Bayview–Hunters Point in transition Looking across 3rd Street towards the former naval shipyard. Dale Cruse via Flickr
Thomas Lin was born and raised in San Francisco, but when he and his wife began looking to stop renting and finally own a home, their options were few and far between, leading them to consider a townhome in one of the city’s most affordable neighborhoods: Bayview-Hunters Point.
Their bank refused to offer a mortgage because of the “environmental issues” in the area.
They would otherwise be priced out of the city he was born and raised in.
It wasn’t until Lin and his wife went to their bank to get a loan for their prospective home they hit a snag. Their bank refused to offer a mortgage because of the “environmental issues” in the area. This was the first they had heard of the nuclear and industrial contamination brought by the Navy decades before and the sometimes feckless cleanups.
The Lins are not alone. Young families like them are at the crux of two trends affecting former Superfund sites nationwide. They must weigh the opportunity for home ownership at a time when for young people the goal has never seemed more impossible — with the median age of first-time homebuyers is at an all-time high — versus how much they trust the cleanup process, which in Bayview-Hunters Point has been riddled with controversy and missteps.
Bayview-Hunters Point is arguably the city’s most polluted neighborhood.
In Bayview-Hunters Point, plenty of young people are also willing to take the risk. Although many older Black residents do own their homes, many of these same residents who lived with the hazards of the neighborhood for generations are now being displaced as the area becomes more affluent.
“Generally, I do trust the cleanup procedures and the testing procedures,” said Lin. He added, “I think it helps that I have a science background. I kind of understood that they are trying their best to develop methods to test and to clean and to continually monitor the area, in the soil and in the air.”
Bayview-Hunters Point is arguably the city’s most polluted neighborhood. First, there are the chemical hazards associated with what once was an active shipyard: lead, mercury, volatile organic compounds, and polychlorinated biphenyls are all materials hazardous to human health, and they are notoriously difficult to remove from the environment. Historical records show both that these materials were present, and they were often disposed of through dumping.
Second, when the Navy purchased the shipyard in 1940, it became the site of a top secret laboratory, developing methods for decontaminating people and equipment exposed to radiation during Cold War atomic bomb explosions in the Pacific. As the shipyard was the only site authorized to dispose of radioactive waste on the West Coast, material from these experiments was routinely dumped there, at land and at sea. In 1956 alone, 980 tons of radioactive waste were dumped, according to the Navy’s own records. Bayview-Hunters Point was also the heart of the Black community in San Francisco at the time.
Since it was declared a Superfund site in 1989, the Navy and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been responsible for cleaning up these hazards, a process which continues to this day.
As cleanup progresses, many are willing to make the same choice Lin did. The first 350 units built on recently decontaminated land went on sale in May 2014 for about $1 million apiece, and were snapped up by March 2015. Increasingly, Bayview-Hunters Point homes are seen as valuable investments despite the ongoing cleanup a short walk away, just behind a fence.
For Lin, the dueling problems he faces are pollution and affordability. For lifetime-residents of the neighborhood like Rachelle Holmes, the problem is Lin.
A neighborhood now unrecognizable
Holmes is 65, and she has been living in Bayview-Hunters Point her entire life. These days, she takes care of her mother, who is 95 and faces syncope, fainting caused by loss of blood flow to the brain, while managing intense asthma attacks of her own.
Holmes attributes the illnesses her family faces, and the cancer that has taken many friends over the years, to the radiation and toxins of the shipyard. Neighborhood advocacy groups and outside research projects have found that Bayview-Hunters Point residents have significantly higher rates of respiratory, cardiovascular, and metabolic illnesses.
Holmes is watching as loved ones and neighbors feel forced to leave the area as the cost of living increases with new developments moving in. Increasingly, she said, her neighborhood is becoming unrecognizable.
But as her neighborhood gets cleaner, a new pressure emerges. Holmes is watching as loved ones and neighbors feel forced to leave the area as the cost of living increases with new developments moving in. Increasingly, she said, her neighborhood is becoming unrecognizable. The gentrification was highlighted in the San Francisco Chronicle eight years ago and has become more pronounced since.
The neighborhood was approximately 77 percent Black back in the 1980s, back when roughly of 18,500 workers flocked to the city for the neighborhood’s then-booming shipyard. However, jobs dried up in the years after the closing of the shipyard in 1974.
From there, profit-driven redevelopment became the model, not federally funded projects, said Quintin Mecke, the executive director of the San Francisco Council of Community Housing Organizations. Housing prices soared, keeping pace with the general increases experienced in Silicon Valley to the south. Even if Bayview-Hunters Point is distant from Silicon Valley, its residents felt the change.
Whereas the nominal median price of a single family home in the U.S. has more than tripled: Redfin, a real estate site, says that median value in 2026 is $437,864. According to the Associated Press, in 1996 it was $118,100, putting the increase at 271 percent. In Bayview–Hunters Point home prices have increased 609 percent — nearly triple the national rate — from $129,000, as reported by SFGate, to $914,000 this year, according to Redfin data.
