They said it couldn’t be done, but in less than three weeks, more than 7,000 San Franciscans have signed the petition to stop the Redevelopment Agency from grabbing and “repeopling” Bayview Hunters Point. At that rate, we’ll have the needed 30,000 signatures (21,000 plus a cushion) well before the Aug. 21 deadline.
At Juneteenth and every day on Third Street, people are literally lining up to sign. Black folks need no explanation; no mo’ Fillmore is in our blood.

A rumor’s going around that Daddy Big Bucks is funding the petition drive. No! We’ve been blessed by getting the printing and other costs on credit; but now the bills are coming due, and only a few small contributions have come in. Please help if you can.

This petition is for a referendum. According to the law, once sufficient signatures are validated, the Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan goes back to the Supervisors for reconsideration first. If a majority approves it again, it goes to the voters. But if six or more Supervisors vote against it—two more than in May—the land grab plan is dead.

As soon as Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff spoke to a Juneteenth crowd of 12,000 Sunday, people lined up to sign the Stop Redevelopment petition.

Supervisors will have to decide: Is it more racist to oppose District 10 Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, the lone African American on the board, who supports the Redevelopment Plan, or to support the ethnic cleansing of Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco’s Black heartland, where people of color are 91 percent of the population?

Supervisors will have to decide whether they support the Redevelopment Agency—on this issue or any other? Supporting Redevelopment means supporting ethnic cleansing; a state Redevelopment brochure published a few years ago lists “repeopling” of neighborhoods as a primary goal.

“The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, incorporated August 10, 1948, was established for the purpose of improving the environment of the City and creating better urban living conditions through the removal of blight.” That’s the first sentence on the agency’s homepage. And Ebony Colbert told us what blight really means: “Blight means Black,” she wrote in a classic editorial on March 1.

Redevelopment land grabs are plaguing Black and Brown communities all over the state. And other state and local agencies play supporting roles, obeying the same satanic commandment: to rid the cities of the poor and people of color, with Black folks first in line. Here’s how ethnic cleansing is working right now in Bayview Hunters Point:

• Police act like an occupying force and treat us like Iraqi “insurgents.”
• Muni has locked us out of $600 million in Third Street light rail construction, a major component of which, the huge maintenance facility at 23rd and Illinois that this paper campaigned for as an on-the-job training program for our people, is under construction right now without us.
• The School District and School Board close or threaten every year to close some of our most cherished schools.
• The Housing Authority creates homelessness by evicting tenants without a hearing, boarding up hundreds of apartments and forcing families who amply qualify into shelters or out onto the street.

It wasn’t Redevelopment but rather an evil land speculator with the help of the City of Los Angeles—and the same racist attitude—that grabbed South Central Farm, evicted the farmers from 130 family farms and bulldozed the land that fed their bodies and souls.

The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, too, however, is up to the same wicked tricks typical of such agencies statewide. In Leimert Park, a Black arts mecca much like the Fillmore once was, where the POCC holds events at Club Chaos, red-lettered “Save Leimert!” signs are posted everywhere in opposition to a new Redevelopment “master plan,” www.saveleimert.org.

Check out the pictures here that back up this statement by the family of legendary Black character actor Nick Stewart about Redevelopment’s demolition of his block-long Ebony Showcase Theatre: “In 1996, the Stewarts, pioneers who brought the first legitimate theatre to their community in 1950 when legitimate theatre was unknown, were sued by the Community Redevelopment Agency, which declared the area to be the Mid City Redevelopment Project. At first, the Stewarts fought successfully to save the theatre from demolition by the Redevelopment Agency. But on Sept. 3, in spite of public pronouncements by City Councilman Nate Holden and the CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) that the Redevelopment Agency was “saving” the “Ebony Showcase Theater,” the CRA moved quickly to demolish the building in a few hours.” The Stewarts call it “a LAND GRAB and redistribution of private property.”

Is Redevelopment’s track record in San Francisco any better? Last Monday, a discussion featuring Redevelopment Director Marcia Rosen on KALW’s City Visions talk show produced some important revelations:

• Redevelopment’s official excuse for extending the Hunters Point Project Area for another 30 years is that the agency has been unable to eliminate “blight” in the project area’s first 30 years.
• Crime counts as “blight” in Redevelopment terms, and the city’s highest murder rate is in the Western Addition (formerly known as the Fillmore), where Redevelopment has been in control for nearly 30 years.
• King-Garvey (Martin Luther King-Marcus Garvey Square Cooperative Apartments, Inc.) resident Sharon Jones called in and said, as summarized later in an email, Redevelopment “ran my cooperative through the wringer for an entire year, working with HUD to try and force us to agree to sell two blocks of property (owned by low- and moderate-income mainly minority, female, senior residents) that has at full occupancy and current rates an annual rental income of $4.5 million for the price of one two-bedroom condo in our neighborhood ($550,000) to be divided among 211 Shareholders.”

Even Charlie Walker, in an interview broadcast live from Juneteenth on KPOO, called anyone foolish who believes that Hunters Point Shipyard “Master Developer” Lennar will really spend $30 million for the benefit of a Black community. The Shipyard, besides being a federal Superfund site, is a Redevelopment Project Area.

Now, dear Supervisors, where is the “divided Bayview Hunters Point community,” the excuse some of you relied on to vote in favor giving the Redevelopment Agency the right to determine our destiny?

As I’ve said before and will say again, we want and deserve the right to develop our own community. We can use City Hall’s help to stop lenders from redlining—denying loans because of the borrower’s race or location—so we can fund our development plans and put our community to work, the best and only real way to stop the killings.

Funding to build or renovate affordable housing can even come from Redevelopment, which explains on the home page of its website: “The Agency also provides local funding for the development of affordable housing throughout the City.” In other words, Redevelopment can fund affordable housing in a neighborhood without taking control of it as a project area.

Bayview Hunters Point needs development—but not Redevelopment. We can and we will do it ourselves. I have many more arguments if these haven’t persuaded you, Supervisors. We’ll talk again soon. Meanwhile, I invite you to join your constituents and sign our petition.

This article was printed by permission of the San Francisco Bay View. Contact Willie Ratcliff at publisher@sfbayview.com or (415)671-0789 to sign or circulate the petition or to contribute to the cause.

Willie

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