Ethnic Cleansing in San Francisco
by Don Santina
"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."
- Appolonia Jordan, San Francisco Bayview
Alan Goodspeed was my next door neighbor in the
Ingleside District on the south side of Ocean Avenue in San Francisco. He was a
Black man from Marshall, Texas, who had moved to San Francisco during WWII and
worked as a machinist for twenty five years in the shipyards of Hunters Point.
Within that time, he bought a home and raised a family.
"There are
probably less than 40,000 Black people left in the city."
When Alan passed away a few years ago, working
class Black people had already become an endangered species in San
Francisco. According to a 2005
demographic study, there are probably less 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 and jawed about whether Muhammad Ali would regain the title, there
were almost 100,000 black people in San Francisco.
So, here in 2007, ethnic cleansing of the Black
population in the city "where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars" is
more than halfway to completion.
The Jobs at the Hunter's Point Ship Yards
By 1974, most the 8,500 jobs at the shipyards
created during World War II were gone, and a decade later a petulant Navy
scotched plans to homeport the nuclear-armed USS Missouri when City officials
objected to footing the bill with no job guarantees for locals. The shipyards were closed, and the Navy
pulled out, leaving forty years of highly toxic contaminants behind them, and a
commitment to clean up their mess some time in the future.
Even as jobs at the shipyards were drying up,
the Hunter's Point-Bayview neighborhood was a majority Black neighborhood, a
vibrant community in southwestern San Francisco which was affordable and had
spectacular views of San Francisco Bay.
The slaughterhouses of "Butchertown" were gone, along with most of the
auto wreckers, and although it was underserved and largely ignored by City
officialdom (except for heavy-handed police presence), the neighborhood was
hearth and home for thousands of Black Americans.
Gentrification Rears its Ugly Head
Fast forward twenty years from the Navy's
retreat. San Francisco's housing dynamic has changed drastically. Home prices and rents have skyrocketed. A
studio rents for $1,800 and a small condo fetches $650,000 to $800,000. The City's light industry has disappeared,
and, while most of the dot commers dot come and dot gone, they were replaced by
a new urban class of middle managers, hedge fund hustlers, fashion designers,
bio-meds, money changers, paper brokers, and techies of all persuasions.
Gentrification has metastasized throughout the City, spilling out of the
central Victorian neighborhoods into the outlying frontiers, like Hunter's
Point/Bayview.
"A studio
rents for $1,800 and a small condo fetches $650,000 to $800,000."
Consequently, the public lands on which the
shipyards once stood provided both lucrative opportunities for developers and
desirable potential properties for the new yuppie class.
On the part of the shipyard now known as Parcel
A, the bulldozers, scrapers and graders of the Lennar Corporation are hard at
work, flattening a former hillside for new homes and condos. The original plan approved by the City
included affordable rental units in the mix.
However, those units have now been scrapped. Lennar reneged on the
affordable housing part of the plan, claiming a lack of profitability.
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.
Dress Rehearsal in the Fillmore
To understand what's happening today at Hunter's
Point, it is necessary to understand what happened in San Francisco's Fillmore
District in the 1960's and 1970's. The
Fillmore, often called the "Harlem of the West," was a center of Black culture
in the decades following World War II.
Like Tulsa in the early 1920's, the Fillmore was 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. Among
those businesses was the legendary Jimbo's Bop City, which featured
performances by jazz immortals like Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles
Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane.
And then came something called Urban Renewal in
the guise of a heavily-cloaked urban real estate operation called the
Redevelopment Agency. When the RA was
finished, the Fillmore was gone. The bulldozers had smashed and leveled block
after block after block. The fabulous Fillmore looked like a bombed-out city in
an old newsreel. And that's exactly
what it was, displaced residents and all.
The people who lived in the Fillmore were dispersed to the East Bay
cities of Oakland, Richmond, and to Hunter's Point/Bayview. As the Redevelopment Agency smashed homes
and businesses, it issued thousands of certificates of preference to the people
of the Fillmore. These certificates were documents which gave the displaced
businesses and families a promise of preference for renting or buying other
redevelopment property within the City and the right to return to the neighborhood
from which they'd been evicted.
"The people who lived in the Fillmore were dispersed to
the East Bay cities of Oakland, Richmond, and to Hunter's Point/Bayview."
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 3,055 families and 590 businesses which held
certificates of preference.
