Austin Brown

Austin Brown is a good student. He says that apologetically, eyes down, slumping in his chair.

“I have little interest in anything. Journalism is the thing that has not interested me the least.”

Austin thinks he’s a good writer, but he doesn’t think he’s a good reporter. He got an A- in a reporting class, but he shrugs that off.

“I did all the assignments,” he says. “When the bullshit of doing assignments dies down, something hasn’t grabbed me.”

He likes sports, though. Fantasy baseball takes up a lot of his time.
Where might he like to work?

“Just say ESPN,” Austin says. “That’s the most obvious.”

A Self-Imposed Myth

There seems to be an understanding between many I’ve spoken to that the level of crime in Bayview is so high as to be unique. There is a sense, not among everyone, but among enough people I’ve spoken to, that this neighborhood is singular in its share of San Francisco blight, murder and drugs. While these things happen (most people I’ve spoken to who live here have more than one story of being witness to drug activity or the victim of theft), the statistics tell a different story.

Which is the truer take? Is there something the numbers don’t account for? Why is there this disconnect?

Shirley Moore, the vice president of the Bayview Hill Neighborhood Association, is an example of an exaggerated view. When talking about crime in her neighborhood, Moore’s voice becomes louder and more strained. She can’t walk her dogs anymore, she says, because one day she found a note in her mailbox. It said, “I follow you home.” She’s tired of seeing glass from car windows on the street when she leaves her home in the morning. When her car gets broken into, she says, she doesn’t report it, knowing it will just make her premiums go up.

“When I want a nice cup of coffee, I make it myself,” Moore says. “Or I have to drive in my car to a mall in Portola.” Continuing, Moore uses phrases like “held hostage.” When talking about where they live, she and others in Bayview Hill Neighborhood Association tend to paint a picture of siege.

Statistics tell a different story. A mapping application on the San Francisco Police Department Web site shows where various crimes. Incidences come up in color-coded dots, blue, green, yellow, red.

On the map, Bayview has its share of colored dots, certainly. But they’re nowhere near as dense as the dots in the Tenderloin and South of Market.

It’s the same for subsidized housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has a similar map for housing projects, it’s own, and those run by other organizations. Again, Bayview has a few, downtown San Francisco has many more.

The list continues this way, for the number of people who are homeless, the number of registered sex offenders. One by one, the statistics show something less dire than the picture painted by Moore and others.

But it’s comparative gain. Bayview’s bad numbers are consistently trumped by the Tenderloin’s.

Also, the financial center and the tenderloin are less residential, if you look at the numbers. Bayview has a much higher number of single family homes and rental housing units. Though downtown San Francisco has higher statistics of crime, that place may be less of a home to more people.

The Glamour of the Tough Neighborhood

Talking to residents and outsiders, Bayview’s reputation precedes it. I’ve seen craigslist ads for apartments in the neighborhood, many of them with qualifiers like, “yeah, I know, Bayview…”

When I’ve told people I’m reporting on their neighborhood, they tend to ask me to focus on the good things this place has to offer. This has happened more than once. More than once, I’ve also heard the phrase, “after a while I stopped calling the police when I heard gunshots.”

In reporting, there seems to be an almost willful focus on the neighborhood’s weakest attributes.

I’ve noticed it in myself. The Bayview district, according to the city’s formal boundaries, run much father north and west than the common understanding of where Bayview, as a neighborhood, begins and ends. I’ve often had to choose which information to use, data from the larger or smaller Bayview. In these situations, I’ve felt a dark little temptation to use the information that gives the worse impression.

This could also be due to expediency. Official data is easiest to get for the larger, district Bayview. Census data is easily had by zip code—94124 falls loosely in line with the district boundaries.

I can understand the temptation to paint a place you don’t live in as worse off than it is. But what seems unique to me, rather than Bayview’s crime rate, is the tendency of some people here to exaggerate the negative. To an outsider, which I am, it comes off as a myth.

Sunday Streets Festival

Today was a good day in Bayview for nostalgia.

For the first time, the Bayview neighborhood was a part of Sunday Streets, when volunteers block off major streets to car traffic. Rollerbladers, bicyclists, pedestrians, had most of Third Street to themselves. Sunday Streets was a part of other Third Street events, rather than its own entity.

Sunday is a good day for foot traffic in this neighborhood. Many of its residents go to church on Sundays, and more importantly, many of them go to churches they can walk to.

Add to that local art shows. Local, black-positive artist Malik Senefru showcased at the Bayview Opera House, which marked the end of the Sunday Streets route.


Hats and Foot Traffic

Bayview has hats like nowhere else in San Francisco: big, wide-brimmed hats, wrapped hats in colorful printed cloth, hats with glitter and rhinestones, hats worthy of Aretha Franklin.

