The predominantly African-American Hunters Point housing projects are known for high crime rates. PHOTO BY MELISSA MA / GUARDSMAN

When tables were set up on Ocean campus to collect signatures for a referendum on the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan, Peter John LaCrosby, a student, signed the petition. He knew if the referendum passed, he would vote against the plan to redevelop Bayview-Hunters Point.

The petition was submitted to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in time to make a referendum for the 2007 mayoral ballot, one of many tools that Bayview-Hunters Point’s African-American community will use to keep their home on San Francisco’s historic southeastern shore.



“The million-dollar view the people enjoy will soon be a thing of the past,” LaCrosby said. “The developers in San Francisco are greedy. All they want is to put up million-dollar condos and move the black people out.”



Bayview-Hunters Point is home to San Francisco’s last historically African-American population. African-Americans from the nation’s southeast region migrated to the area, attracted by jobs in the naval shipyard. At that time, agreements among landlords restricted blacks to either the Fillmore or Bayview districts.

When the naval yard closed in 1974, the community plunged into economic depression. Since then, the area has experienced 30 percent unemployment and is infamous for its high rates of violent crime associated with gang activity and narcotics.

In an effort to eradicate urban blight, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, lead by Bayview’s Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, passed the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan in May.

The plan, which will turn over 1,300 acres of the Bayview’s southeastern region to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, has been critiqued by the community and denounced as an effort to turn the southeastern shore and its vistas over to land developers.

For Bayview newspaper publisher and land developer Willie Ratcliff, who organized the coalition responsible for the petition, the fight to stop the Redevelopment Agency is extremely important.

“[It’s] the fight for our lives, the fight for the colored people to stay here in San Francisco and control our own destiny,” Ratcliff said.

Ratcliff said that nationwide redevelopment efforts represent “an effort to take back the inner city by white people after the great white flight of World War II, when all the white people left the inner city for the suburbs.”



If LaCrosby sees the destruction of the African-American community in Bayview-Hunters Point as a foregone conclusion, it is because he — and virtually all the city’s citizens — remembers the Redevelopment Agency that battled urban blight in the Fillmore in 1948.

Called the “Harlem of the West,” the Fillmore was known throughout the 1950’s for its black jazz district. The Redevelopment Agency, under the guise of eradicating urban blight, relocated 461 African-American businesses and over 4,000 black citizens to other parts of  San Francisco. The majority of the displaced never returned.

According the Jacolbrian Barnard, a music production student who has lived in the Fillmore for 10 years, redevelopment did nothing to improve life for the African-American community in the neighborhood. He once had an extended family in the area that never returned to the homes taken away by the city’s government.

At that time, the Redevelopment Agency utilized the governmental power of “eminent domain,” which allowed private property to be expropriated from owners without their consent, providing that it could prove it was for the good of the public.

However, the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan prohibits eminent domain in residential areas. Furthermore, the Redevelopment Agency has made a commitment to take direction from the Bayview-Hunters Point Project Area Committee, a community-based organization, headed by Sophie Maxwell.

Still, the Redevelopment Agency has not won a great deal of trust in the community. Many feel that simply an influx of housing in the neighborhood at market rates in San Francisco will be enough to replace its poor population with a richer, whiter group of people.


“You still have people getting killed and no one knows what happened to them,” Bernard said of redevelopment efforts. “The police cannot solve the murders, and building high rises didn’t stop them from happening.”

Employed at the Hunters Point shipyard, LaCrosby admitted he was one of the first to benefit when the Redevelopment Agency and developer Lennar Corp took over the 500-acre shipyard.

“Work for me is better than it has been in years. It was spotty for awhile. Now, I’m a teamster,”
LaCrosby said.

LaCrosby works for Lennar Corp., the upstart military base redevelopment firm that has already taken over the 500 acre Hunters Point Shipyard. The company has plans to build 1,238 new homes on the property, one third of which will be set aside for affordable housing.

LaCrosby is not the only student benefiting directly from Lennar’s construction in South Bay Shore. Mayor Gavin Newsom promised that half the workforce hired by construction companies like Lennar will come from the area.

The City Build program at the Evans campus is working to create a viable construction workforce in the area. The program’s laboratory is a web of fabricated construction sites. The sight of it might bring to mind the set of a massive home improvement reality show.

The City Build program works with Young Community Developers to provide a workforce for redevelopment. City Build trains young men and women in the practical arts of carpentry, electronics and construction and gives students the background in math and science they will need in the field.

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