Lennar Corporation is sponsoring heavy TV advertising in favor of Proposition G, a redevelopment plan for Hunters Point and its mostly minority residents.
The ad touts the benefits to San Francisco of this plan cooked up by City Powers. Of course, we have to filter these claims through the knowledge that Lennar Corporation has only one performance standard—profit.
Organizations and residents of Bayview Hunters Point along with grassroots progressives and others opposed to the corporatization of all human experience have qualified a competing ballot measure, Proposition F, aimed at affordable housing and fair treatment for current BVHP residents.
I’ve been having trouble remembering which is which, so I’m using this mnemonic, which sort of indicates my preference:
Maybe the recently announced municipal budget deficit will spur radical action. Maybe San Franciscans are fed up with the duct-tape/crazy-glue approach to city finances.
I suggest we eliminate city government almost entirely, and outsource the whole thing to Lennar.
This could coincide with the renaming of San Francisco. Sooner or later we’ll realize that naming a city after a saint of a particular religion, especially a saint of the anti-gay, anti-choice Roman Catholic Church, is just too incorrect politically.
Name it Lennar City. Let Lennar run things directly, instead of through the charade of city government. There could be enormous economies.
Anyway these three stories came to me via Google Alerts the other day.
Crew detonates fragmentation bomb found on former bombing range site.
It’s about a Lennar development built on a Florida bombing range. Inspection for live bombs was sort of an afterthought. I’m sure that the middle school in the story, where bombs were found, prides itself in being drug-free and certainly gun-free, but they can’t be sure if the place is bomb-free.
Present Tense – “Lennar bombs.”
It’s not just any Palm Springs golf course Lennar is shutting down because of the slumping housing market, it’s a Jack Nicklaus designed golf courts. Oh, the sacrilege!
Lennar has shut down the Escena golf course in Palm Springs. They were supposed to build 1400 luxury homes starting at 400K and up. Jack Nicklaus designed the golf course. After building about 60 homes, they have stopped all building on the project, have not finished the club house, and now have closed the golf course. Those 60 people who bought golf course homes are screwed.
Quoted from implode-explode.com. "Re: Lennar shuts down Nicklaus designed golf course"
Future Tense – “Lennar will bomb”
It looks like we’re getting another Candlestick ballot measure on the June 2008 ballot. According to the SFGate story:
The new proposal - which would reach the June 2008 ballot following a signature drive - calls on the city to contribute public land and to subsidize portions of the project by tapping a city affordable-housing construction fund and by issuing bonds backed by future property tax revenue from the site.
The coalition sponsoring this ballot measure is led by Lennar Corporation.
I think the above quote means that taxpayers guarantee Lennar a profit.
The proposed ballot initiative, submitted by a group calling itself the African American Community Revitalization Coalition, would repeal measures passed by city voters in 1997 that approved $100 million in public financing and land-use rule changes to allow a new 49ers stadium and shopping mall at Candlestick.
Tentative name of the initiative: "Bayview Jobs, Parks and Housing Initiative."
According to the blog Educational Justice, Tuesday evening’s regular SF Board of Education meeting will consider a resolution supporting the stoppage of work at Lennar’s redevelopment site in Bay View Hunters Point.
Educational Justice is written by a team that includes Eric Mar and Kim-Shree Maufas, two Board of Education members who are sponsoring the resolution.
Their blog post, which includes the full text of the Stop-Lennar resolution, includes a link to BVHP commenter and activist, Francisco DaCosta. Mr DaCosta is extremely outspoken in his opposition to Lennar. I’m impressed that elected officials such as Mar and Maufas would align with him.
Here’s the agenda item description:
In Opposition to Lennar Corporation’s Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Development and In Support of the Community’s Demand for a Temporary Stoppage and an Independent Health and Safety Assessment to Protect Our Students and Their Families - Commissioners Eric Mar and Kim-Shree Maufas (Per Board Policy 120, Section 9.4, the Board may suspend its Rules in order to consider action to this resolution at First Reading)
The meeting is open to the public.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2007 6:00 P.M. 555 FRANKLIN STREET, FIRST FLOOR
The meeting will be shown live on cable channel 78, and can also be viewed via live webcast.
Some Bay View Hunters Point residents are concerned that Lennar’s redevelopment project will produce more rather than less toxicity in their neighborhoods.
In most cases, victims of environmental pollution experience some sort of “slow death.” BVHP residents are told that their asthma couldn’t be caused by asbestos dust—asbestos takes twenty or thirty years to kill you.
Residents of two Orlando, Florida, Lennar development have more immediate health concerns—sudden death.
