Working For Jobs

by Rachel Waldholz.

The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard covers 500 acres on San Francisco’s southeastern flank, jutting out into the bay like the fletching of a giant arrow. Acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1940, it was once one of the
West Coast’s largest shipyards, at its World War II peak employing up to 17,000 people, many of them African Americans who settled nearby. The Navy ended its work at the Shipyard in 1974, devastating the local economy, and it was eventually listed for cleanup as a Superfund-equivalent site. These days, it’s a rusting city unto itself, its drydock and warehouses abandoned. For a long time, its only tenants were the city’s crime lab and artists drawn by the cheap space and haunting surroundings: a boarded-up diner, its Pepsi sign intact; the giant crane where the Navy once tested rockets; deserted labs that hosted radiological experiments.

As one of the largest chunks of vacant land left in San Francisco—
which has some of the highest land values and housing costs in the
country—the shipyard represents an immense opportunity. And so last
summer, after decades of wrangling and neglect, the San Francisco Board
of Supervisors approved an ambitious redevelopment plan for the site. If
completed, it will be one of the largest developments here since the
creation of Golden Gate Park—and perhaps the most contentious.

The city has hired Florida-based Lennar Corp., a major housing
developer, to transform the site. Lennar’s plan calls for 10,500 new
housing units, and space for retail and artists’ studios. It’s
chock-full of green goodies: parks, mass transit upgrades, and a “green
tech” campus. Thirty-two percent of the housing will be sold at prices
well below the city’s sky-high market rates. It’s the kind of mixed-use,
mixed-income development that sprawl-weary environmentalists have
cheered from Denver to Portland—dense, transit-oriented, and built on
reclaimed brownfields near the city center.

But many locals have received the plan with deep ambivalence. “The
project is flawed from stem to stern,” says Saul Bloom, executive
director of Arc Ecology. The local nonprofit has advocated for the
Shipyard’s cleanup and redevelopment since 1984, but contends that the
current plan won’t benefit the community.

Bayview Hunters Point, which wraps around the Shipyard, is the last
of San Francisco’s historically black neighborhoods. Rows of modest,
pastel-colored houses march up its hills, with breathtaking views of the
bay. But it is among the city’s poorest communities. Before the
recession, the unemployment rate reached 10 percent. Activists and city
officials estimate it could now be as high as 30 percent, compared to
9.1 percent citywide. The neighborhood hosts a panoply of polluting
industries besides the shipyard. An aging sewage treatment plant
processes two thirds of the peninsula’s waste on a residential street,
and a dense commercial district houses everything from plastics
manufacturers to commercial drycleaners. Until 2006, when local pressure
shut it down, one of California’s oldest power plants sat at Bayview’s
edge. All this has contributed to some alarming health statistics: More
than 15 percent of the community’s kids have asthma, compared to 5.6
percent of Americans nationally. Hospitalization rates for chronic
illness are three times the state average, and breast and cervical
cancer rates high.

But the industries that have so burdened the neighborhood have also,
to some extent, sheltered it, keeping housing relatively affordable as
rising prices forced low-income residents out of other neighborhoods.
For decades, activists urged the city to redevelop the shipyard, hoping
it could revive the neighborhood’s economy. Now that redevelopment is
finally under way, though, many worry that it’s come at too high a cost.

If the typical environmental justice story involves a poor community
of color living in the shadow of toxic industry, Bayview is the next
chapter. What happens after the mess is cleaned up? From New York City
to Denver to Seattle, sustainable redevelopment projects promise to
address festering issues of environmental injustice. But instead of
delivering economic lifelines to struggling communities, they often
threaten to displace the very residents who for years endured the
burdens of pollution and fought to relieve it.

In recent years, a growing number of cities have adopted “smart
growth” policies aimed at encouraging infill—the development of
unused space within city limits. And in 2009, the Obama administration
announced a major shift in federal policy—which it dubbed the Partnership for Sustainable Communities—to push more cities to adopt
such codes. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency,
Department of Transportation, and Department of Housing and Urban
Development will work in tandem to direct federal money to projects that
curb sprawl and are close to mass transit.

In booming cities, old industrial sites, railyards, shipyards, and
decommissioned military bases are frequently among the last large empty
spaces ripe for infill. The communities near these sites are often
low-income. Like Bayview, many have weathered the economic and
environmental blows of declining industries and their toxic legacies.
Now, they find themselves caught between hope for much-needed investment
and fear of the change it might bring.

