potrero view

November 2009

Hunters Point Shipyard at Center of Debate over Southeast San Francisco’s Future

By Mary Purpura

The City and County of San Francisco (CCSF) is finalizing plans for the biggest parcel of waterfront property – roughly 750 acres – left on the peninsula.  The tract includes the Hunters Point Shipyard, Candlestick State Recreation Area, Monster Stadium, and Alice Griffiths Housing Project. The Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development and Lennar Corporation, a Miami-based development firm, have proposed a site plan, which includes CCSF transferring the land – except for Candlestick, which is state-owned, and has been recently subjected to another land trade involving Lennar – to Lennar in exchange for the corporation’s development of the property.

Lennar’s earliest plans – which were developed between 1998 and 2005 – were for the shipyard alone, where the corporation proposed to build upwards of 4,000 housing units. That figure doubled to 8,000 units in 2007.  Last year, Lennar asked San Francisco voters to approve Proposition G, which was supported by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Mayor Gavin Newsom, and Supervisors Sophie Maxwell, Michela Alioto-Pier, and Carmen Chu. Initiative proponents insisted that measure passage was necessary to clean-up and redevelop the Hunters Point shipyard – a Superfund site extensively contaminated with toxics and irradiated materials – and to create hundreds of acres of new parkland.  Under Proposition G, Lennar would build 10,000 housing units – recently revised to 10,500 – up to one-fourth of which might be affordable; construct a science and technology park focusing on green tech; re-build the Alice Griffith Housing Project; and establish a permanent home for shipyard artists.  

After Proposition G passed, Lennar began publicly arguing that it needed 42 additional acres, carved out of Candlestick Point State Recreation Area’s 150 acres – to make the development plan viable.  According to Mary Ratcliff, editor of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, much of the additional acres of parkland promised in Proposition G turned out to be polluted shipyard land. The northern and southern shoreline parks would be developed on land that’s capped as a way to contain pollution, explained Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, an environmental nonprofit that helps communities close and clean up military bases. Bloom added that the capping solution was proposed by the Navy, the shipyard’s current owner. “The frustration on the part of many community and environmental activists is that the City and Lennar appear unwilling to fight the Navy and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to help get the [toxic] dump landfill removed per community desire,” explained Bloom.  

Frustration may be an understatement. Bayview-Hunter’s Point residents have repeatedly demanded that the site be cleaned up, not just covered up.  “The push from the Mayor’s Office, the Navy, and Lennar is to cap the land, [not] clean it, transfer it before it’s clean, and be silent on key issues of water rise and liquefaction,” said Jaron Browne, an organizer with the Bayview Organizing Project of POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights), as reported in 2009 in the Bay View.

Negotiations between environmental organizations and legislators reduced the Candlestick Point parcel proposed to be sold to Lennar to 23 acres, down from the 42 acres that Lennar originally wanted. The resulting legislation, Senate Bill (SB) 792, was approved by the governor last month.  “What kind of precedent is that? Selling off public parkland to a private corporation?” asked Mary Ratcliff.  According to Ratcliff, Candlestick Point State Recreation Area was originally established because of the persistent advocacy of Bayview-Hunters Point residents, but the negotiations that led to SB 792 occurred without the community’s input.  “Our main point is this:  before you do something – in this case, negotiating significant changes that markedly altered the bill that will affect us where we live and work – please talk to people in the community. We did not know that these negotiations were happening. If we had, we would have demanded a place at the table,” said Ratcliff.   “Candlestick Point State Recreation Area is the only urban state park in California and the only big park in our neighborhood. Bayview-Hunters Point has less open space and less parkland than any other neighborhood in the City.”

“The purpose of a state park is to give people the opportunity to get out of their urban environment, to de-stress,” said Bloom. “When your plan misses that purpose, but adds 10,000 units of housing and 25,000 people, you no longer have a park where you can get away.” Arc Ecology has proposed alternatives to the Lennar plan that would reconfigure the locations of buildings and industry to create more open space.

