Public Housing Tenants Need Repairs, Not Promises

This fall he announced that “all of his political capital will go” towards producing a plan to locally finance the revitalization of the 2,500 severely distressed units in Bayview-Hunters Point. He has since created a task force on the issue to further explore the feasibility and to develop recommendations.

While initially proposing a $100 million bond measure to pay for the improvements, it is unclear what direction this “Hope SF” idea will take (except that the Alice Griffith public housing site seems to have been folded into his grand plan for Candlestick Point, as remade by Lennar). As recently as last month, however, the Mayor reaffirmed the city’s intentions to redevelop the housing authority properties in his State of the City address.

The Mayor shined the spotlight on his plans to solve the public housing problem once again in January, when he announced that he had put together a panel of “national experts” to evaluate whether the city is doing everything possible to ensure improved living conditions for public housing residents. The panel was supposed to report back with their assessment on April 15th – but we’re still waiting.

While his intentions may be honorable, and if plans to improve uninhabitable public housing developments with no displacement are realized it would be monumentally laudable, the Mayor’s ideas remain both theoretical and in the distance. In fact, if the financing were in place today to fully improve all of the units in need, it would still likely be 5-10 years before residents saw any real improvements in their conditions.

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