or to be more exact...The
"Hunters Point"area in the City where people "leave their hearts" and the poor leave their health....and African Americans just plain leave. (20 percent, or one in five, black residents have left town since 1990)
Forget rebuilding Iraq....our country has a war on against, not poverty, but rather the POOR. Why don't we start rebuilding OUR country first. Why don't the Democrats take a stand for "poor" people (i.e., the one's that can't afford to attend their fancy fundraisers or donate big bucks to their campaign coffers) From the San Francisco Bay Guardian....
Abernathy and I cut through the complex, tromping over an expanse of dirt and concrete toward the northeast end of the development, where a row of apartments looked down from a grassy hill. We paused next to a vacant, boarded-over unit to take in the scene: A stream of shit, piss, tampons, and toilet paper spewed from a dark hole in the sidewalk, poured down the hill, and formed a sort of shit lagoon next to the street. Weeds, about six inches tall, were growing in the little lagoon.
Raw shit, obviously, is not cool. Beyond the fact that it smells and looks nasty, fecal matter provides a haven for dangerous bacteria, most notably E. coli, a virulent pathogen that can sicken and even kill humans, especially infants. In the so-called developing world, according to the World Health Organization, water tainted by feces is a major killer, a prime cause of severe diarrhea, which takes the lives of an estimated 1.8 million people annually.
Everyone I met wanted to talk about the sewage stream. Forced to live in their own excrement, the shit proved to folks in Oakdale - who are mostly African American and Samoan - that nobody gave a damn about them.
"They don't care," said Mary White, a great-grandmother who's lived in the area since 1968. "They really don't - otherwise they'd do something." I took "they" to mean the Housing Authority - but she could've meant the greater city government, the mayor, the governor, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and everyone else who allows slum conditions to persist in Oakdale.
In August the Housing Authority had further offended Oakdale residents by barring them from washing their autos. "The lease you signed to live in public housing states that residents are allowed reasonable plumbing and water use," agency officials wrote in a letter sent to every tenant on bright orange paper. "Washing cars on Housing Authority property exceeds reasonable water use."
To Abernathy this was absurd: People throughout the complex were dealing with seeping showers and toilets and sinks; outside, raw sewage was gushing from a busted pipe in the ground. Clearly, the entire plumbing system was in dire need of maintenance. And yet the Housing Authority had the nerve to tell people they couldn't use a few gallons of water to scrub their cars.
Hell, the Housing Authority couldn't even guarantee mail service around here, since a large number of the mailboxes in the development were busted and wouldn't lock. - SFBG "A Place Called Dispair"
....San Francisco Housing Authority executive director Gregg Fortner stated at the hearing that a shortage of revenue due to cuts in the federal program known as HOPE VI forced the agency to find more "creative solutions" to maintaining more than 6,000 units of affordable housing for low- and very-low-income individuals and families. Those solutions include partnerships between the SFHA and nonprofit/private development teams to rebuild public housing in Bayview-Hunters Point with affordable and market-rate homes and condos. Their goal was to partner with these development teams, rebuild their structures as well as create new ones, then share profits with the SFHA.
While the SFHA waits for developers to take an interest in their properties, what happens to tenants? The SFHA maintains a waiting list of more than 20,000 names for far fewer than 6,000 available units. Using the rhetoric of a recent opinionist, David Zebker ("Supply and Demand," Letters, 11/16/05), that means there "isn't enough supply to meet the demand." How then, does the city resolve the problem of a lack of affordable housing supply for low- and very-low-income people? Continue to build more market-rate housing.
In the meantime, residents in public housing continue to live in absurd conditions ranging from open raw sewage in the presence of children to ceilings that aren't guaranteed to hold up from this winter's rains or the next big earthquake. SFBG "Ritzy Condos...Raw Sewage"