According to Ratcliff, Lennar’s current plan includes building high-rise condominiums and townhomes on the waterfront property it secured as a result of SB 792.  People paying big bucks for luxury condos, she pointed out, will consider the remaining Candlestick Point acreage as their own personal backyard, and may not be open to sharing it with local “riff-raff.” “This is gentrification to the thousandth multiplier. It’s very offensive,” she said.

Lennar has begun work on Parcel A of the 750-acre site, a hilltop that the developer and its subcontractors graded, which involved excavating serpentine rock. When serpentine is disturbed, asbestos is released. Community members question whether their health –and especially the health of children living and attending school in the area – has been compromised by asbestos-laden dust.  The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety maintains that there’s no safe level of asbestos exposure. Last year, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) fined Lennar $515,000 for not accurately monitoring toxicity levels during construction, the biggest penalty BAAQMD has ever levied, according to Ratcliff.

Lennar had promised to construct rental units as part of the Parcel A development, but changed this plan when it determined that market conditions were unfavorable.  The corporation also promised that it would generate 7,500 jobs for the community, which has an unemployment rate that’s more than double San Francisco as-a-whole.  But Bloom doubts the reliability of these job creation claims. “There’s a disingenuous quality to the dialogue on this issue,” said Bloom. “We’ve asked the City to be sober about these projections.  We are not opposed to development of the property.  We are opposed to the audacity of how the conversation has gone forward.”

“Nobody is more eager to see this largely black community put to work than we are,” said Ratcliff. “If there were anything substantive to Lennar’s claims about providing jobs, we would take it seriously. But really, there haven’t been any jobs,” despite the fact that construction has already begun, “and we have no reason to believe that there will be jobs. Lennar hasn’t kept any of its promises: in terms of building rental units, in terms of the percentage of units they said they would build that would be affordable housing, and in terms of the community benefit fund they promised to establish that originally started out at $40 million, and has since been chopped down to half a million dollars.”

According to Ratcliff, three African-Americans working in management positions at Lennar during Phase I construction at the shipyard site were appalled at the corporation’s disregard for the community. “Lennar ignored requirements about asbestos dust mitigation, practiced discrimination, and didn’t treat workers properly. These men made their concerns known,” said Ratcliff. They were fired, and later sued Lennar, further eroding the community’s confidence in the development giant. “This is a low-income neighborhood with 91 percent people of color. These are poor people who want jobs. They know perfectly well that Lennar doesn’t give a damn about them,” continued Ratcliff.

“There’s a sense of political isolation in the African-American community,” said Bloom. “It’s important for people living in Potrero Hill and other parts of the City to communicate clearly that we care about what happens in Bayview-Hunter’s Point.”

Environmentalists would like to see more attention paid to preserving the unusual natural features of the shipyard area, such as the coastal wetlands. The Lennar plan includes “bridging the only unbridged body of water of its kind in the southern part of the City,” said Arthur Feinstein, conservation chair of the San Francisco Sierra Club. The proposed bridge would pass over Yosemite Slough, a tidal inlet surrounded by parkland.  Land adjacent to the tidal inlets from Mission Creek and Islais Creek, both formerly free-flowing, has been built up, making the inlets virtually inaccessible. Feinstein pointed out that the proposed bridge would save commuters only about four minutes of driving time, and could easily be avoided by creating a driving route around the slough.

“It’s very feasible to create a Crissy Field-type park, with restored wetlands on this parcel,” said Feinstein.  “From a land-use perspective,” said Bloom, “establishing a destination park in Bayview-Hunter’s Point that draws City residents as well as tourists has the potential to create business for local merchants,” injecting much-needed economic activity into the area.

This month the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency will issue an Environmental Impact Report on the Lennar development proposal.  To obtain a copy of the report, and learn how to file your comments, go to www.arcecology.org. Arc Ecology has also published various possible alternatives to modify the current proposal, which can be viewed at http://www.arcecology.org/afs/.  


This article is the first in a series about the bay.



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