Rebuilt housing projects in S.F. offer more than simply a place to live.
4 developments rebuild crumbling units, help families
Growing up in the Alice Griffith housing project in San Francisco’s Hunters Point almost ruined Samuel Vaughn’s life before it got started.
The rotting greenand-tan buildings at Alice Griffith, also known as Double Rock, were moldy and infested with mice. The tubs were rusty, and hot water was sporadic. Violence and crime were rampant — his brother was shot in the head but survived.
Sam, 19, was a football and basketball standout at Mission High School, recruited by more than a dozen colleges. But he
kept getting caught up in trouble at Double Rock and ended up in juvenile detention his senior year before straightening out enough to graduate.
Today, the old projects are boarded up, replaced by 256 new public housing units in new buildings across the street. There is a new gym, playground, health center and lush landscaping. The boxy, modern apartment buildings look no different than a lot of the expensive buildings popping up in Mission Bay or SoMa. There are also 248 units of affordable housing.
On Friday, Vaughn, now a student at Dillard College in New Orleans, returned to his hometown to celebrate the opening of the new buildings. He stood on the stage alongside Mayor London Breed, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Board of Supervisors President Malia Cohen to celebrate the opening of the new complex.
“They are beautiful — my little cousin is excited he can take a shower,” he said. “I’m so happy with the way they turned out.”
The new Alice Griffith housing development is one of four public housing rebuilds known as Hope SF. Together the four developments — the others are Hunters View, Sunnydale and Potrero Terraces and Annex — will replace 750 units of public housing and add 4,275 apartments that will be a mix of affordable and market rate. The 321 units at Hunters View have already opened, while construction is just starting at Potrero and Sunnydale.
While the trend of rebuilding public housing projects and mixing them with market rate units is a national one, Hope SF prides itself on being different. For one thing, the “rate of return” of families who lived in the old buildings sticking around to move into the new buildings is more than 80 percent — more than three times the national average of 25 percent.
And the Hope SF program focuses not just on the housing, but the broader health and success of the families. There are walking clubs and a health care center, job training and afterschool programs. The educational programs are supported by the Partnership for Hope SF, a philanthropic initiative run by the San Francisco Foundation. So far the partnership has raised $17 million to support programs.
Since the new buildings opened, the median income of families living in the new buildings has increased from $12,000 to $24,000, partly because of the job training programs. The percentage of kids chronically absent from school has declined by 20 percentage points.
San Francisco Foundation Executive Director Fred Blackwell is hoping to recruit more companies — not just to contribute money but to help in other ways — with jobs and educational opportunities and expertise.
On Friday, Blackwell and the foundation staff arranged for dozens of downtown business leaders to be whisked out to Alice Griffith in a pair of fancy buses that departed from Embarcadero Center.
During the bus ride, which also toured both Hunters View, Blackwell, who used to run the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, told the business leaders that he started thinking about the idea behind Hope SF after studying data that analyzed areas in San Francisco where kids had the most problems with mental health, school absenteeism and the juvenile criminal justice system. The study found that these problems were concentrated in several corners in the city, six of which were in front of public housing.
“These sites are about 5 miles away from the Salesforce Tower, but for many of the folks who live over there, it could be thousands of miles away,” he said “What we are trying to do is close that distance.”
During the ribboncutting celebrating the new housing, Blackwell said that the new Alice Griffith is a model for the city.
“When you see something this nice in the hood, your first thought is ‘Man, that is not for us . ... Rent is $3,000 a month and nobody in the community can afford it.’ And it ends up a monument to gentrification and displacement,” he said. “This is the exact opposite of that.”
The city’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure contributed $68 million to the project with another $40 million coming from FivePoint, the developer of the embattled Hunters Point Shipyard project nearby, where construction has been put on hold because a scandal involving the $1 billion property cleanup.
“San Francisco is delivering on our promise to revitalize and rebuild the most distressed public housing in our city,” Breed said. “This beautiful new version of Alice Griffith will serve generations to come.”