“One of the complaints about the (smart growth) movement has been,
‘It’s always upscale, it’s expensive, it drives people out,’” says John
Frece, the director of the EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities. To
prevent displacement, federal funding for smart-growth projects through
the Partnership includes requirements for affordable housing,
job-training programs, and community engagement in the planning process.
The administration’s goal, Frece says, is to make sure communities
aren’t “penalized just because their environmental problems get cleaned
up.”

Accomplishing that, though, isn’t easy. Says Malo Hutson, assistant
professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, “You would get
the Nobel Prize in Economics—or Peace—if you could figure out a
way to keep the community that existed before the redevelopment project
came along.”

In Bayview, the debate over redevelopment has been
heated. After 30 years of neglect, many residents welcome the project,
with its promise of jobs and amenities in a neighborhood with few
stores, no major supermarket, struggling schools, and limited access to
public transit. But others say the job projections are unrealistic, the
plan doesn’t include enough affordable housing, and most of what it does
include is still too pricey for the average resident.

“If I see one more report on how sustainable our developments are,
the top of my head’s going to come off,” says Arc Ecology’s Bloom. A New
York native with a grizzled ponytail, Bloom organized against the
Vietnam War, in the labor movement, and once tried to fly a hot air
balloon into the Nevada Test Site to stop a bomb test. Now, he’s among
the leading critics of the city and Lennar Corp. “I support development
on the site. There’s no question about it: This community needs
development,” he says. “But we’re talking about smart development.”

Compounding the economic worries, some doubt that the Shipyard will
be fully cleaned up and fear that the construction itself could put
local residents at risk. (The EPA insists that it will not.) The
Shipyard houses the typical detritus of heavy industry—plumes of
solvents in groundwater, PCBs, lead, and chromium from metalwork—as
well as more bizarre souvenirs of its days as one of the Navy’s
radiological testing laboratories. Ships exposed to radiation during
nuclear tests in the Pacific were towed to Hunters Point for study, and
animals as large as cows were irradiated to observe the effects of
fallout.

The Navy is responsible for cleanup, under the oversight of the EPA
and the state of California. Parts of the Shipyard will be cleaned to
residential standards; one of the most contaminated sections, a former
landfill along the waterfront, will be partially excavated, and then
capped and topped with a park. In 2004, the Navy handed over the first
parcel of land to the city; the full cleanup is set to be completed by
2018—29 years after it was listed for cleanup.

Lennar, meanwhile, has not endeared itself to the neighborhood.
Starting in 2008, a subcontractor for the company did heavy grading that
kicked up clouds of dust, including puffs of pulverized serpentine,
which contains naturally occurring asbestos. Local activists maintain
that the dust caused nosebleeds and rashes. And assurances from the EPA,
San Francisco Department of Public Health, and Bay Area Air Quality
Management District that it did not pose a health risk have done little
to alleviate their concerns. In the San Francisco Bay View, a local
paper that calls itself “the voice of Black Liberation,” Bayview
resident and physician Ahimsa Sumchai wrote that the development would
have such significant health impacts and displace so many black
residents that it “meets the UN standard definition of genocide.”

This kind of hyperbole and caustic distrust has its own backstory. In
the 1940s, African Americans began moving to San Francisco as part of
the Great Migration from the South. The Shipyard was a major employer,
and one of the few in the area that hired black workers. Even after
World War II, it continued to employ some 7,000 workers, and Bayview
developed into a solid blue-collar black neighborhood. By the 1960s, it
had one of the highest rates of homeownership in the city, a distinction
it retains. Many of the city’s neighborhoods had property covenants
barring minority buyers or renters; Bayview was one of the only ones
that welcomed African Americans.

“There were areas in San Francisco when we moved here that the only black person’s face that you saw were the ones working in the houses, doing childcare or housecleaning or cooking,” says Marie Harrison, a 44-year resident of Bayview, and a community organizer with the environmental justice group Greenaction who helped spearhead the campaign that led to the decommissioning of PG&E’s local power plant in 2006. “The only place for us to live was in the Fillmore or in the Bayview.”

Talk to anyone about the new development in Bayview, and pretty soon
they will mention the Fillmore. Known as the “Harlem of the West” for
its bustling black-owned business district and burgeoning jazz scene,
the neighborhood was razed in the ‘60s as part of San Francisco’s “urban
renewal” campaign. It was one of many anti-blight drives that swept
through cities at the time, earning the bitter nickname “black people
removal.” The land sat vacant for years, and many Fillmore residents
moved to Bayview. The Fillmore leveling was among the first projects of
the nascent San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, now tasked with
redeveloping the Shipyard.

