problems.”

Some issues were standard for aged, neglected buildings, such as the need for electrical, mechanical, and seismic upgrades. More challenging was the question of how to fit 29 units into the merged buildings when historic preservation concerns put big chunks off-limits. For instance, the third floor of the Masonic temple is largely taken up by a cavernous performance hall with a nearly 30-foot-high ceiling. An elevated platform snaking around the bottom of its walls provided ample room for the throne-style seating favored by the Masons. But 2,600 square feet of essentially unusable space posed a revenue problem for the developer, particularly given that the goal was to produce affordable units.

In order to make the project work financially, Kang and her team had to get creative and collaborative. With the performance hall—which residents now use for their own gatherings and gallery shows—on the list of untouchable spaces, Domus instead received the go-ahead from California’s State Historic Preservation Office and others to subdivide the temple’s third-floor grand ballroom into nine loft apartments. In return, Kang and Lindley agreed to preserve the building’s overall sense of space and volume by maintaining the third floor’s corridors in their existing locations and keeping the ballroom’s ornate doors. “Because the original ballroom had floor-to-ceiling room dividers, we were able to use this precedent to allow us to subdivide the room even more,” says Kang. “Therefore, designing lofts would allow the apartments to have the same room volumes and the same ceiling heights.”

Clearly, their hard work paid off. Last fall the project won a prestigious Preservation Design Award from the California Preservation Foundation. All of the units rented quickly, and today there is a waiting list for available apartments. The artists who live in the building have developed a level of camaraderie, and they take advantage of the communal studio space Temple Art Lofts offers its tenants. “We are different, but a good portion of us hang out,” says Murdock. “This place gives us a workroom and space to grow.”

The building also offers an economic lifeline to its residents. Starting at less than $700 per month, rents at the Temple Art Lofts are an extreme anomaly in the Bay Area. The region’s latest technology boom—in which millionaires seem to be minted at the pace of new iPhone apps, thanks to the success of companies like Facebook and Twitter—has sent housing prices skyrocketing out of the reach of many. “People can’t live in San Francisco unless they’re wealthy,” Flowers says.

The presence of Flowers, Murdock, and other artists in Vallejo has generated a palpable sense of possibility that the town’s many historical and artistic resources can be translated into a bright and sustainable future. “It’s a beautiful town; the bones are here,” says newly elected city council member Katy Miessner, who has a BFA in painting and has worked for many years in nonprofit management. “It’s time to put the skin on.”

How will people know when that has happened? No doubt economists can analyze plenty of statistics to determine how well revitalization is or isn’t taking hold. But there’s a less scientific visual cue that may be just as effective. These days, the commute pattern between Vallejo and San Francisco on the ferry is predictable. In the morning, traffic flows into San Francisco as people who live in Vallejo head into work; in the evening, it’s the reverse.

When city manager Keen sees that pattern disrupted, he’ll know things have really changed for the better. “One of my dreams is that instead of so many people getting on the ferry to San Francisco, we will have reverse traffic,” he says. “We’d like to see people coming to see and do things in downtown and then get back on the ferry.” It’s a dream that seems more possible every day.