If attendance figures at recent community-wide meetings
in Bayview–Hunters Point and the
Mission District are any indication, the residents of these
neighborhoods will address the long-term issues confronting them with
unabated enthusiasm, if not the usual crunch-time ferocity.
A packed house at town hall meeting in Bayview–Hunters
Point on March 2 linked the multiple concerns of police brutality, U.S.
Navy environmental racism, economic abandonment, and local power plant
pollution, reports PoorNewsNetwork reporter Gretchen Hildebran in the
San Francisco Bay View of
March 6. Marie Harrison of the SF Bay View and the Restoration Advisory
Board for the Hunters Point Shipyard, opened the meeting by saying, “The
environment we live in is so tainted, so toxic, that a three-year-old
can’t go outside or breathe the air, a 12-year-old can’t stay in school
because he can’t concentrate.” Panelist Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai described the
toxins that have been found in the Naval Shipyard, adding that the
agreement transferring the shipyard to the city for a speedy cleanup
also seemed tainted. “Never in the history of conveyance agreements has
a developer been named in the agreement. There always is a bid.” Some
20,000 people, 23 percent of the African American community, have fled
the city during the past ten years, the article notes.
Nearly 400 people filled the ODC Theater in the Mission
on February 12 for a meeting sponsored by the Mission Anti-Displacement
Coalition (MAC), the Mission Council and the City Planning Department.
MAC organizers are shaping a "people's plan," a community planning
process pegged to what will occur as interim zoning controls end in
June. Victor Miller reports in The
New Mission News that district
activists
are wary about the next wave of dot.com-like gentrification, suspecting
that it will be ushered in with the life-science industry associated
with the Mission Bay project. A
related story by M. Toby Levine examines the problems facing
homeless people in the Mission. “For a person without a home, a decision
has to be made. ‘Shall I walk 20 blocks to the Multi-Service Center
south of Market and try to get a bed/mat or shall I return to the
storefront I have slept in so many times before.’” Despite the generally
bleak prospects for homeless people in San Francisco, Levine notes that
the Mission offers several model programs, run by the Salvation Army,
Dolores Street Community Services, and the Mission Housing and
Development Corporation. These providers offer clothing, housing, food,
counseling, health care, incidental monies, and GED education courses.
The Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, which will open on Capp Street
near 16th this spring, will also provide assistance to people
who are marginally housed or in danger of losing their homes. Although
not a shelter, Project Director Laura Carcagno Guzman explained in a
February article, “One of the main goals is to offer a safe
space to the homeless population.”
J.H.
