On Thursday, a hearing was held in San Francisco Superior Court to challenge an environmental impact report that found it safe for mega developer Lennar Corp. to build commercial housing on a former naval shipyard. The hearing came the same week that damning e-mails emerged showing that some local and federal officials may have colluded with the developer to cover up health risks associated with the controversial and long-troubled $8 billion project, which many people in the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood fear will ultimately price out what’s left of the city’s black population. From John Upton at The Bay Citizen:
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved much of the sprawling redevelopment plan last year after receiving assurances from federal and local officials that it was safe, despite toxic compounds, radioactive contamination and naturally occurring asbestos in swaths of the shuttered shipyard's soil. A 75-acre outlying chunk of the project area was transferred to Lennar in 2005, but the construction of homes has not yet begun.
Work shutdowns occur when airborne asbestos levels at the construction site are unsafe. Lennar was fined $515,000 by air regulators in 2008 for engaging in practices that allowed dust to blanket surrounding neighborhoods.
“I'm sure you will also want to change my wording on how I portray the problems, lack of monitors, etc.,” San Francisco Department of Public Health official Amy Brownell told Lennar employees in an Oct. 13, 2006 email while preparing for a safety-related presentation. “Go ahead and change any way you want. I may change some of it back but I'm willing to read your versions.”
Interestingly, the neighborhood began attracting black residents during WWII to work in the shipyard, which is where key components of the atomic bomb were first loaded onto the USS Indianapolis en route to Japan. After the war it was home to the Naval Radiological Defense Lab, which was then the military's largest facility for applied nuclear research. The area was finally declared a Superfund cite in 1989, but despite federal law, little has been done to clean it up. The developer in question, who's already been sued by three of its former employees for punishing whistle-blowers, was reportedly being asked to finally finish the job.
Questions of redevelopment aside for a moment, it's important to note that contaminants from this shipyard have been quite literally killing black folks for years. The Bayview district, which is over 60 percent black, has the highest asthma and cancer rates in the city. The lack of accountability and, in this case, corruption speaks volumes. Particularly because it's happening in one of the most green-conscious cities in a state with some of the strongest environmental protections in the country.