They come out on early Sunday afternoons, after church. Third Street is something to see at noon on Sunday—over the course of church-going hours it’s transformed from a ghost town to a small town thoroughfare. The streets are full of marvelous, old-fashioned outfits.

So it’s a good thing Sunday Streets happens on Sundays. The crowds outside Bayview’s major churches, vendors, bicyclists passing through from neighborhoods further north mixed together.

Third Street businesses put out balloons and played music.

It felt great, and strange, to walk in the streets.

An Anecdote, Over a Beer

It would be easy to miss the Speakeasy Brewery. The building, which shares turf with light industry (The San Francisco Examiner’s printing press is a close neighbor), doesn’t have a written sign. Instead, a pair of shifty eyes painted red, black, and large above the building’s sole front door mark the brewery’s entrance.

At its weekly happy hour (Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m.) it doesn’t sell beer. Rather, it sells tokens (printed with the emblematic criminal-looking eyes) for three dollars each. Inside, one token buys a pint of the brewery’s mobster-themed beer: Prohibition Ale and The Old Godfather Lager, to name two.

At happy hour, the crowd inside is, alas, homogenous. Twenty-something white kids, most of them bicycle enthusiasts and many of them new residents, are gathered inside and within the brewery’s “yard”—an area of the street enclosed in twice-as-high-as-me chain-link fences.

“Never the Twain Shall Meet”

Along Evans Road, at the bottom of Hunters View Hill, The speakeasy brewery is a neighbor to many of Bayview’s HUD housing complexes. Jim Ansbro, who frequents the happy hour, recounts a story about trying to encourage the brewery’s neighbors to come and mingle a bit.

“I offered them a free beer the first time they came,” Ansbro says. “Nobody came.”

Ansbro pauses.

“Well, three of them came. But that’s not very many for a free beer,” he says.

Investing for free, sort of.

An attempt to open the investment, and profits, of redeveloping the Hunters Point Shipyard to various Bayview leaders has had to change course.

The community builder program, part of the city’s original plan to develop the shipyard, paired prominent members of the Bayview community, some of them religious leaders, with construction companies. Originally, each would have shared the cost of construction, investing potentially millions of dollars, to be paid a management fee—three percent of construction’s total profits—a net gain of several hundred thousand dollars for a lot of 25 homes.

Because of the tightening credit market, those who would be community builders have had trouble coming up with the cash.

Trying to preserve the program, Lennar Urban, the company overseeing the shipyard’s development, has shifted the entire cost to construction companies. This will allow several Bayview leaders, including Bishop Lee of the Shiloh Full Gospel Church and George Davis, the executive director of the Bayview Multi-Purpose Senior Center, to participate in the redevelopment even though credit is tight.

However, some worry that without skin in the game, community builders will reap an investor’s benefits without having to contribute to the redevelopment.

“(Community) builders need to put up the equity,” said Christine Johnson, the head of the housing branch of the Community Advisory committee, which oversees the redevelopment on behalf of Bayview residents.

Without that incentive, Johnson said, community builders won’t contribute resources to their respective projects.

Cheryl Smith, the director of community affairs for Lennar Urban’s Bay Area division, said the community builders would be expected to play a managerial role.

“This is not a handout from Lennar,” Smith said.

However, Smith was vague as to what exactly each community builder would have to bring to his project.

As plans currently stand, over 10,000 homes and 3.5 million square feet of retail space will be constructed on the former shipyard.

When pressed by Johnson in a CAC meeting on April 23, Smith defended the program, saying it was important for community members to contribute to, and benefit from, the redevelopment.

“My kids will see other people in this community being involved in developing their neighborhood,” Smith said. “To me, that’s significant.”

Women-Owned Businesses in the Bayview

Third Street, Bayview’s main corridor, has seen six new businesses open over the past year. Five of them are owned by women.

The five businesses, all located within the same few blocks on Third Street, have close ties. The owners of two of them, Auntie April’s Soul Foods and Trendsetters II, are sisters (their stores are next door to each other).

Beyond that, the owners of four of the five are friends, and were before deciding to open their own businesses.

These five businesses are part of a larger trend. The nonprofit Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center offers classes and financial to new business owners. Antoinette Mobley, the Center’s Third Street Corridor Manager, says the bulk of people in the center’s classes have been women.

They are also local. Bayview’s reputation tends to discourage outside business owners from setting up shop in the neighborhood. The benefit of this, Mobely says, is that Bayview businesses owners tend to be residents.

“They don’t have that fear factor,” Mobley said. “This is where they live; they’re not going to be intimidated by it.”


View Women-Owned Businesses on Third Street in a larger map

"For some reason, honey, it's the women who are doing all the work."
-Antoinette Mobley

The Kids on the Stage

The two little girls have been up there for a while. About ten years old, they’re wearing long dark dresses and headscarves, like smaller versions of the women who brought them. They’ve been standing in a corner of the stage with their arms raised, patiently, as if in class. Every now and the woman and the man next to them whisper something in their ears.

