Tag: Mercedes Gavin

These crushing personal accounts of lives living, lived and lost on Treasure Island, are a clear indictment against the white supremacist, racist, capitalist, profits-over-people developers, the U.S. Navy and government entities, which intentionally continue to withhold information and refute any danger and harm to residents suffering and dying from extreme toxic conditions of their harmful living space.

Treasure Island (TI), part of San Francisco’s District 6, according to various censuses, is the third most diverse neighborhood in the U.S. Seventy percent of tenants are Black or Latina/o, and the majority are low-income. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC) documented District 6 to have the most eviction cases represented by the EDC in courts in 2016. The island’s better housing units, on the northwest side, are destined for redevelopment in the form of new, upscale apartment buildings as part of a larger development project.

As Phase One of Treasure Island redevelopment gets under way, the Island’s subsidized and market rate residents are experiencing increasing intimidation and harassment and fewer services. Damian Ochoa, a seven-year market rate renter in good standing at John Stewart’s “The Villages,” describes intensifying “habitability issues,” amounting to prohibited Eighth Amendment “cruel and unusual punishment,” officiated over by John Stewart Property Manager Dan Stone.