The gated parking lot at McKinnon Avenue and Third Street In the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood has been sitting vacant for the past 24 years. High hopes of what the property could be, what it will become still lingers but now depends solely on federal funding. The lot could be just another symbol of a governmental promise to this community that is not filled.
Rev. Calvin Jones of Providence Baptist Church, which owns the lot, was the first to have a vision of what the property could be used for: affordable homes for Bayview Seniors.
"There is a desperate cry in this city for affordable housing" Jones says, "and we need to start finding alternatives for our senior community."
In the late 1990s, the parking lot became the center of the Bayview brownfields pilot project. The national brownfields program, sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, awards funding to communities that sit on contaminated land. The Bayview neighborhood was granted $200,000 of brownfields funds through San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency to clean-up and revitalize the area. But since the project formally ended in 2000, momentum around building the senior center ended with it.
First initiated in 1995, the national brownfields program is designed to implement the first stages of redevelopment in disadvantaged communities and to focus on revitalizing areas for economic development by cleaning up the environmental contamination.
Like other urban social programs funded by the federal government, the brownfields program intervenes in disadvantaged communities with the intention of improving the quality of life. But some question whether the programs, fed with tax dollars, really help people and listen to community needs.
Furthermore, debates continue as to what the goals of the brownfields program really are. To some, the program is a critical resource in cleaning up contaminated land and offering the beginning tools for economic rebirth to the communities in which it works. To others, the program is a part of the city's greater development plan, which provides an excuse to develop disadvantaged communities only to then displace its residents.
According to Olin Webb, Executive Director of the Bayview Community Advocates, the EPA developed the brownfields program because EPA's Superfund law, which laid the original groundwork for clean-up strategies in polluted communities, was too stringent and was becoming too costly in the remediation stage. "Brownfields clean-up requirements are not as restrictive and they focused more on economic development," Webb says.
In August of 1996, the EPA announced the selection of Bayview Hunters Point as a site for a Regional Brownfields Pilot program, one of the 370 nation-wide grants that have been awarded. The funding was to finance investigation of the level of contamination of the brownfields sites and the feasibility revitalizing the area. The end goal was to find one site for redevelopment. For the project, all 2,528 acres of the neighborhood were to be included in the study area because the entire Bayview Hunters Point community was seen as potentially contaminated. Before the project even began, there were already 120 known brownfields sites within the 3-mile area of the community. However, Webb thinks that the Brownfields program in Bayview Hunters Point was a part of a greater ploy to move the current residents out of the community.
"Bayview Hunters Point is the last area of the city that needs cleaning up," he says. His theory is that efforts to redevelop and revitalize the area were not intended to help the community but instead, to move the residents out of the neighborhood so that a more affluent community could move in.
Olson Lee of San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency adds that "Other neighborhoods in San Francisco where cleaned up before Bayview Hunters Point because of the demand in the market place."
The Redevelopment Agency was awarded a $200,000 brownsfields development grant in September 1996. The funding was intended to define economic and social changes in the project area, generate employment and new businesses, and assess the environmental condition of the project area.
From the onset of the project, the Redevelopment Agency's main objective was to involve the community in the decision making process. Martha Walters, the Brownfields Coordinator for the Redevelopment Agency, says that the community was given the opportunity to have a voice in the process from the very early stages of the project.
"The community had input on who the consultant and the facilitator would be along with what the priorities of the project were," Walters said. In addition, a Brownfields Advisory Board whose members comprised of community residents, was established to assess the work of the Redevelopment Agency and the consultants.
Webb, also a member of the BAB, felt that community voices were never meant to be heard. The advisory board had to fight the Redevelopment Agency throughout the course of the project, he said. The main conflict was that the advisory board wanted to use developers from the community to support economic growth from within. Yet, the Agency wanted to use outside companies to do the work.
To Webb, the goal of the Redevelopment Agency was clear: "They wanted to build a community that we couldn't afford to live in," he says.
Dwayne Jones, Executive Director of the Young Community Developers, a Bayview Hunters Point job training program partially funded by the EPA, thinks that working with any public agency poses some challenges, but he is hopeful of the outcome. He said that the EPA and the community becoming familiar with each other only happened over a short period of time.
"The EPA had larger competing interest when they first started working in the neighborhood," Jones says. "But once they took the time, they began to show interest in community involvement."
Two years after the funding was granted, the Redevelopment Agency released a report summarizing environmental conditions in Bayview Hunters Point. This extensive inventory, which used up almost all of the project's funding, assessed historical and current land use patterns of the neighborhood.
Around the same time the report was released, Rev. Jones approached the Redevelopment Agency with his idea of transforming the church's parking lot into a housing center for seniors. The church, which had already built a charter school and a gymnasium on its property, was attempting to expand its ministry and saw a great need for senior housing in the Bayview, particularly among its congregation.
"Soon all of our baby boomers are going to be turning 65 and they will be needing housing," Reverend Jones says.
In addition, San Francisco's shortage of housing for seniors is not new news, especially in the Bayview. According to the Bayview Resource Center and Network for Elders, 15 percent of the 1,338 Bayview seniors are homeless. Although there are shelters in the area, few take advantage of this service.
Furthermore, in the area surrounding the church, more than three quarters of the 1,338 seniors do not collect retirement income besides social security. Social security only pays $750 a month; hardly enough to afford rent in San Francisco's competitive market. More than half earn under Bayview Hunters Point's median income, which is $34,704, already almost half of the rest of San Francisco, and 77 senior residents live below the poverty level.
The parking lot, which had formerly been home to a gas station, seemed like an ideal site to focus clean up efforts. Not only was it likely to be contaminated, but there was already a development concept in the making. The Redevelopment Agency initially found the proposal appealing.
"It's clear that there is an extreme shortage of housing for seniors in this city" Walters says. She adds that the proposal clearly stated what the end product would be which was a critical component in approving a proposal.
Members of the advisory board agreed that this was an ideal site for the project. "To me, it seemed that it was a good opportunity to help the community by cleaning up the lot for development," says Webb.
After the Redevelopment Agency completed a survey of the area, underground storage tanks were discovered. Remediation efforts by the EPA, the Redevelopment Agency and the city removed these tanks and cleaned the soil. After remediation was completed so was the Redevelopment Agency's commitment to the project. As far as Walters was concerned, the Redevelopment Agency saw its role through and was only responsible for investigating the feasibility of implementing the project.
In her final evaluation report, Walters writes, "This [Brownfields] project also provided an opportunity for the Agency to gain some trust and credibility with the Bayview community at large." When asked if she feels that the Agency achieved this goal she says that results were middle of the road.
"There are so many negative social issues that are present in the neighborhood that it's difficult to separate them from the environmental issues," she says.
Through Webb's eyes, the Brownfields project is just another ineffective government program that has come through his community.
"They [government agencies] don't want to deal with us," he says. Yet, Rev. Jones thinks that the EPA and the Redevelopment Agency have been helpful until now and that the overall experience in working with the agencies has been a positive one.
Regardless of federal and local government's goals in Bayview Hunters Point, the parking lot still stands empty. Rev. Jones continues to independently search for federal grants to build the senior housing center.
"I see development being finished within four to five years from now," he says enthusiastically.
His main hope is to get assistance from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, but recent federal funding cutbacks could effect when and if the funding will ever come through.
"It's really a simple path," he says. "We just need the help to get there."