Selling off The City

by Olivia Colt/PNN Race, Poverty and Media Justice Intern

It’s about 8:30 in the morning and I am just about to begin my commute. I see the bus tumbling down the street full of people like myself heading downtown for yet another day of work. I numbly show my pass and shuffle along to find a spot in the midsection. I grab onto a pole and look up, the ad catches my eye, and I begin to read. Discover Neighborhood Treasures: BayView. Each letter pops out, calling to me, D-I-S-C-O-V-E-R the BayView. Will it be like uncovering hidden treasure? The smiling face, a man of color, stares at me, begging me to find the contradiction in his gaze. I look out the window as we lumber up a hill, then the city stands before me.

“There is little to no housing for people who aren’t rich… the idea of destroying the little housing [we have left] is crazy,” Mary Ratcliff, the co-owner and publisher of the Bay View newspaper, friends of POOR/PNN and fellow resistance journalists, relayed to me. Currently, the San Francisco neighborhood of BayView Hunter’s Point is experiencing the beast of redevelopment. It is the last threshold in the City that can allow for major construction, allocation of Federal funds, and has the largest amount of homeownership within city limits. BayView doesn’t get credit for this, however; what it does get credit for is the high rates of infant mortality, gang violence, drug use, and being a predominantly Black neighborhood. With the installation of the new T-Line and a possible stadium for the 49ers on the old Navy shipyard, the landscape of BayView Hunter’s Point is rapidly changing. “People in BayView Hunter’s Point are very cool people, we want diversification, not a re-peopling and pushing out of the current community,” says Ratcliff. I am a product of a gentrified neighborhood in the Western Addition, I agree with Mary Ratcliff, when redevelopment happens where do all the people go?

Bayview Hunter’s Point has been receiving a lot of attention since construction of the light rail began in 2000. Gavin Newsom has signed over two major housing projects for re-development: Alice Griffith (also known as Double Rock) and Hunter’s View. The City has this cowboy, caviler attitude towards the re-development. Instead of using the pool of funding that the Federal government has set aside for the reconstruction of public housing, the current administration has decided to go it alone, thereby allowing for what was once public housing for the poor to become private market-rate housing for the middle and upper classes of San Francisco.

John Stewart Company may be San Francisco based, but nothing about it screams S.F. The company itself is still fairly young, but has a reputation that far surpasses its youth. Started in 1978, John Stewart has had exclusive rights to re-build and maintain a number of housing projects in San Francisco and around the Bay Area. What they say they do is re-develop for the poor, but what they actually do is take the land, displace the people, and flip the project into mixed-income market rate housing. They create a process riddled with false promises, intimidation tactics, dehumanization, income thresholds, impossible deadlines, and discrimination. Vivian Hain, WelfareQUEEN and poverty scholar with POOR Magazine summed up her experience with John Stewart and their application process for housing at both Valencia Gardens in the Mission District and Adalaide Street Housing in Berkeley like this: “[John Stewart Company] set these standards when no one meets these standards they have to fill the spaces to do that they privatize the land and make market rate housing.”

Hain’s experience is one of many. She never did get into those housing projects and for that matter neither the Presidio nor Treasure Island. Laure McElroy, POOR Press author of SystemBitch, has a similar experience, “I was put on the waiting list for three years for Treasure Island before my number came up. They told me my credit wasn’t good enough. I have since been put back on the waiting list and nothing…not one piece of communication.” Both Laure and Vivien have interfaced with representatives of the John Stewart Company. They feel that they were denied housing because they were homeless or had very little money. The day Vivian went to apply for Valencia Gardens, her partner was told by the John Stewart Rep. that a family of five had to make at least thirty thousand a year to meet the income threshold (they made $700.00 a month) to be eligible to receive housing that was, ironically, already designated for low-income folk. Laure didn’t even have an opportunity to apply; the John Stewart Rep. said her federal subsidy could not be used to pay for rent at the new Valencia Gardens. She later found out she was lied to when the developer held a lottery for units specifically set aside for cases such as hers. Jewnbug, co-founder of the F.A.M.I.L.Y. Project, a multigenerational school for children zero to one hundred, summed up her application processes with John Stewart with this statement, “…it felt like a corporation who was not there to serve the people on fixed income, not to provide housing for fixed income folk or people in dire need of housing. They partnered with H.U.D. to get the space but not to give it to the people who need access to housing the most.” John Stewart is exploiting their contractual agreements to make low-income housing for the sole purpose of garnering more profits at the expense, displacement, and lives of poor people.

