The Ethnic Cleansing of San Francisco: Redevelopment in Bayview-Hunters’ Point
“They want to kick you out so they can build housing they know you can’t afford and allow rich San Franciscans to enjoy it. They don’t feel that poor Blacks or other people of color deserve to have a view like that.”
Alan Goodspeed was a Black man from Marshall, Texas who was my neighbor on the south side of Ocean Avenue in the 1970s. He had moved to San Francisco during WWII, worked as a machinist in the shipyards of Hunter’s Point, bought a home, and raised a family. When Alan passed away a few years ago, there were fewer than 40,000 Black people left in the city. Back in the day when Alan and I changed the oil in our cars in adjoining driveways, there were almost 100,000 Black people in San Francisco.
The ethnic cleansing of the Black population in the city “where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars” is more than halfway to completion.
By the 1980s, the jobs at the shipyards were gone, and the Navy had pulled out, leaving forty years of toxic contaminants behind them and a commitment to clean up their mess some time in the future. Bayview/Hunter’s Point remained an affordable majority-Black neighborhood which had spectacular views of San Francisco Bay, and although it was under-served and largely ignored by City Hall (except for heavy-handed police presence), the neighborhood was hearth and home for thousands of Black Americans.
Today the housing dynamic in San Francisco has changed drastically. A studio rents for $1,800 and a small condo starts at $650,000. Gentrification has metastasized throughout the city, spilling out of the central Victorian neighborhoods into the outlying frontiers like Bayview/Hunter’s Point.
On the part of the shipyard known as Parcel A, bulldozers and scrapers of the Lennar Corporation have flattened a former hillside for new homes and condos. The original plan approved by the City included affordable rental units in the mix. However, Lennar has reneged on that part of the plan, and those units were scrapped.
Very few, if any, of the local residents will be able to afford the new residences and they will be forced out of this last corner of the city as the prices go up around them. And, to add injury to insult, the asbestos dust being raised during construction is making the neighbors sick.
To understand what’s happening today at Hunter’s Point, it is necessary to revisit San Francisco’s Fillmore District in the 1960s. The Fillmore was a center of Black culture in the decades following World War II, and a flourishing home for thousands of Black people, and hundreds of Black-owned markets, auto repair garages, barber shops, salons, restaurants, shoe repair shops, laundromats, night clubs, and apparel stores.
Then came “Urban Renewal” in the guise of a heavily-cloaked real estate operation called the Redevelopment Agency. When the RA was finished, the Fillmore looked like a bombed-out city in an old newsreel. And that’s exactly what it was, displaced residents and all. As the RA smashed homes and businesses, it issued thousands of certificates of preference to the people of the Fillmore. These certificates gave displaced businesses and families promises of preference for renting or buying other RA property in the city, and the right to return to the neighborhood from which they’d been evicted. Of the 883 certificates given to Black-owned businesses, only 39 resulted in other business locations. Of the 4,719 certificates given to families, only 1,099 certificates put families in other homes. Somehow, the Redevelopment Agency lost contact with the rest.
Today, the Fillmore is almost completely gentrified. However, a pocket of Black families remains in the neighborhood with just enough young Black men to be targeted for a gang injunction from the City Attorney.
It’s no secret that there appears to be a national program to target, arrest and warehouse young Black men into the prison industrial complex across the United States. Aside from the genocidal effect of this proactive criminalization of an entire generation, the program also serves as a convenient method for clearing out the soon-to-be-lucrative neighborhoods of the former “inner cities”—neighborhoods designed to provide potential profit for hungry real estate and investment industries.
A recent study found that San Francisco police arrest African-Americans at a higher rate than any other city in California, even as the number of Black people living in the city diminishes. And, in keeping with the national dismemberment of the Constitution, the City Attorney has sought gang injunctions against African American alleged gangs in the Fillmore, along with some “gangs” in the Mission. Last year, the first injunction was granted against the “Oakdale Mob” in Bayview/Hunter’s Point.
Under these injunctions, alleged members of the gangs are prohibited from meeting with each other in designated geographic locations, like, say, their own neighborhoods, a tactic that literally drives non-white residents out of their own neighborhoods. The irony of these court-ordered gang injunctions is that the most powerful and ruthless gang in San Francisco is glaringly absent from the City Attorney’s list: the Downtown Gang, also known as the AWDG (All White Downtown Gang), which virtually controls all public policy in San Francisco, including who will live in the City and who will not.
