by Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia and Tony Robles, Poor News Network
Join us at 9 a.m. Tuesday, April 14, in the front of City Hall for an emergency press conference and then join poor youth and elders who will be impacted by the lie of RAD as we visit the Board of Supervisors to plead with them to NOT vote to sell off public housing to the RAD program.
RAD Fact Sheet
- San Francisco is essentially selling – or “long-term leasing” on 99-year leases – most of its public housing to private developers.
- People who live in the buildings will be displaced as part of this “housing reform.” It is supposed to be a temporary relocation, but no one has said where people are supposed to go.
- Tuesday, April 14, the Board of Supervisors is voting on whether or not to advance this forward.
- This vote affects you if you live in 25 Sanchez, 462 Duboce, 255 Sanchez, 1150 Scott, 939-950 Eddy, 1880 Pine, 100 Appleton, 255 Woodside, 990 Pacific, 227 Bay, 1068 Oakdale/798 Jerrold, 345 Arguello, 491 31st Ave., 666 Ellis or 430 Turk.
- This is just the first stage. More buildings will be affected as this continues.
- This is called “Multifamily Housing Revenue Bonds” on the Board of Supervisors agenda for April 14, 2015, Items 10-23.
“They criminalized my son so they could evict my family,” said Sabrina Carter, single mother and resident of public housing building Plaza East in the increasingly gentrified Fillmore district of San Francisco.
One at a time, African-American young people have been profiled, arrested or intimidated for merely living in their neighborhoods while being Black, and then almost immediately their families are forced to file stay-away orders and sign agreements to never contact their own children.
In the case of Sabrina Carter’s family, she was harassed and intimidated by the law firm representing her public housing building, Bornstein & Bornstein, the infamous “eviction” lawyers of San Francisco’s Ellis Act eviction boom who teach classes to landlords on how to evict “your grandma.”
Ms. Carter has jumped through every hoop to comply with the stipulation and exhausted every resource to get intervention for her son. “I have done the best I could. They forced me to file restraining orders, which I did. I have signed documents banning him from the property and I even have a letter from the judge stating that I have complied to the fullest extent, but the truth is that he is a grown man that’s going to do what he wants.” Despite all Sabrina has done, she and her two younger sons face homelessness through the criminalization of our children.
So far there have been five families who have been removed from Plaza East alone through the process of criminalizing their children and then removing the family. In light of the recent implementation of the RAD program, which will privatize all the public housing in San Francisco with the goal of turning them into mixed income housing, families and advocates believe this is one of the ways they are systematically removing families of color and poor families from these buildings to make way for more tech employees.
“RAD and the privatization of our last little bit of public housing is just another way to chip away at the tiny remaining African-American community left in San Francisco,” said Lisa Gray-Garcia of POOR Magazine.
To learn more about the lie of RAD, see https://sfbayview.com/2013/09/rad-public-housing-privatization-stealing-our-last-acre-and-our-one-remaining-mule/ and https://sfbayview.com/2014/12/congresswoman-maxine-waters-condemns-rad-public-housing-privatization-scheme/.
This event is co-sponsored by POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE, the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and Manilatown Heritage Foundation.
Tiny – or Lisa Gray-Garcia – and Tony Robles are co-editors of POOR Magazine and its many projects. They can be reached at deeandtiny@poormagazine.org. Visit POOR at www.poormagazine.org.