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Text Box: Bayview Under Siege: The Toxic Corporate Attack On Our Most Vulnerable Neighborhood

Text Box: Centuries Of Purposeful Racism, Poisoning, And Neglect It was once tacitly accepted that people of color and the poor would be treated far worse than their white and property owning counterparts. That police and judges would treat these groups badly and unfairly. That our worst factories and pollution would be placed in their neighborhoods because they lacked the financial power to resist. That they would be relegated to the worst of our jobs because they had no choice. That the races would live apart from each other and those who had darker skin would be politically disenfranchised, unable to vote or take part in democracy. But with the passage of civil rights laws and the forward thinking that came about in the 1960’s, that time was supposed to have passed. The new millennium was supposed to have brought us a new equality unparalleled in history. The Dream Demolished That promise was never fulfilled, and a new conservative backlash has even stripped away many progressive gains of the past. Whites and people of color have become even more polarized in modern society. Higher percentages of the poor and people of color than ever before, are now held in U.S. prisons for nonviolent crimes (and in record overall numbers). Affirmative action is being stolen from our schools by courts and administrators. Unwarranted police attacks, arrests, and racial profiling are again on the rise. The death penalty, especially for people of color, is back with a vengeance. The poor and people of color still receive the worst health care, and recently, for the first time in modern U.S. history, our child mortality rates have gone up. Our most toxic factories, waste sites, waste treatment facilities, and mold plagued substandard housing, are still relegated to marginalized communities just as they have always been. In most such neighborhoods, greed driven property owners and developers take advantage of low property values; snapping up and gentrifying these areas all over the country to make way for high priced condominium, stadium, and other puff projects while they sweep the poor and people of color outside of city walls in record numbers and at record speeds. Ask San Franciscans if such tragedies continue in our own city, and most would say we are treating these groups much better than other U.S. cities. They would be completely wrong. The Toxic Environment Of San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point The Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood on San Francisco’s Southeast side, is made up almost entirely of residents who are low income and/or people of color. Its core is a former Navy yard, which contains so much military radioactive and toxic waste that large sections are federal superfund sites that are, to a vast extent, not yet cleaned up. Compounding this, the area is partly situated on natural serpentine rock (a source of asbestos) and when construction occurs there, it often stirs up huge amounts of one of the most cancer causing substances known to humankind. The City’s central waste treatment facility, disproportionate stretches of smog spewing freeway, all of the polluting fossil fuel power plants, and many of the most polluting industries in San Francisco, have been placed (with more planned to be built) where their toxins flood this district, causing some of the highest rates of cancer and life threatening asthma in the country. Children in the area have died of asthma attacks triggered by the pollution. Only one of the pollution sources, the Hunters Point Power Plant, has been closed. The rest remain. And as noted on page 2 of this newsletter, our own San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is even planning to place another polluting natural gas power plant in the Bayview. Lennar Corporation, The Redevelopment Agency, And City Officials, Deepen The Damage One might think, with this current toxic state of emergency in the Bayview Hunters Point, we would put a moratorium on construction and launch a massive program to completely clean up the neighborhood before letting developers build there; but nothing could be further from the truth. City officials, the Mayor, the infamous Redevelopment Agency, and even Bayview’s own district Supervisor, Sophie Maxwell, have given permission to Miami based Lennar Corporation to build condos in the Bayview. (Lennar makes a habit of building on abandoned toxic military bases.) Ironically, many people of color fled to the Bayview after being driven from San Francisco’s Fillmore District by Redevelopment Agency condominium projects that were almost identical to the ones now being allowed under Lennar. (continued next page)

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