One bottom line isn't enough for Marin City's Gateway Retail Center.

Located in Marin County's only predominately African-American community, the shopping center was constructed nearly two decades ago with promising goals that went beyond mere profit: finance community programs and train workers through mall operations. By 1999, however, that promise looked tarnished, with the private and public mall partners at odds with the lack of money flowing from the center and the extent to which community members were employed in mall operations.

Enter the Bay Area Council's Smart Growth Fund, a private equity fund which bought out the private developer in a $20 million deal aimed at restoring the flow of funds from the center and, in five years time, turning ownership completely over to the city through a planned 2008 refinancing.

Smart Growth has partnered with Blake Hunt Ventures of Danville to redevelop and operate the shopping center.

The new plan is twofold. To bolster the first bottom line, financial profit, the Council, working with Marin City Community Land Corp., plans to leverage heavy traffic to the mall's Best Buy by changing the mix of retail tenants around the store and through a redecoration.

To improve the mall's social impact, the partners plan to train community members to hold positions affecting all aspects of the mall's operations rather than throwing them without instruction into mundane jobs like landscaping or collecting rent from the mall's tiniest tenants.

Initially, community members would work in some 10 to 15 mall management jobs across the fields of property management, maintenance and security. They would be assisted by outside contractors until they get up to speed on the work.

But the development partners hope to grow the number of jobs by bolstering mall profits and by forming the operating divisions as independent companies that can eventually go out and find contracts outside the shopping center.

"Over five years, they will have institutionalized what they need to know," said Bay Area Council Executive Vice President Elizabeth Ferguson.