The agency has come a long way since then. In an interview at its
office downtown, Thor Kaslofsky and Wells Lawson, the city’s two point
men on the project, listed Bayview’s environmental justice issues and
discussed San Francisco’s history of African-American flight as well as
any activist. They say the city has bent over backwards to ensure that
Bayview residents have a voice in the development—and a chance to
benefit from it.

“Gentrification issues are really a significant concern for the
city,” says Lawson, who coordinates the project for the Mayor’s Office
of Economic and Workforce Development. “(But) we do want the land values
to increase in this area. That’s the premise of redevelopment,
fundamentally: to take what’s blighted and use public investment to
increase the land value. The question then is, how do you maintain
neighborhood stability?”

The city is attacking the problem with a suite of programs designed
to prepare local residents, homeowners, and businesses to, as Lawson puts
it, “ride the wave” of rising costs of living. The hope is that the
jobs the build-out generates, primarily in construction, will raise
local incomes alongside property values. The project includes a program
to help local developers get contracts at the site, and requires outside
contractors to make a “good faith effort” to hire locals.

Additionally, the city and Lennar have assembled an $83 million
“community benefits agreement.” It includes $20 million to help
homeowners retain and upgrade their homes and $9 million in job training
programs to help locals get jobs during the build-out and afterwards,
in the businesses the city hopes will follow. There’s also money for
pediatric health programs and college scholarships. Perhaps most
importantly, 32 percent of the housing units built will be sold below
market rate. (The proportion was raised from 21 percent after local
activists put up a fierce fight.) In fact, San Francisco has already put
in place many of the measures pushed by the Obama administration’s
Partnership for Sustainable Communities.

Despite all this, Marie Harrison remains deeply skeptical. “(They)
promise these young folks: ‘This time, we’re gonna give you jobs, we’re
gonna train you, and you’re gonna be able to buy these houses.’” But,
she says, many Bayview residents simply lack the necessary skills or
education to take the jobs that will be available. And similar promises
have gone unfulfilled in the past. In 2004, the city began construction
of a light-rail line down Third Street, the neighborhood’s main commercial
corridor. Construction was supposed to create jobs and reinvigorate the
struggling business strip. But almost no local residents were hired.
Only after activists, including Harrison, raised a fuss, were some
locals hired to handle traffic signs for short stints. The experience
embittered many. “I cry when I hear my folks going through this,”
Harrison says. “It is just miserable for them.”

Bayview has seen intense gentrification in the past 10 years. This is
consistent with national trends—more affluent Americans are
increasingly returning to city cores—and is, in part, a result of
land speculation in anticipation of the redevelopment. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the median price of a single-family home in
Bayview rose from $129,000 in 1996 to $570,000 in 2008, a faster
increase than any other neighborhood in the city; some houses on the new
light-rail line jumped from $200,000 to $800,000 over the same of the
period. (The housing bust erased some of those gains.) Activists like
Harrison see these figures as harbingers of what future development will
bring. They agree that, in the long term, the project will help
revitalize the community—but what community will be there then?

Despite their determination to maintain neighborhood stability,
Kaslofsky and Lawson acknowledge that change is coming. Bayview will not
be the same place 20 years from now, they say—and they insist that’s
a good thing.

“From my personal perspective,” Lawson says, “the real community
champions in this neighborhood are the ones who basically focus on, ‘I
want to be able to raise my kid in this area, and I don’t care what has
to change to make that happen, I don’t want it to stay the way it is.’”

“Invasion and succession—in planning speak—is a very natural urban ecological thing.”

Of course, how natural it feels depends on which side of the invasion you’re on.

Displacement in Bayview today happens in a different way than in the
days of the Fillmore. Many Bayview residents live in subsidized housing
or own their own homes, so they’re not at risk from rising rents.
Instead, say Bloom and Harrison, the younger generation is moving out
because they can’t afford to buy homes. And some longtime homeowners,
who waited decades to see their homes appreciate, are now selling. But
because what they sell for isn’t enough to buy a house elsewhere in San
Francisco, they are leaving the city. Only the more affluent can afford
to buy in.

Marie Harrison’s family is Exhibit A. She owns her home and has
raised three children, seven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren
in the neighborhood. But when her son and his wife wanted to buy a
house, they couldn’t afford anything in Bayview. They moved 80 miles
away to Stockton, Calif., instead.