Who’s in the Downtown Gang? Pick a politician, check out the big-buck contributors, and see whether the politician’s policies benefit private profit or the public good.
A textbook example is the mayor, Gavin Newsom, who pulls the levers and pushes the buttons for the policies of the AWDG. As a supervisor, Newsom made his bones for the AWDG by placing his “Care Not Cash” proposition on the ballot, which would solve the problem of homeless people by slashing monthly payments from $395 to $59 in return for a proposed system of “care.” The proposition would have flopped without the big-buck effort behind it.
The campaign for the proposition, known to homeless advocates as “Neither Care Nor Cash,” was funded by SFSOS, which was founded by Warren Hellman, heir to the Wells Fargo fortune, Donald Fisher, sweatshop king of the Gap/Banana Republic/Old Navy clothing empire, and Diane Feinstein. Other supporters included financial heavy hitters like Charles Schwab, and Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, the war profiteer. SFSOS also opposed the living wage campaign and tenant protection and supported charterizing public schools.
As Election Day 2003 neared, it became apparent that Democrat Newsom was barely ahead of Green Party’s Matt Gonzalez, even though he was outspending him by a 10 to one margin. The possibility of a Green becoming mayor so terrified the AWDG that the gang pulled out all of the stops, even calling in Bill Clinton. Feinstein and Pelosi hit the phones. George Shultz, a Republican flush with new-found Bechtel riches from Iraq, opened his wallet, as did the heirs to the Getty oil fortune who were Newsom’s original sponsors. Republicans Charles Schwab and Donald Fisher wrote checks. The Swig and Shorenstein families, real estate developers who had underwritten the activities of Democrats for years, dialed in their dollars.
Of course, Newsom won and policies favored by the AWDG continue to flourish during his regime, like the quick construction of Parcel A, regardless of the health of the residents near this toxic site. Lennar has been cited multiple times for failing to monitor and control asbestos dust during grading, but the project was never shut down to correct any non-compliant operations. Neighborhood organizations went to City Hall this year to unsuccessfully request that the City red-tag the site until safety measures could be enforced.
Meanwhile, the AWDG also continues to target existing public housing for privatization.
The situation at Hunter’s View, a public housing project in the Hunter’s Point/Bayview neighborhood with a scenic view of the Bay, is a classic example of how politicians, developers, and financial interests work together to achieve their respective ends of power and profit at the expense of people. In 1997, a grandmother and five children burned to death in there because the smoke detectors didn’t work. A recent inspection found that 64% of the units still had non-functioning smoke detectors.
Here’s how privatization for profit works: first) don’t maintain anything, let everything deteriorate; second) throw up your hands in dismay of ever being able to repair anything with the meager public funds available; third) call in private developers and their bankers to “help out’; fourth) evict the residents because by now everything has to be torn down, and fifth) build units to buy, not to rent, that the evicted residents can’t afford.
The patron saint of privatization is Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, known to some locals as “Nancy Privatisi” for her landmark work in taking the 1,200 acres of public land in the Presidio and placing it into private hands. Even the Chronicle noted that the Presidio was “the first privatized national park in the United States.”
One of the founding directors of the Presidio Trust was Donald Fisher, appointed by Bill Clinton. Fisher is a major contributor to Pelosi’s campaign fund, as well as being a Republican and charter member of the SFSOS and AWDG. Next, with Pelosi’s help, Fisher is going to construct a museum to himself—excuse me—for his art collection, in the Presidio.
Recently, Newsom has been seen cruising Hunter’s View with developers from the AWDG. Hunter’s View is a perfect candidate for privatization: it has a view that yuppies will pay big bucks for, and it’s sufficiently deteriorated to warrant complete leveling.
In response to a Chronicle series about the dire living situation at Hunter’s View, Pelosi announced that the Democrats had not only increased funding for public housing, but that their $1 million allotment for Hunter’s View would create “one-for-one replacement of 267 public housing units” with “new affordable rental units,” and “market rate homes.”
Sound familiar? Sounds like Lennar’s original plan for the shipyards. Sounds like the Fillmore.
Don