“I tried to get housing for me, mama dee and my son in several properties owned by John Stewart, but we never passed their strident application process and ridiculous income and credit requirements that are all about whitening San Francisco and displacing poor folks of color,” said Tiny ( aka Lisa Gray-Garcia) poverty scholar, welfareQUEEN and editor at POOR Magazine.

The tentacles of John Stewart reach farther than the application process. Marie Harrison, a former resident of Geneva Towers—a property formerly managed by John Stewart Company—a community activist, environmentalist, and writer for the Bay View had a long conversation with me regarding living at Geneva Towers and her experiences with John Stewart Company. “I lived in the Towers for eight years; on the 17th floor in Tower B… it was during this time that I learned what the word astounding means.” The violations in human rights and decrepit maintenance of these projects are enough to make one’s heart break. The buildings, which were twenty stories high, have since been torn down and the population displaced. The elevators rarely worked and when they did were extremely dangerous: at one point a small child’s finger was chopped off when it got stuck in the door. The water mostly ran a dark brown and muddy color from the faucets; additionally the hot came from the cold and the cold from the hot. The Health Department told John Stewart to supply bottled water; they did so, and locked it up in the basement making it accessible to no one. Residents could not open windows; they experienced extremely low lighting inside and no lighting on the surrounding premises. After a major fire in one of the towers, where a black fireman was killed, authorities discovered the emergency exits were padlocked, which prevented residents from exiting the building safely and out of harms way.

John Stewart announced that they were appalled by the ramifications of their poor maintenance of the facility and vowed to make repairs and clean things up. They never did, and when the Federal government came to do an audit, “all of a sudden all these trucks came from Montgomery Ward with brand new refrigerators and stoves… boxes and boxes… we got so excited until we saw they were going into the empty units,” Marie described to me. The buildings failed the inspection and the company was removed from managing the site. They were, in fact, barred from ever managing a housing project again. “How can you be fired by the Feds, then get to manage low income housing, and then sit on the Board as the Director…” Marie demanded an explanation of the gross negligence that encompassed her stay at Geneva Towers.

Marie makes a great point. How does one get fired and barred from maintaining public housing yet sit as the Director for the Low Income Housing Board both in San Francisco and Washington D.C., then receive exclusive rights to redevelop Hunter’s View? Not to mention all the other housing projects in the Wharf, North Beach, and the Mission that John Stewart Company still manages, especially after committing such careless and flagrant human rights violations. Mary Ratcliff mentioned that at some point during the era of Geneva Towers John Stewart himself said, “ [he] had thirty-five thousand black people under his control in San Francisco.” Thirty-five thousand black people… seems like he was building an empire on the backs of the poor.

This all can not be put solely on John Stewart Company. Everyone has their finger in the pot and is snatching any little piece that they can. Marie Harrison said it best: “stop looking at the people and follow the money.” During the construction of the Third Street Light Rail the City spent upwards to 648 million dollars. Not one penny of that was used in employing people inside of the community, i.e. no local merchants, contractors, or businesses were utilized during the construction in their own community; in other words all the work was outsourced. To add injury to insult, the Federal Government provides subsidies to cities and counties to compensate vendors along major transportation construction, San Francisco did not apply for this money and as a result many businesses along Third had to close or suffered extreme hardship. Many in the community believe that this was part of the City’s plan to push them out because the majority of the businesses and properties are owned by Blacks.

This is not the first time the whole re-development team has gotten together and has tried to pull sneaky moves to reach their objectives. James Tracy, a former Organizer with the Eviction Defense Network, recalls what occurred in the North Beach redevelopment: “the development team (not just John Stewart) tried to negotiate a provision where any extremely low-income unit could be converted to higher income “affordable” units if vacated for any reason. This would have resulted in the supply of available ELI units shrinking over time.” Luckily this didn’t happen. Why? The community organized, got motivated, and beat the developers.

This is not a completely hopeless situation. BayView Hunter’s Point has been built on the foundation of community activism, organizing, and empowerment. This is not the first time the BayView has been threatened. In the 1940s—with racial tensions running high—the community forced the City to not take their housing. “The key to a thriving, but non-gentrified neighborhood is the same no matter where it is: organized communities able to exert power on both public and private entities.” James Tracy is right. Communities united are a much stronger force—stronger than government or big developers because they are the voice and the will of the people. I pick up a cup of coffee from the corner store and watch another MUNI, full of working folk, pass me by; this time the ad is splashed across the side of the transporter. Discover Neighborhood Treasures: BayView!

Come and join us at POOR Magazine’s teach-ins with the residents of the threatened housing projects in Alice Griffith and Hunter’s View in May and be part of the City’s hidden treasure: the thriving, striving, and surviving community that is Hunter’s Point/BayView.