A strong editorial was written last week by Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff on the upcoming redevelopment plan for Bayview/Hunters Point. The following are some excerpts:

“In Monday’s mail came a “Notice of Public Hearing of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Commission on the Proposed Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan Amendment” announcing that on Tuesday, March 7, at 4 p.m. in City Hall Room 416, “any and all persons having any objections to the proposed Redevelopment Plan Amendment may appear before the Agency and show cause why the Redevelopment Plan Amendment should not be approved.””

“Notice of another boring meeting? No, not this time. This is an eviction notice to nearly everyone who lives in Bayview Hunters Point, San Francisco’s Black heartland.”

“The word “amendment” doesn’t sound like a threat. But this “amendment,” according to the notice, “proposes to add approximately 1,361 acres of new land as ‘Project Area B’ to the existing 137-acre Hunters Point Redevelopment Project Area.” The map on the back of the notice designates nearly our entire neighborhood as the proposed Project Area B, dwarfing the existing project area that covers much of Hunters Point Hill. The proposed “amendment” stretches from Cesar Chavez Street south to the county line and from Highway 101 east to San Francisco Bay.”

“If we allow the Redevelopment Agency Commission, whose strings are pulled by Mayor Gavin Newsom, to declare our neighborhood a “project area,” we are consenting to our own eviction from the most valuable land – considering we have the best views and the most sunshine – in San Francisco, the city with the most valuable land on earth.”

“Property in a project area is subject to the city’s seizure by eminent domain. In horror, Black San Franciscans watched it happen a generation ago when the world-renowned Fillmore district became Fill-no-mo’, when Redevelopment bulldozers destroyed 200 Black-owned businesses and the homes of 5,000 Black families. They even tried to bulldoze our memories by renaming the neighborhood the Western Addition.”

“I doubt a land grab this big is being proposed anywhere in the country outside New Orleans. Will the people of Bayview Hunters Point and the people of the Lower Ninth Ward accept our eviction notices and quietly disappear? Or will we stand shoulder to shoulder and say, “No way! This land is our land!””

“Gentrification wears many disguises. It’s the sale of the old Coca Cola bottling plant on Third Street – the building sheathed in shiny red tiles – to a developer who’s replacing it with 375 million-dollar condos.”

“Don’t sell! Stand and fight for all we hold sacred. That’s our heritage: When threatened, we have always fiercely defended our community.”

“This year, 2006, marks 40 years since the Hunters Point uprising in September of 1966, when tanks rolled up and down Third Street and the SFPD lined up like a firing squad and shot their rifles into the Bayview Opera House where children had taken refuge. Less than a month later, in October 1966, the Black Panther Party was born. 2006 also marks 30 years since the Bay View newspaper, then called the New Bayview, was founded by Mohammed Al-Kareem and 14 years this week since I became publisher.”

“So tune up your best testimony – spoken or written – to convince Redevelopment commissioners on March 7 that they’d be crazy to approve the “amendment,” declare Bayview Hunters Point a project area and subject us to eminent domain, another word for eviction. We’ll pack the hearing and shout loud enough to shake City Hall: “We shall not be moved.””

See my post from last week as well with details about the redevelopment meeting.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.