by Asé Mora
As gentrification trickles down into Bayview from surrounding neighborhoods, anchored by half-hearted transit initiatives and rising housing costs, Black Bayview is becoming less and less Black.
Bayview’s lack of public transportation has been a long standing battle for the community. Bayview resident Annie Tang said that the removal of the 15 Third bus, which ran from City College and back to Bayview, affected a lot of people. Tang also attributed the development of Bayview to what’s been happening in surrounding neighborhoods.
“It’s not one thing that’s causing Bayview to change. Mission Bay has gotten redeveloped,” said Tang. “The whole Dogpatch is redeveloping and becoming too expensive – and it’s all moving down towards Bayview.”
Transit initiatives like the Bayview Shuttle Program demonstrate city efforts to “address the impacts in Bayview Hunters Point of decades of structural and institutional racism” and create sustainable employment and “wealth-building” opportunities, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority.
Executive Director of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Youth Academy Capt. John Smith, headquartered at 4936 Third St., said Third Street is unrecognizable compared to his formative years (pre-SFMTA initiatives), “Specifically less Black people from when I was a kid to now, less Black businesses.”
Initially an Italian farming and Chinese shrimp fishing district in the early 1900s, Bayview was later developed into an industrial neighborhood after the U.S. Navy acquired the San Francisco Dry Dock and operated it as the Hunters Point Shipyard from 1940 until 1974. Thousands of Blacks were recruited from the South, mostly from Texas and Louisiana, to work in the Shipyard. They brought their families and settled into barracks housing on Hunters Point Hill.
Ryan Nuss, manager of the Old Skool Cafe, a non-profit supper club run by at-risk youth, said Bayview was still “predominantly Black in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, through the ‘90s and the 2000s.”
Avona Cofey, bartender at the Jazz Room, the last Black bar on Third Street, said: “I think it’s taking away from the essence and the history that lives here. Speaking with a lot of my patrons who were here during the booming times, they said, ‘You could walk down the street and everybody looks like you. You never reached a block where there wasn’t a Black-owned business or somebody that you didn’t know.’”
Having observed a change in demographics, Nuss said, “I see that (gentrification) as both a positive and a negative … I see a lot of the youth in this area had to move out to other areas like Oakland and Antioch because they couldn’t afford to stay out here. But I also see the benefit in different diverse cultures getting together and living in the same community, providing different inputs and ideas.”
Signs of erasure and an inequitable split in prosperity and respect are already prevalent – the rising cost of housing, the closing of many Black businesses and most recently the closing of the last Walgreens pharmacy in the neighborhood. Bayview is becoming more and more unrecognizable to locals who’d also like to reap the benefits of the developments happening in their community.
Bayview local Darren J. said, “Definitely a lot of different races that have come into the neighborhood, it’s actually a nice thing; it’s not as bad as I thought it would be … Personally I feel like as long as the colors can mix and mingle together, then I’m OK with it. I just don’t want one color pushed out and then another color comes in and just takes over.”
Asé Mora is an aspiring journalist, studying at San Francisco State University, and an intern for the SF BayView National Black Newspaper. She can be reached at asemora81@gmail.com.
