http://www.sfbayview.com/020806/evictionnotice020806.shtml
Eviction notice served on Bayview Hunters Point
Editorial by Willie Ratcliff
The cop who supervised the gang of police who beat and molested five children in Hunters Point on Martin Luther King Day 2002 gave us notice: “As long as you people are here, we will act like this,” he told the children’s terrified parents.
Now we have our notice in writing. 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.
And, 13 years ago, Redevelopment admitted in writing that the purpose of declaring the Fillmore a project area was to drive Black people out of San Francisco, validating the nickname “Negro removal” for the official term “urban renewal.”
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!”
Eminent domain may be legal, but it’s not fair. It gives the city the power to grab our land – our homes, our businesses, even our churches – away from us and give it to big outside developers. The threat is nothing new. Long time Bay View readers will remember my angry editorials whenever City Hall made a menacing move over the past dozen years or more.
Lately the pressure to sell out has intensified, especially along Third Street, our main commercial corridor, which is still mostly Black-owned. Black property owners get “friendly” visits from brokers who sympathize with our plight: “Oh, how sad! You’re redlined and can’t borrow money against your equity to fix your place up? Don’t worry. We have buyers ready and waiting. They won’t pay you what your property’s worth, but it’ll be more than you’d get if you wait for the city to take it by eminent domain.”
We know what’s what. Buildings that need a coat of paint are the “blight” that gives the city its excuse to declare our neighborhood a project area and subject us to eminent domain. Loans against our equity – loans available in other San Francisco neighborhoods – would enable us to erase the “blight” overnight.
Because we won’t budge, the gentrification pressure intensifies another notch. Recently, building inspectors, always accompanied by well-armed police, have been visiting property owners on Third Street finding code violations, whether they exist or not. “Oh, how sad,” they say. “These repairs will cost more than your building is worth. Since you can’t borrow the money to rebuild, why not let Mr. Big take over? He’ll give you enough to get out of town.”
Being in business on Third Street is no way to get rich quick. Muni has had the street torn up building the light rail line for most of the past five years, hindering customer access and denying our people the construction jobs that would give them the money to be good customers. I’ve been told that Muni even refused to apply for available federal funds to cover Third Street businesses’ losses during construction – that’s how badly City Hall wants us gone!
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.
And it’s the cops. Echoing the “as long as you people are here …” threat from MLK Day 2002, the Chronicle, starting on Sunday, has filled its front page daily with an amazing – and courageous – series about the SFPD called “The Use of Force,” http://sfgate.com/useofforce/. Among the facts cited in the first installment:
l “In the years 2001 to 2004, San Francisco officers were the subject of more force allegations than officers in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego and Seattle combined.”
l “In most years, blacks have accounted for more than 40 percent of cases where officers used force.”
l “Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has ultimate responsibility for the department, did not make himself available for an interview despite repeated requests. Members of his staff helped the department prepare a plan to ‘defuse possible negative public reaction’ to the investigation, according to documents The Chronicle obtained through a public records request.”
And what is Mayor Newsom’s solution to rampant police brutality? “the hiring of as many as 700 additional officers over four years,” according to this morning’s Chronicle.
While our friends in Congress prepare to impeach Bush and our brothers and sisters in New Orleans and the Katrina Diaspora threaten to evict FEMA, let’s get ready to evict Newsom and any official complicit in plans to evict us and give Bayview Hunters Point to the big developers.
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.”
Eviction notice served on Bayview Hunters Point
Editorial by Willie Ratcliff
The cop who supervised the gang of police who beat and molested five children in Hunters Point on Martin Luther King Day 2002 gave us notice: “As long as you people are here, we will act like this,” he told the children’s terrified parents.
Now we have our notice in writing. 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.
And, 13 years ago, Redevelopment admitted in writing that the purpose of declaring the Fillmore a project area was to drive Black people out of San Francisco, validating the nickname “Negro removal” for the official term “urban renewal.”
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!”
Eminent domain may be legal, but it’s not fair. It gives the city the power to grab our land – our homes, our businesses, even our churches – away from us and give it to big outside developers. The threat is nothing new. Long time Bay View readers will remember my angry editorials whenever City Hall made a menacing move over the past dozen years or more.
Lately the pressure to sell out has intensified, especially along Third Street, our main commercial corridor, which is still mostly Black-owned. Black property owners get “friendly” visits from brokers who sympathize with our plight: “Oh, how sad! You’re redlined and can’t borrow money against your equity to fix your place up? Don’t worry. We have buyers ready and waiting. They won’t pay you what your property’s worth, but it’ll be more than you’d get if you wait for the city to take it by eminent domain.”
We know what’s what. Buildings that need a coat of paint are the “blight” that gives the city its excuse to declare our neighborhood a project area and subject us to eminent domain. Loans against our equity – loans available in other San Francisco neighborhoods – would enable us to erase the “blight” overnight.
Because we won’t budge, the gentrification pressure intensifies another notch. Recently, building inspectors, always accompanied by well-armed police, have been visiting property owners on Third Street finding code violations, whether they exist or not. “Oh, how sad,” they say. “These repairs will cost more than your building is worth. Since you can’t borrow the money to rebuild, why not let Mr. Big take over? He’ll give you enough to get out of town.”
Being in business on Third Street is no way to get rich quick. Muni has had the street torn up building the light rail line for most of the past five years, hindering customer access and denying our people the construction jobs that would give them the money to be good customers. I’ve been told that Muni even refused to apply for available federal funds to cover Third Street businesses’ losses during construction – that’s how badly City Hall wants us gone!
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.
And it’s the cops. Echoing the “as long as you people are here …” threat from MLK Day 2002, the Chronicle, starting on Sunday, has filled its front page daily with an amazing – and courageous – series about the SFPD called “The Use of Force,” http://sfgate.com/useofforce/. Among the facts cited in the first installment:
l “In the years 2001 to 2004, San Francisco officers were the subject of more force allegations than officers in San Jose, Oakland, San Diego and Seattle combined.”
l “In most years, blacks have accounted for more than 40 percent of cases where officers used force.”
l “Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has ultimate responsibility for the department, did not make himself available for an interview despite repeated requests. Members of his staff helped the department prepare a plan to ‘defuse possible negative public reaction’ to the investigation, according to documents The Chronicle obtained through a public records request.”
And what is Mayor Newsom’s solution to rampant police brutality? “the hiring of as many as 700 additional officers over four years,” according to this morning’s Chronicle.
While our friends in Congress prepare to impeach Bush and our brothers and sisters in New Orleans and the Katrina Diaspora threaten to evict FEMA, let’s get ready to evict Newsom and any official complicit in plans to evict us and give Bayview Hunters Point to the big developers.
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.”