In 2000, Bayview was about 48 percent black—down from 65 percent
in 1990. That figure has continued to decline. In 2010, the city as a
whole was only 6 percent black, down from 13 percent in 1970. San
Francisco lost 10,000 black residents in the last decade; Antioch, an
hour inland, gained nearly that many, a 114 percent increase. Many of
the Bay Area’s outer-ring communities have grown rapidly, attracting
lower-income black and Latino residents, who move where their money buys
more space while continuing to work in the city. San Francisco isn’t
alone in this trend. You can find lower-income exurbs growing, says
Berkeley professor Hutson, “from Seattle to San Diego.”

Many Bayview residents do support the development.
“If they are able to do just what they say, I’d be pretty pleased,” says
Angelo King, a resident for 13 years. King chairs the Project Area
Committee, a volunteer citizens’ advisory board to the Redevelopment
Agency. He believes the project could revitalize a stagnating economy
while locking in middle-class housing in a city that sorely needs it.

The current situation is untenable, King says: Already-high property
values will continue to rise, with or without redevelopment. The demand
for housing in San Francisco is simply too great for Bayview to remain
unaffected. Meanwhile, those who can afford to leave have been doing so
for years, frustrated by the neighborhood’s struggling schools,
isolation, and lack of amenities.

“We don’t have a problem with subsidized housing—we have more than
any other ZIP Code in the damn city. We have a problem with
middle-class housing,” King says, noting that he can’t afford to buy in.
“There is housing for people who have not and who have. But if you live
with your wife and you make $110,000, you don’t have a place in
Bayview. You don’t have a place in the whole city.”

And Fred Blackwell, chief of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,
says the city’s plan is the only viable option. “There are a lot of
novel ideas out there. (But) I haven’t seen another one that works from a
financial point of view.” San Francisco lacks the funds to develop the
site on its own, he says. Redevelopment projects like the Shipyard
require a developer with the ability to invest a lot of money up front.
And it’s the massive amount of market-rate housing which subsidizes the
cheaper units. The Shipyard needs basic infrastructure—grading,
roads, sewers, streetlights—which Lennar will have to pay for before
it turns a profit. Once the infrastructure is built and property values
start to rise, the money the city collects in increased property taxes
will be directed to the Redevelopment Agency to fund further investments
—that’s where the funding for most of the affordable housing comes
from, as well as for community benefits like job training.

Arc Ecology, however, remains steadfast in its disapproval of the
city’s plan. Bloom argues that the city chose a conventional developer,
endorsed its “off-the-shelf” plan, and then tacked on benefits to
mitigate its impacts. He sees it as a missed opportunity to think more
creatively about how to build a more sustainable—and fair—
community. During the planning process, Arc Ecology proposed a “green
maritime” industrial and research center to take advantage of local job
skills and one of the country’s great deepwater ports, and return the
shipyard to its role as the area’s economic engine. And Bloom suggested
the city pay homeowners to turn single-family houses into multiple
units, which he argues would increase density and local incomes, and
generate the same amount of housing faster and more cheaply.

It’s admittedly unclear that such a plan could materialize. But the
same could be said of the city’s plan for a green tech center, its major
hope for generating jobs. So far, the proposal has no definite takers.

The Board of Supervisors voted to approve the current plan in August
2010, but Bloom and Harrison still hope to amend it. Harrison’s
Greenaction has sued the city, arguing that the environmental impact
report approved by the Board does not adequately address possible harm
to local residents during cleanup and construction at the site. Bloom
hopes that with the upcoming mayoral election, the political winds could
shift, or that economic factors could persuade the city to consider
changes. “If there’s anything true about development, it’s that what you
see on paper isn’t what gets built,” he says. “Things change, markets
change, opportunities change.”

For the moment, construction at the site is stalled, tied up by lawsuits and the unfavorable economy.

“You’re walking through housing right now,” says
Bloom. In fact, we are walking through Candlestick Point State Park, the
only major green space near Bayview. The park, which sits on a spit of
land just south of the shipyard, wraps around the 49ers football
stadium, hugging the shoreline. Under the city’s plan, housing will
replace the stadium and part of the park. The city argues that the
additional land is needed to make the development financially viable.
Besides, the park is hardly untouched wilderness, project supporters
say.

But, says Bloom, spreading his arms, “In this part of town, this is
the best you get.” And it’s a surprisingly tranquil place. Birds chatter
in the manzanita and Monterey pines. The bay itself stretches
splendidly away, and, to the south, fog hugs the hills.

Bloom worries that the plan will effectively turn the remaining park
from the area’s only real open space into a private park for the
residents of the new condominiums. To him, it’s indicative of the
problem at the heart of the whole project. “It’s not oriented towards
this community,” he says. “It’s a completely different community that
they plan to build.”

This article originally appeared in the May 31, 2011 issue of High Country News.

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