The wind blows through untrimmed eucalyptus trees that hang over the cream and blue public housing units. A young black man in a white, black and red T-shirt that reads “Stop Snitchin! Snitches Get Stitches” strolls back and forth in front. Cans, plastic bags and bits of paper rustle around the barren dirt and weed-filled lawn that shines like diamonds from scattered shards of glass.

This is the Hunter’s Point A West public housing development. Residents here are fed up with leaky toilets, mold, mildew, trash and crime, and won’t be ignored any longer. They want the San Francisco Housing Authority to take notice and provide them with a community where their kids can play, with clean unproblematic housing and crime control, so they can feel welcomed in the community.

Bayview Hunter’s Point, with a population of 91 percent of people of color, is nicknamed “Toxic City” after its hazardous radioactive waste sites, shipyard pollutants and chronic mold problems. The area was deemed “blighted” in 2000 because of horrible living and environmental conditions. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) estimates that of the 39 pollutants they measure in San Francisco neighborhoods, the highest concentration of 20 pollutants were found in Bayview Hunter’s Point. The neighborhood also has four times as many toxins released as all other neighborhoods in the city, as well as four times the state rate of hospitalization for chronic diseases like emphysema, diabetes, asthma and hypertension. Many residents, like long time tenant Joanna Abernathy’s 16-year-old daughter Latesha Abernathy, suffer from chronic asthma due to toxic mold, mildew and a general lack of ventilation in the area.

Joanna Abernathy, a thin, young resident of A West since 1989, passes out brightly colored flyers, hoping to convince residents to come to community meetings to tell the San Francisco Housing Authority about their housing and community problems. “It didn’t always used to be like this,” she says, describing the development management before SFHA budget cuts. “[The previous manager] took the time to get to know the residents and got things fixed on time. Now we have management that doesn’t care because they don’t have to live here. They’re working for a paycheck."

Since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development money is evaporating, San Francisco’s $118 million Hope VI program to rebuild public housing is slated for the scrap heap. This is why SFHA has opened discussions with private developer John Stewart Co. about 18 locations throughout Hunter’s View and Hunter’s Middle Point for redevelopment. Right now, A West isn’t included. The argument against “imminent domain”—partnering a private developer on public land—is that the poor residents are the ones usually displaced.

In Abernathy’s 3-bedroom apartment where she lives with her two daughters, husband and brother, there’s been a leaky toilet since 2003, which caused the kitchen ceiling to bubble up, soften to a pasty consistency and drip continuously. SFHA didn’t respond to the problem until a year later, when the kitchen ceiling collapsed on her blind mother’s shoulder. “How can they take a year to come out and fix a collapsed ceiling?” Abernathy says with frustration. “It just isn’t right to ignore us like that.”

Repairmen didn’t bother to remove any of the old piping or water-softened wood planks. Instead, they smeared a patch over the hole and dumped all the dirt, debris and trash from the repair on her back porch. She has the same bubbling ceiling in her daughter’s room when it rains, along with loose tiling in the entryway, which have all been ignored by the SFHA.

Leaks and plumbing problems are common complaints among residents. Mike Roetzer, an SFHA administrator, says he’s never heard any of the complaints cited by the residents. “I’m not aware of the specific things going on there,” he says, declining to comment further on the subject.

Passing broken and bent stairwell railings, there is a makeshift wheelchair ramp in front of an apartment that a resident made two years ago from a slab of wood for his son who visits frequently. Past the closed childcare center, two lively and energetic young girls are sitting on a dirty sidewalk away from the street. One plays with her dolls in the dirt while the other swings from a garden hose looped around a tree. Behind them, loud rap music resonates from open cars, while some young adults with laminated pictures of a teenager that say R.I.P. around their necks hang out.

“We wish we had a playground closer to where we live,” 7-year-old Sariah Sturudviant says. “We can’t go to the other park without a teenager because my dad says the grown adults hanging out are dangerous.”

Along the path to the outdoor clothesline, the rotted wood fencing sways in the wind as sewage water flows from an open underground pipe onto the cement, creating a pool of tampons, feces and toilet paper that cascades down the only grassy hill in the complex.

While one of the sewage pools has been repaired by SFHA, two others haven’t.
“I won’t let my kids play outside or in the playgrounds because I’ve seen all the dirt, sewage, needles and trash,” says Kelly Provost, a nurse assistant who has lived there for five years.

Espanola Jackson, a warm and friendly Bayview Hunter’s Point advocate and resident since 1948, recently went before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to speak on behalf of the residents, but feels they already have an agenda in mind and aren’t too concerned with the residents’ living conditions.

“They want to get these residents out, but like the other development renovations before, like Valencia Gardens and Western Addition, those residents are never brought back. Where did they go, honey? That’s the question,” she says.

Roetzer claims there is a 60 percent return rate for residents of Hope VI developments. “To be readmitted they must meet the minimum conditions of no criminal record and had paid rent for the duration of time they were gone,” he says.

The residents seem to have lost hope that anything will change in their communities. “I’ve got to move out because if I stay, I guarantee nothing will change,” Abernathy says.

Others think the community is being ignored because of the people living there. “It’s not the place, it’s the people,” Provost says. “They see it as a waste.”

So while the perfect Bay views continue to go unappreciated, A West residents will go on living in inadequate housing while the neighborhood around them will undergo possible renovations, leaving A West behind.