City keeps its promise with Hunters View
A new neighborhood has quietly sprung up in San Francisco. It sports modern homes, postcard views of the bay, some of the city’s sunniest weather and charming streets and parks.
It’s easy to imagine software engineers scooping up the apartments and town houses for $1 million or more.
“It looks like marketrate housing in Rincon Hill or South Beach,” boasted Olson Lee, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing. “In fact, it looks better than that.”
But in a surprise twist in an exorbitantly expensive city desperate for new housing, this new neighborhood isn’t for the wealthy. It’s the new Hunters View public housing project in Hunters Point, which then-Mayor
Gavin Newsom pledged to rebuild one month after he took office in 2004.
Once in a while, government promises are kept.
Residents will celebrate their new homes at a community barbecue Friday, joined by Mayor Ed Lee, who finished the job begun by his predecessor, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who helped secure federal funding for it.
Ed Lee grew up in Yesler Terrace, a public housing complex in Seattle that was also recently rebuilt.
“Public housing needs to be decent housing,” the mayor said. “It can’t be this dilapidated stuff the Housing Authority has been known for for decades.”
Like before-and-after photos come to life, much of the old Hunters View sits just across the street from the new one. In 2007, the 1950s barracksstyle buildings were ranked by federal inspectors as among the worst public housing in the country. They were infested with rats, mold and raw sewage and made for a devastating symbol of neglected poverty in one of the world’s richest cities.
The Housing Authority, which operates public housing with federal money, was found negligent for a 1997 fire at Hunters View that killed a grandmother and five children. The agency hadn’t installed a smoke detector or fixed a broken heater in the unit.
The last of those miserable apartments will be demolished within a few months. For Supervisor Malia Cohen, who grew up in Bayview-Hunters Point and has championed the rebuilding of public housing there, the demolition is what’s really worth celebrating.
“We see new buildings all the time,” she said. “What will have the strongest emotional impact will be the sight of the old, dilapidated buildings coming down. Literally out of the dust and debris, you have new life rising up.”
Newsom’s Hope SF program to rebuild the city’s worst public housing was announced in 2004 but didn’t get going until 2007, when he secured $5 million in general fund money to seed $95 million in revenue bonds. More federal, state and private funding made the redevelopment, helmed by the John Stewart Co., possible. The entire project is expected to cost $450 million.
Since the groundbreaking in 2010, the work has proceeded in phases. The first 107 units opened in 2013, and the second phase just opened. Each of the 267 public housing units in the old Hunters View has been replaced, and 64 percent of the former residents have opted to move in. Others, many of them African Americans fleeing the city along with their black peers, have left for Vallejo, Antioch or places farther away.
“Some people maybe didn’t believe it would be real,” said Theo Miller, director of Hope SF. But he said the typical rate of return at rebuilt public housing projects around the country is just 15 percent.
Another 85 units in the new development are affordable housing, serving those who make more than public housing residents but too little to afford market-rate apartments. Market-rate housing is expected to be built as part of the project, though details are still sketchy.
Lottie Titus, 59, is a proud new occupant of a three-bedroom, twobathroom townhome in the new Hunters View that she shares with her husband and their three grandchildren. She’s still coming to grips with the amenities so many of us take for granted: functional smoke alarms, a usable bathtub, a sink that doesn’t leak.
“If you leave your refrigerator open too long, it beeps!” Titus said, noting her family couldn’t figure out the odd sound at first. “We are just across the street, but it’s totally different. It’s so relaxing, so peaceful. It’s not so stressful.”
She lived in the old complex for 22 years, and her former apartment is now boarded up with plywood. Cigarette butts there litter the front yard, which is overgrown with weeds. Feral cats roam the complex. In just months, the depressing scene will be gone.
Other Hope SF projects will follow. The rebuild of Alice Griffith apartments near Candlestick Point is nearing completion. Ground has been broken on the projects in Potrero Hill. Sunnydale will follow, if all goes according to plan. After that, nobody knows. President Trump and Ben Carson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — which funds public housing — want $6 billion in cuts to the department.
Olson Lee, the mayor’s housing chief, said he thinks if Trump and Carson made the trek to Hunters View — highly unlikely — they would be convinced such projects are worth funding. City officials say crime has gone down since residents moved to the new units. Children’s attendance rates at school have improved by 30 percent.
Betty Brown, 69, lived in the old Hunters View for 37 years, raising three kids who’ve gone on to give her seven grandchildren. Now, their photographs fill the walls of her pleasant, new onebedroom unit. For a long time, she doubted all the talk would amount to much, but it finally has.
“It was meetings and meetings and meetings,” she said. “This is what we were waiting for.”