The two neighborhoods -- about 450 homes in all -- are part of the 950-acre Vista Lakes community built atop the western fringe of a forgotten Army bombing range.
The Army Corps of Engineers said in July that at least two live, unexploded bombs dropped there in the 1940s were found on some cattle land about 1,500 feet behind nearby Odyssey Middle School. No one was injured by the recent find, but in the late 1940s, three boys playing with what they thought was metal junk were maimed in an explosion.
Lennar has promised a thorough search of the area for unexploded ordnance.
A private company specializing in such things will be performing the search. It’s unclear if this effort will allow Lennar to advertise the homes as “certified bomb-free.”
The map below shows the major museums of San Francisco. Boxes 1 through 5 designate existing museums. Box 6 designates the approximate location of the proposed new Fisher museum of modern art.
1. DeYoung Museum 2. Academy of Science (natural history museum) 3. Legion of Honor 4. Exploratorium 5. Museum of Modern Art 6. (Proposed) Fisher Museum
Note that the proposed site of the Fisher Museum (#6) is just south of the Golden Gate Bridge, which makes it closer to Marin County than to the southeast corner of San Francisco. The neighborhoods that surround the proposed site are, like Marin County, almost all white and affluent.
The proposed site is as far away from the poor, mostly non-white, high crime neighborhood called Bay View Hunters Point (BVHP), near the arrow-tip.
Recently there has been much discussion of “environmental racism” in BVHP, both past and present. Currently Lennar Corporation is the general contractor of a massive redevelopment effort in the BVHP.
Some BVHP residents have complained about health problems caused by unmitigated dust from the construction. There is also generalized distrust of the Lennar effort, since to many in San Francisco “redevelopment” has meant “negro removal.”
It would go some way toward demonstrating good will if City Powers could locate the new museum, with its jobs and educational opportunities, in the BVHP redevelopment area.
To place yet another museum in the white, affluent part of San Francisco, insinuates that black, poor people don’t or can’t appreciate art or other museum fare. Why can't there be even one museum in the southern half of the city?
Lennar Urban announced this afternoon the appointment of a new Director of Community Relations for the Bay Area. Lennar press release here.
Cheryl M. Smith, a BVHP native, will be tasked with taming vocal community residents who can’t believe that Lennar and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency have their best interests at heart.
Last week’s tumultuous Supervisors meeting, in which the Lennar redevelopment project came within one vote of a shut-down recommendation, could be just a skirmish in a battle that amounts to the San Francisco African-American community’s “Last Stand.”
At the very least the close vote showed Lennar that they needed to improve their community relations.
In last week’s emotional, sometimes clamorous Bd of Supes meeting on stopping (temporarily) the Lennar redevelopment project, Supervisor Sophie Maxwell in whose district the project is taking place got beaten up pretty good by many of the public commenters.
The measure, sponsored by resurgent supervisor Chris Daly, was defeated 6-5 after a marathon hearing.
Now Daly continues to embrace the issue of environmental racism regarding the Lennar development, even visiting her district to personally inspect the site. To supervisor Maxwell this must feel like poaching.
Now it looks like Daly could run for Mayor after all.
Her final comment—is that what they used to call “snarky”?
It’s four minutes long but there’s hardly a dull moment.
Protecting poor, disadvantaged neighborhoods from being redeveloped out of existence is a classic leftist organizing cause. I guess it’s kind of old fashioned.
Residents of Bay View Hunters Point are told that the Lennar development in their neighborhood is environmentally safe. This, despite numerous asbestos exceedences and the outright failure to monitor asbestos dispersal for the first months of the project.
The residents, mostly poor and/or people of color, are told that everything’s safe and not to worry.
The 8/13/07 issue of BusinessWeek has an article titled You Call This a Home?, about a nationwide increase of angry, litigious homebuyers.
I wonder if these quotes from the article will reassure the concerned BVHP residents.
Lennar Corp. (LEN ), another large builder, has drawn scrutiny in South Carolina. Residents of its new Pebble Creek development in North Charleston, such as Bill and Holly Hurley, say they have suffered from light-headedness, lethargy, and depression. Home inspections they commissioned showed unsafe levels of methane gas, which the Hurleys and others fear may be linked to possible soil contamination by a previous land owner.
Miami-based Lennar says in a written statement that it "hired a consulting firm before the land was developed and found no evidence of recognized environmental conditions" at that time. Playing down health concerns, Lennar acknowledges that methane has seeped out of "broken sewer pipes and improperly seated toilets," which it says it has now repaired. The ultimate source of the gas hasn't been determined, however. The company has bought back one house as a result of the controversy.
