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• 1 2019-08-24T23:22:59-07:00 2000s–Present 4 Mixed-Income Redevelopment and the Privatization of Public Housing plain 2019-08-24T23:52:22-07:00 01/01/2000-01-01-2020 San Francisco’s public housing redevelopment was made possible not only by federal HOPE VI funding but also through private investments. The late 1990s marked a shift toward public-private financing of public housing and a move away from entirely low rent public housing to more mixed-income developments. San Francisco had gentrified some of its more noticeable public housing projects in central areas of The City through HOPE VI, however, it did not fix some of the largest and most neglected public housing projects in the southeast. The Obama Administration introduced new funding for public housing redevelopment that emphasized mixedincome redevelopment through public-private financing. This was ironic because at the same time that the private market had caused a financial crisis, the government placed housing for the most vulnerable in the hands of the private market.
         San Francisco launched its HOPE SF program, an extension of HOPE VI that aimed to minimize the displacement by keeping residents on sight while rebuilding public housing. The City chose Alice Griffith (Double Rock), Potrero Hill, Hunters View (West Point), and Sunnydale as HOPE SF projects, all of which are located in the southeast side of The City, particularly along the waterfront. The first HOPE SF construction began at Hunters View projects in 2010. The City had long been devising a plan to redevelop the Hunters Point and Candlestick Park area with the cleanup of the old naval shipyard and other environmentally toxic sites. Another key goal of HOPE SF is to decrease the concentration of public housing units by building more units at higher income levels including moderately affordable, below market rate, and market rate units. Some residents and activists feel that this is The City’s way of appeasing higher income residents, by privatizing the projects.
         Amidst rampant displacement and an affordable housing crisis, in 2015 Mayor Ed Lee began a plan to completely privatize all of San Francisco’s public housing by transferring management to private entities. Today nearly all of San Francisco’s public housing is privately managed and he City is once again on the HUD’s watch list due to financial shortfalls and mismanagement. 
         This timeline was meant to show the destructive forces of structural racism that follow public housing investments (when they were majority-white) and disinvestments (when they became majorityBlack). Public housing was a program that provided permanent affordability for all residents who lived within. Housing justice activists with an explicitly anti-racist lens know that the impact of structural racism will not be solved through privatization or through the non-profit industrial complex. Permanent affordable housing in San Francisco has been compromised because private financial interests are now centered as solutions. By thinking of the past failures, and gains led by public housing tenants themselves, we look to a possible future where public housing is returned to the public, which would call for the dismantling of structural racism backed by political and private financial interests, centering the needs of the most marginalized, and the expansion of permanently affordable housing for all.