A San Francisco infrastructure project shows the potential for creating good jobs that can preserve and strengthen a marginalized community.
Bayview-Hunters Point, a low-lying, four-square-mile pitch of southeast San Francisco, has seen its fair share of transition, and even drama. Occupied by the Ohlone people before the arrival of the Spanish, it once hosted slaughterhouses that fed the city’s growing population. To support the wars of the 20th century, the Navy made dramatic investments in the shipbuilding industry there. And in 1982, long before Candlestick Park was turned into dust, Dwight Clark made a miraculous endzone catch to bring home a championship to a city that badly needed some good news.
During the Great Migration, blacks came to the region on the promise of good blue-collar jobs at the shipyards, and “the Bayview,” as the community is known to locals, became a bastion of black home ownership. Even today, as the community continues to reckon with crime and poverty, the area’s majority of black and Asian-American residents forge strong and diverse social networks bound by churches, neighborhood groups, youth organizations and community gardens.
Now the Bayview is undergoing yet another transition. Massive real estate projects on the sites of the decommissioned Navy shipyard and Candlestick Park are bringing thousands of new homes and associated commercial activity, signaled by the appearance of craft breweries, coffeehouses and rising real-estate prices that are displacing long-time residents. This is happening even as the realities of environmental injustice continue to burden the community. Only recently were its gas-fired power plants shut off, and questions around remediation of a former Navy radiation lab remind everyone of the public-health risks the community has long grappled with.
GOVERNING.COM
by Jayant Kairam | Contributor
JUNE 4, 2018