Gavin Newsom won’t take their questions. The room, after all, is full. This is another one of the San Francisco mayor’s town hall meetings around the state, pre-campaign campaign stops for the 2010 race for governor. Though the meetings have been billed as a chance for Newsom to get to know the issues of places outside San Francisco, they’re also an opportunity for him to shine. The Napa crowd is receptive. One man spends his question asking Newsom if he can take the mayor’s picture and load it onto his Facebook page.

Yet the kids still stand. They are part of a group from Bayview which has dogged Newsom at each meeting. Two nights ago in Oakland they and people sympathetic to them overran the circulating microphone, shouting questions instead of waiting for a turn. Newspaper articles made that Oakland meeting seem like a circus, nearly a brawl.

It doesn’t feel like a circus tonight, except for those kids, and that the Bayview group won’t stop asking questions. As I watch the meeting, the kids’ raised hands seem like something of a secret weapon, an ace in the hole, pushed up to the stage after Newsom stopped taking questions from the black people in the room.

It’s sad that I can say that, but it’s true. It’s easy to tell who’s from Bayview and who isn’t, some are seated in the folding chairs laid out for the Napa crowd but most of them stand along the walls, some just outside the doors. Some of them, in suits, look like bodyguards – one is still wearing sunglasses even though the sun set fifteen minutes ago.

Their complaints are familiar: Lennar, the company slated to redevelop a great deal of the existing neighborhood, has been given too much. In places the soil is still too polluted to build on or to live by. Promises the city made have not been kept. The complaints, Newsom’s answers and the way the people from Bayview shake their heads and mutter angrily when he responds, all of it has a practiced quality.

But the kids! They’re still up there. After a while each girl supports her raised arm with a free hand.

After it’s all over, after the Facebook man asks his question and Newsom is applauded for his support of the gay community, the Napa crowd, minnow-like, clusters around Newsom to ask him more about his environmental policy. A woman confronts the group from Bayview, shouting at them for bringing San Francisco’s issues to Napa, saying they had stolen the smaller community’s chance to let Newsom, the potential gubernatorial candidate, know what is important to them. I go up to the girls, who are looking down, being patted and comforted.

I ask the older girl what her question had been.

“About Lennar,” she says, close to tears. She is holding piece of paper with something of a speech written on it. Could that be her handwriting? The writing looks, perhaps, too neat to be hers, but she could be a precocious student. How old is she?

An undercurrent of opportunism runs through this meeting. It’s in Newsom’s presence and his answers, in the way the Bayview group has followed him from town to town, in the emotional punch a critical question from a little girl might pack. I wonder whose idea it was for the children to come on stage and raise their hands.

Seeing me speaking to the girl, a woman in green takes her elbow and leads her away.

I feel like a jerk for asking anything of a child.

Before I Begin.

First off: a confession.

I’m writing from my laptop in Burlingame just before midnight, and this scenario is playing itself out in my mind: as I rumble up the 101 in my big green truck, I have to make a decision. There’s the exit to Cesar Chavez; I can veer right and descend into the Bayview, or I can keep straight and overshoot it, maneuver back eventually, back toward the airport, to my white suburb. Two imperatives are at work here. I need to walk around in Hunters Point at night; I need to keep safe. Twice before I have chickened out.

Online, by reputation, the worst things about this neighborhood are the easiest to find. Skim the reputation of this place in print and video, you’ll find clips of Kevin Epp’s documentary “Straight Outta Hunters Point” with footage of gang shootouts. You’ll hear of children hit by stray gunfire.

But in the neighborhood that danger, that immediate negative, is noticeable at first only in small details. There are three mortuaries along Third Street’s 2.2 mile stretch through Bayview. While here at night, James Ansbro, a resident, wouldn’t let me walk the four blocks back to my car, driving me instead. Just before that, when an acquaintance of his had walked 20 feet or so down Third Street to show me his church building, Ansbro insisted on staying back, keeping watch. Despite all this, I have never actually felt threatened.

More easily noticeable is the good. Churches and community organizations make up a large and visible portion of this neighborhood. And something else: so much more than in the suburbs, people here greet each other in the street. Walking one day, I sneezed. A man across the street called out, “Bless you!”

Reporting on Bayview Hunters Point has come down to a balancing act. While walking around for the first few days in this neighborhood I would consciously relax my body. How far do I let go of my cautions? How far do I ignore the reputations this area carries? Where does objectivity end and naivety begin?

I want to be prudent, but I also don’t want to be blind to the good that is here.

As I drive, I wrestle with whether to lock my doors. To lock them means judging those I am trying to observe, to predispose myself to fearfulness. To leave them unlocked means…Well…

So far, I’ve left them unlocked.