Page 4 of 6
Even with powerful support from City Hall and a divided community, Lennar spent nearly $4 million on the ensuing political campaign.
"They were running ads on BET. They were sending mailers every single day with little black children jumping up and down on the bed in their new home," Garza says. "It was fucking disgusting."
Prop. G won handily, while Prop. F went down, 63 percent to 37 percent .
The Lennar fight left Garza with a bitter taste. "I'm not going to say that the irony is lost on me that folks are really adamantly trying to challenge gentrification and displacement now. The problem is that in San Francisco, the process is really advanced," she says. "We were trying to consolidate people when we still had an opportunity to impact it in a proactive and not a reactive way."
Today, ACCE is demanding the Mayor's Office of Housing produce more housing affordable to people below 100 percent AMI, especially since the influx of highly paid tech workers has pushed San Francisco's AMI for white households to $104,503, while African American households have seen their median income decline to just $29,503.
The problem has also spread from the black community to other communities of color. San Francisco's African American population has fallen to below 6 percent. In the Mission, 8,000 Latino families are in danger of being pushed out in the next 10 years (on top of the 8,000 families already displaced since 2000).
Even Chinatown, long protected from market-rate development by restrictive zoning, is feeling pressure from affluent tech workers willing to shack up in the single-room occupancy hotels that have traditionally housed low-wage immigrants.
Neighborhood activists in Chinatown and other affordable pockets of the city worry about going "the way of the Mission," but black community members in the Bayview have another perspective.
"The way of the Mission?" asks Archbishop King. "The Mission is going to go the way of the Bayview."
"Black folks are like the canary in the coal mine," adds Donaldson, now an activist with ACCE. "You send us up in there, and we don't come back."
"As a lifetime Bayview resident, we've always known that they want this area," says Pastor Dorn. "They've always wanted this area, but it was inhabited by so many African Americans that they thought they just couldn't survive out here until now that they've found a way to push so many out."
King, Donaldson, and Dorn weren't all on the same side of the Lennar fight, but these days they work together through ACCE and are united in a campaign to save Pastor Dorn's home from the crisis that engulfed Bayview shortly after the shipyard fight: foreclosure.
For the past seven years, Dorn, a pastor and chaplain for the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, has been fighting foreclosure and eviction. (He claims to have never missed a mortgage payment; in court documents, he says his mortgage company lost his paperwork.) Any day now, the very sheriff's deputies he provides spiritual guidance to may evict him from his home.
He doesn't plan to go quietly.
"I'm going to sit here, and we're going to occupy," he warns.
To Donaldson, King, and ACCE, Dorn represents the overlooked history of the San Francisco eviction and displacement crisis. Despite so much media and activist attention focusing on the Mission, they believe the current crisis has its roots in the Bayview, where the subprime meltdown and subsequent foreclosure crisis was felt most strongly.
"This community was the No. 1 homeowner community in the city," King says. "But we're not homeowners. We own mortgages. We were tricked into those mortgages because at one time you couldn't get a mortgage in this neighborhood. When they opened it up, we were like, 'Wow!' We were starving for something so we went for it, and they gave us these big interest rates and set-up-to-fail payments."
According to a February report from the city Controller, the Bayview has the highest foreclosure rate in San Francisco, at four times the city average.
Donaldson believes that the shipyard fight was a turning point for San Francisco politics. He draws a line from the political upheaval over Lennar to an increased focus on Bayview voters in the 2011 mayoral race, the Occupy protests targeting the Financial District beginning in 2011, and the passage of Prop. B in 2014, a restriction on waterfront development that set the table for progressive forces to extract the 40 percent affordable housing commitment from the Giants.
"To me, it represents a changing of the political landscape in this community, and I see it to a large extent directly linked to Black Lives Matter," Donaldson says. "There's that undercurrent that's basically saying that our concerns, our issues, in every area of life need to be validated and need to heard."
Donaldson was on the opposite side of the Lennar fight from Garza, but the two are still Facebook friends. "When she started hashtagging on Facebook, I started hashtagging Black Lives Matter too, because I instinctively understood what it was that she was getting at," he says. "She was talking about it in the context of law enforcement and mass incarceration — the devaluing of black lives by police officers. I see the work we do here at ACCE as Black Lives Matter in an economic, political, and labor context."
"I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life"
The final lines of June Jordan's "Poem about My Rights" are tattooed in black ink on Alicia Garza's chest. The font is small and runs below her shirt's neckline. You have to stand close to read the words of commitment.
Showing 1-8 of 8
Comments are closed.
