Searching for weapons of mass destruction: Where is the Bayview blight?

Two days earlier, in Western Addition, Josie, an acquaintance, said, “I was around the Fillmore for the jazz time. In 1964-65, Redevelopment started buying everybody out, bulldozing apartments on Eddy and Ellis, including my place, saying they were going to build it up better.

“When they finished, it wasn’t like before. Rents were higher. The neighborhood was gone.”

The Redevelopment Agency’s main tool in its recent sudden push toward a Fillmore-style “re-peopling” and “gentrification” was to declare the area “blighted.” “It’s plain criminal greed,” says Willie. “Anything they see is blight.” So he and I set out searching for blight in Bayview Hunters Point.

Several public commentators at the March 6 San Francisco Redevelopment Commission hearing described the Redevelopment plan as “a social hurricane ... sweeping people out of their homes,” likening the Bayview to the Fillmore and Katrina’s ethnic cleansing.

The national and international significance of Bayview Redevelopment is that it is another local sortie in the class war of Rich on Poor. After New Orleans, the Bayview is the nation’s largest self-contained African American community under immediate threat of redevelopment.

The United States struggles in the grip of a totalitarian corporatocracy. The political flow chart surges down from Bush to Schwarzenegger to Newsom.

Parties seem nonexistent. What remains is the corporatocracy, respecting no geographic boundaries. Politicians and business interests hold complete fealty to corporations like Lennar and the money they generate for the rich. Such totalitarians make self-entitled decisions against the will of the people.

According to Randy Shaw, director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, “dictators” in the Redevelopment Agency, use eminent domain as a tool to “circumvent democracy.”

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