Today, the Fillmore is almost completely
gentrified. Much of the neighborhood
has been condo-ized and yuppified, replete with foo-foo restaurants and ersatz
jazz festivals. However, a pocket of Black families remain in the neighborhood
with enough young Black men to be targeted for a gang injunction from the City
Attorney.
The Gangs of San Francisco
Most observers of Urban America agree that there
appears to be a national program to target, arrest and warehouse young Black
men into the "criminal justice" - that is, prison industrial complex - system
across the United States. Aside from
the near genocidal effect of the proactive criminalization of an entire
generation, this program also serves as a convenient method for clearing out
the soon-to-be-lucrative neighborhoods of the former "inner cities,"
neighborhoods which will provide potential profit for hungry real estate and
investment industries.
"San Francisco police arrest African-Americans at a
higher rate than any other city in California."
The City of Saint Francis is no exception to the
rule. 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. However, it seems that the
simple policy of arresting young Black men is not efficient enough to move them
out of town. They must also be kept from gathering in their own
neighborhoods. Accordingly--in keeping
with the continuing national dismemberment of the Constitution--the City
Attorney of San Francisco has sought gang injunctions against a list of African
American gangs in the Fillmore known as Eddy Rock, Chopper City, and Knockout
Posse, along with some "gangs" in the Mission. Last year, the first injunction
was granted against the alleged "Oakdale Mob" in Hunter's Point/Bayview.
Under these injunctions, alleged members of the
alleged gangs are prohibited from meeting with each other in designated
geographic locations, like, uh, their own neighborhoods. Aside from the questionable
constitutionality of these injunctions, the fact remains that these injunctions
literally drive non-white residents out of their own neighborhoods.
For the local folks who have some idea of what's
going on, the irony of these court-ordered gang injunctions is that the most
powerful, ruthless, and rapacious gang in San Francisco is glaringly absent
from the City Attorney's list.
The Downtown Gang (AWDG)
Not surprisingly, the City Attorney's injunction
list did not include the Downtown Gang, also known as the AWDG (All White
Downtown Gang). These gang members virtually control all public policy in San
Francisco, including who will live in the City and who will not.
How does one identify members of the Downtown
Gang? Well, for starters, like members
of all gangs, the AWDG hang out together: at museum galas, society do's, first
nighters at the opera and the symphony, parties in Pacific Heights, winter in
Tahoe, and so forth. But the best way
to ID them is to use the old-fashioned follow-the-money method. Pick a
politician, check out the big buck contributors, and then see whether the
politician's policies benefit private sector profit or the public good. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to find a
political spear carrier for the AWDG and then the AWDG member who owns and
supplies the spears.
"The âCare Not Cash' proposition would solve the problem
of homeless people by slashing monthly welfare payments from $395 to $59."
A textbook example is the current mayor, Gavin
Newsom. Newsom, the extremely
personable shill for all things rich and white in San Francisco, pulls all the
levers and pushes all the buttons that put the policies of the AWDG into
motion, which include sweeping out homeless people, lowering business taxes and
continuing the privatization of public housing.
As a San Francisco supervisor, Newsome made his
bones for the AWDG in 2002 by placing his "Care Not Cash" proposition on the
ballot which would solve the problem of homeless people by slashing monthly
welfare payments from $395 to $59 in return for a proposed system of
"care." "Care Not Cash" would have
flopped without the big buck effort behind it.
The campaign for the "Care Not Cash"
proposition, known to homeless advocates as "Neither Care Nor Cash," was funded
by a shadowy group called SFSOS, or San Francisco SOS, which was founded by
Warren Hellman, heir to the Wells Fargo fortune, Donald Fisher, the sweatshop
king of the Gap/Banana Republic/Old Navy clothing empire, and Senator Diane
Feinstein. Other original supporters included financial heavy hitters like
Charles Schwab, William Hume, Feinstein's husband - the war profiteer, Richard
Blum - and socialites like Dede Wilsey.
In addition to its outright attack on the homeless, SFSOS also opposed
the living wage campaign, affordable housing and tenant protection and
supported re-segregation of the public schools system through charterization.
SFSOS and the AWDG won big in the ensuing
election.
