1101 was supposed to have someone at the front to check you in when you arrive. There were protesters and media crowding around 1101.
“In your bedrooms you have no lighting, so you have to go buy some lamps.” Davis couldn’t bring his old washer that he paid for himself because there’s no hookup in the new unit. “We’re ending public housing.
Last year an audit revealed that it was at least $20 million short of their budget. The meeting was followed by a site walk and inspection of several of the targeted intersections. “The irony in this for me is you are rushing people over here,” Davis says, “and then we get over here and it’s not anything like what we were told, to me.” Most of his concerns are about safety. As much as they’re like, ‘oh there’s violence, or it’s unsafe or it’s public housing,’ ... It’s communities, it’s family, it’s in the fabric.”“When I talk about HOPE SF I call it the nation’s first large scale reparations initiative,” says Theo Miller, director of HOPE SF. These plots will be incorporated into an existing community gardening program in Potrero Terrace and Annex.The southern Potrero Hill neighborhood includes the Potrero Annex and Potrero Terrace public housing sites, with approximately 1,200 people living in 606 homes on the steep, south-facing slope of the hill. It may seem small, but tensions like these add up. And they have to prove they don’t make too much, instead of proving they make enough. As attention focused last month on the violence along the T-Third Street Muni, students from nearby Potrero Hill were also marching, but their three-year-old effort focused on bringing attention to the public housing projects that sit on the south side of an increasingly affluent neighborhood.
The black population in San Francisco has been on the decline ever since then. The buildings were good, but HOPE VI built fewer units than they demolished, and many residents were permanently displaced. That’s about to change for Davis. The shoes you can leave those, those are garbage,” Davis says, as he sorts through his belongings.There’s a crew of movers here to help him, paid for by a government subsidy. A version of this article was originally published in the Potrero View. Irish Hill was a small working-class neighborhood in San Francisco, near the intersection of 22nd Street and Illinois Avenue.Expansion of the local iron and steel works, including leveling of the hill, effaced the neighborhood in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Families should have multiple chances to stay in that building.” 1101 is just the beginning of Potrero’s transformation. Selected in part because they lie on the Walking School Bus routes to Daniel Webster and Starr King Elementary schools; these five intersections are critical to safe pedestrian circulation on the site. No more public housing in San Francisco. I don’t want to leave San Francisco,” she says. There is great diversity in the makeup of people, entertainment venues and fine dining establishments. 1 / 3. That the courtyards that you ran in, or the porch that you sat out on, or the open air that you had—the fact that you didn’t have people on top of you or beneath you — is gone. Potrero Hill is the third to be rebuilt. It would give these decaying sites to non-profit developers to rebuild, as long as they ensured that there would be a one-for-one replacement of all public housing units. Similar to how you sign a lease for an apartment, except public housing residents have to do it every year. Davis says he wished residents had a bigger say in the design of the new building and who is moving into it. This is a ghetto type corner grocery store in the poor side of Potrero Hill, but just a few blocks away from the gentrified areas of the neighborhood. "I’m not excited about this. Each resident coming from public housing has a right to return. “I’m glad we’re finally moving!” She tells me she didn’t get to pick out her new apartment, and won’t have a view. Lifelong Potrero Hill resident Shervon Hunter gives the opening blessing.
So now protections for these former public housing tenants lie with the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The Potrero Hill Neighborhood House was all of that and so much more.
“We are unapologetically intentionally trying to repair what decades of bad public policy has done on top of these communities.” Miller knows this isn’t just about providing a new building.“In some ways the city and county is like three generations late on this issue.” He also knows people in the community are skeptical.