Please, In Our Backyard

From the SF Weekly archives...

I will admit that I was AWOL at the beginning of January, so I missed Matt Smith's article on January 11th in the SF Weekly. This time he tackles the Potrero housing projects and raises a couple of interesting points and solutions.

"We learned from riotous France how ghettoization begets alienation, criminalization, and violence. We learned the same thing at home, as unsolved murders ballooned, with a high proportion of them in what is called public housing, but is really government-created ghettos. L'lle St-Denis near Paris, in other words, isn't fundamentally different than San Francisco's Potrero Terrace or Hunters View."

"Potrero Terrace and Potrero Annex are names given to public housing projects about a mile south of Mission Bay, in which 1940s and 1950s barracks-style concrete buildings are scattered on a dirt-and-grass-covered hillside. They serve a dual role as gang fortress and 635-unit public slum. According to Sangiacomo/Daly math, a new neighborhood made up of 2,000 apartments -- creating about half the population density that's now filling the more urbanized parts of Mission Bay -- would offer subsidized housing sufficient to provide homes for residents currently living at the Potrero projects."

"The Potrero slums happen to possess an amenity that would make this plan quite feasible -- a hillside with stunning bay views. If a builder were to redevelop that now-squalid place, and those views were sold as an amenity to condominium buyers, the resulting money would be sufficient to include in the development subsidized apartments for residents who already live there, albeit much nicer and safer apartments than their current homes."

Unfortunately, "here, NIMBY, anti-density, anti-gentrification battles can push back construction timelines by decades, add millions of dollars of financing costs to a project, and force developers to scale back plans into the deeply unprofitable zone. A molasses-slow bureaucracy stalls things further still, making San Francisco a place that all but the most tireless developers avoid."

"Not-in-my-backyard homeowners are bound to become even more nettlesome than the no-gentrification commission members. Mission Bay, a former rail yard and industrial wasteland where builders are now erecting 4,000 apartments, plus parks, stores, office buildings, and a university campus, had lain vacant for 18 years as landowners were forced to hold charettes with anti-development homeowners' associations such as the Potrero Boosters. This group's neighborhood is a mile to the south, bordering Potrero Terrace and Potrero Annex. Any new development, even a mile from their front door, the Boosters said, would create traffic, noise, and shadows, and block vistas."

"Changing this situation would require leadership. Housing Authority Executive Director Gregg Fortner has already shown some by shepherding the public housing revitalization plan as far as it's come. He needs our help."