“Redevelopment” in San Francisco has a major component h. brown calls “Negro Removal.”
Actually, those were the bad old days of the 1960’s, etc. Now, in the enlightened 21st Century, it would be called “African-American Removal.” Same difference to the removees.
Resistance to the current round of Redevelopment aimed at Bay View Hunters Point can’t help the moderate and low income, mostly non-white residents hold onto their neighborhood. Rather, my hope is that current residents can receive ample compensation for their displacement.
Prominent City Hall watcher and long time Bay View resident, Espanola Jackson, is on the scene to witness the skullduggery and to scold the skullduggers, and negotiate that fair price for her community’s grief.
San Francisco Magazine, in an article on the African American exodus (removal) from San Francisco, describes Ms Espanola Jackson thus:
Jackson is a round marshmallow of a woman who can usually be seen in what she calls her trademark church hat. She calls everyone baby, honey, or sweetie. She is 73, but moves more like she’s 60, stomping around as she rants about this or that. She is very stubborn.
Reportedly Ms Jackson has more than forty great-grandchildren—great qualifications for minding the Board of Supervisors.
In yesterday’s Board of Supes Land Use Committee meeting, residents of Bayview Hunters Point and their supporters testified against the Redevelopment Agency and its Nancy Pelosi connected contractor, Lennar Corporation, who they see as destroying their mostly black community, and in this specific case, their health by contamination from the building site.
Among the commenters was this gentleman, who employed a most striking visual aid:
Mr Shepherd's "mendacity" refers to the previous testimony of SF Dept of Public Health officials that the Lennar project was safe and the neighbors fears were unfounded.
The Board of Supervisors Land Use Committee unanimously voted to approve and send to the full Board a resolution endorsing a controversial development plan.
The “Conceptual Framework,” adds Candlestick Point land to an existing project at Hunters Point being conducted by mega-developer Lennar Corporation.
Some critics refer to this as a “gift” of public land to a private, for-profit corporation, Lennar.
The affected residents of Bay View/Hunters Point fear that their homes and neighborhood will be stolen from them for the benefit of private corporations and upwardly mobile new arrivals to the City.
And rightly so. My impression of the history of redevelopment in San Francisco is one of shame. Basically it’s: Promise the colored folks and poor folks anything in order to get them out of their homes, then, don’t return their calls.
The residents of BVHP will have their homes and neighborhood taken from them, the only question is what, besides promises, they can get in return.
At the meeting today, public comment divided between “let’s move the project forward,” and, “Lennar Corp is a bad actor and should be dumped from the plan.”
As proof of their contention that Lennar Corp is a bad actor, BVHP speakers hammered on an incident in which Lennar Corporation, already grading at the Hunter’s Point facility, failed to monitor the disbursal of asbestos into the surrounding neighborhood.
Other instances of Lennar’s failure to obey environmental regulations, with possible health effects on the neighbors, were cited as examples of why the community doesn’t trust, and why the City government shouldn’t do business with, Lennar.
Here’s my favorite speaker:
All three supervisors, Maxwell, Sandoval, and Dufty, after public comment ended, expressed concern and outrage about the possible environmental threat, and chided Lennar.
They treated the critics as being concerned about discreet health issues, which they wholeheartedly agreed with. The Supervisors completely ignored the commenters’ assertion that Lennar should be dumped from the project, or at least should be investigated.
Basically, the residents were pleading for a developer that might be less rapacious. The supervisors did not even recognize this plea as having been made.
So the message is clear: Lennar is more powerful than the Board of Supervisors, the Mayor, or the voters of SF. BVHP constituents are on their own to negotiate a fair price for their homes.
Good luck.
Lennar Corp has been in the news recently for failing to repair timely gross defects in a new “luxury condo” building in San Francisco. Here’s a recent Chronicle story lead:
When Michael Cullen used the stove at his new $1.5 million penthouse in San Francisco's trendy South Beach, the ventilation failed and his condo filled with smoke. When he filled his spacious new bathtub, it leaked, soaking subflooring beneath bathroom tile and damaging wood paneling.
The entire complex has defects, according to Cullen. The garage walls leak, the water pressure is weak and inconsistent, and the entire west wing of the building experiences temperature swings due to ventilation problems, he said.
The article goes on to explain the difficulty of getting Lennar Corp., the builder, to correct the problems
"It's really disheartening to pay this much for a brand-new home and to have all this stuff happening," said Cullen. "It's been three years of absolute hell fighting ... and I don't see any end in sight."
If a white guy who just paid $1.5 million for a condo finds Lennar unresponsive, imagine what will happen to the mostly black, mostly poor residents of Bay View/Hunters Point.