Merchants Have No Country
Thomas Jefferson noted toward the end of his life
that "merchants have no country," in that the merchant's first loyalty is
always to profit. He could have just as
readily said that the merchants have no political party either. Business
loyalty to self interest rather than common interest is rife in modern American
politics where corporations regularly hedge their bets by contributing to
opposing candidates. Such was the situation when Supervisor Newsom ran for
mayor in 2003.
As Election Day neared, it became apparent that
Newsom was barely ahead of his Green Party opponent, Matt Gonzalez, even though
he was outspending him by a 10 to 1 margin.
The possibility of a Green coming to power in San Francisco so terrified
the AWDG that the gang pulled out all of the stops and flew into action,
calling in celebrity Democrats like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and coughing up
cash. Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi hit the phones. The heirs of the Getty
oil fortune Republican businessmen rushed to the fore. 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 local Democrats for
years, dialed in their dollars.
"No one in the neighborhood will ever be able to live in
the new housing units."
And, of course, Newsom won and policies favored
by the AWDG continue to flourish during his regime - like the onslaught to
quickly privatize the shipyards property, regardless of the health of the
residents during construction on this toxic site, or the fact that no one in
the neighborhood will ever be able to live in the new housing units. In 2006,
Lennar Corporation was cited multiple times for failing to monitor and control
asbestos dust during the grading phase on Parcel A. Oddly enough, the project
was never shut down to correct any non-compliant operations. Finally, several
local African American neighborhood organizations went to City Hall this year
to protest this continuing contamination and request that the City red tag the
site until safety measures could be enforced.
Their request fell upon deaf ears.
Meanwhile, the AWDG, not content with securing a
financial stranglehold on future development of public lands, continues to
target existing public housing for privatization.
Hunter's View and the Patron Saint of 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 Bridge and the Bay, is a classic case 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 Hunter's View because
the smoke detectors didn't work. A recent inspection - ten years later - found
that 64% of the units still had non functioning smoke detectors and pockets of
sewage bubble up in and around these rat-infested homes.
Do you think City Hall rushed plumbers,
carpenters and electricians out there
to fix things up? Go sit in the corner if you answered in the affirmative.
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.
"Do you think that the snail's pace rebuild of the
infrastructure and return of the displaced residents of New Orleans is
accidental?"
When the Federal government purposely abandoned
the "inner cities" of Urban America almost thirty years ago, the vacuum left in
its wake created vast and lucrative investment opportunities for the
exploitation of public property. Do you
think that the snail's pace rebuild of the infrastructure and return of the
displaced residents of New Orleans is accidental? Go sit in the corner!
In San Francisco, 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 staid San Francisco
Chronicle couldn't avoid noting that the Presidio was "the first privatized
national park in the United States."
How about a little Q and A? Who was one of the
founding directors of the Presidio Trust? Donald Fisher. Who appointed him?
Bill Clinton. Who is a major contributor to Pelosi's campaign, while at the
same time being a charter member of the SFSOS, the AWDG and the Republican
Party? Donald Fisher. Who's going to
construct a museum to himself - excuse me - for his art collection, in the
Presidio? Donald Fisher. Who supports it? Nancy Pelosi.
There's also a plan to put a Walt Disney museum
in the Presidio which would be appropriate because Nancy's husband, Paul, owns
a bit of Disney. A local union organizer suggested that it would be fitting
that a third museum be erected between the first two museums-a museum to
sweatshop workers.
"The patron saint of privatization is Congresswoman Nancy
Pelosi."
Getting back to Hunter's View, Newsom has been
seen cruising the neighborhood 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 destabilized to warrant complete
leveling.
Hunter's Point resident Appolonia Jordan, in a
recent article in the Black-owned San
Francisco Bayview newspaper,
wrote, "I know you have noticed the groups of clean, pressed suited white men
who jump out of these brand new SUVs with Mayor Gavin Newsom looking around
your housing project. They smile and sometimes even talk to the âpoor' children
playing outside."
In response to a Chronicle series about the dire living situation at Hunter's View,
Pelosi, whose nephew Laurence has worked for both Lennar and Newsom, 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."
Sounds familiar. Sounds like Lennar's original plan for the shipyards. Sounds like
the Fillmore.
Don Santina is a cultural historian and third
generation San Franciscan who received a 2005 Superior Scribing Award for his
Black Commentator article, "Reparations for the Blues." He recently appeared in a Canadian Sportsnet
TV feature on racism and baseball with Danny Glover and Barry Bonds. He can be
reached at lindey89@aol.com.
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