By 2000, Black residents no longer made up the majority of Bayview-Hunters Point residents. Today, Black residents make up 23 percent of the population.
Holmes has seen this firsthand, watching many of her neighbors move to places like Brentwood, Antioch, and Oakland over the years. “They either gave them a voucher or they gave them some money or whatever, to move them out. Some of them jumped at the opportunity, and they moved. And some of them were forced out,” said Holmes.
But Holmes, and many of her neighbors still living in Bayview-Hunters Point, have no plans of leaving. “This is my home. San Francisco is my home. I don’t want to move anywhere else,” said Holmes, adding that part of why it’s so important she stays is so the voices of legacy residents continue to be heard.
Bayview-Hunters Point has always had a high percentage of home ownership. In 2016, a San Francisco planning report found Bayview–Hunters Point had 52 percent home ownership, much higher than the citywide rate, which was 37 percent at the time. Bayview-Hunters Point is “the last neighborhood in San Francisco where black home ownership is still real,” said Mecke.
A national reckoning
But despite their differences, is the area safe for either Lin or Holmes? Cases like Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York – the nation’s first Superfund site – throw the efficacy of Superfund cleanups into question.
The shipyard cleanup in Bayview-Hunters Point is even larger in scale than Love Canal.
The pervasive pollution at Love Canal was widely publicized in 1978. After a quarter-century of cleanup, it was declared safe by the EPA in 2004. People have started coming back. However, the EPA’s main strategy to deal with hazardous material — installing a concrete cap to contain hazards and monitoring the site — has received criticism from new homeowners, some of whom reported foul-smelling gases entering their houses through sinks, illnesses impacting pregnant women and children, and soil tests turned up traces of the same toxic materials Love Canal’s cleanup worked to contain.
The shipyard cleanup in Bayview-Hunters Point is even larger in scale than Love Canal. The Hunters Point onshore Superfund site covers 866 acres. Love Canal’s site covered 70 acres.
The last step of Bayview-Hunters Point’s cleanup plan relies on the same concrete cap and monitoring strategy as Love Canal. Should the cap fail, by natural degradation or with the help of sea level rise, residents may be exposed to hazards the Navy has assured are safely locked away.
The Bayview-Hunters Point cleanup has been littered with controversy, damaging trust with residents: Tetra Tech, the site’s main contractor fraudulently doctored up to 90 percent of their soil samples. It took samples from less radiologically-impacted parts of the shipyard and passed them off as samples from buildings that housed some of the shipyard’s most toxic experiments. In November of 2024, the Navy detected plutonium levels at twice the recommended levels and kept the information from both residents and city officials for 11 months.
Lin said he heard about the plutonium when it came to light last fall. Although he had misgivings with the way the Navy handled the situation, he said he still feels safe living in the area. Looking into the levels the EPA designates as harmful to people, Lin said he found that the detected level was lower than that threshold, and that it was only detected on a single day.
A familiar story
The story of Bayview-Hunters Point is far from unique. In fact, researchers have coined a phrase for it: green gentrification.
The story of Bayview-Hunters Point is far from unique. In fact, researchers have coined a phrase for it: green gentrification. Several EPA sites, the less-contaminated brownfields, are frequently pointed to as examples of green gentrification.
According to the EPA, brownfields are “properties where the current or future use is affected by real or perceived contamination.” After cleanup has been facilitated by the parties responsible for the environmental hazards at a brownfield, many states have incentive programs in place to entice developers.
However, according to several studies, the track record of brownfields reveals an impossible challenge. Dr. Marisol Becerra, environmental policy researcher whose 2022 paper assessed the impact of Brownfield redevelopment at a national scale, wrote, “Redevelopment strategies present a paradox. While municipalities create green spaces to address environmental justice problems and make neighborhoods healthier and more [a]esthetically attractive, these improvements can increase housing costs and property values. These environmental improvements can lead to gentrification and displacement.”
Becerra’s results, as well as the work of many other researchers, paint a nationwide and cross-decadal trend: environmental cleanup can usher in gentrification.
For Lin, this trend seemed obvious. “It’s inevitable and a good thing that we are, as a society, rising in socio-economic [status]. That naturally will [bring] more people, naturally bring in more businesses. Naturally we’ll build more housing,” said Lin.
However, these trends visible at the Superfund site in Bayview-Hunters Point and in brownfields may not apply to all cleanups nationally. A 2022 National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that after cleanups under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 housing prices rose the most for the least expensive homes. It found only weak evidence that the price increases influence the demographic makeup of impacted communities.
Is a future without environmental hazards and without gentrification possible?
When Tyra Fennell moved to San Francisco for work in 2009, she found her Panhandle neighborhood to be “cold and very white and it was very lonely.” Fennell, a Washington D.C. native, said she has always lived in diverse and multicultural cities and moved to Bayview-Hunters Point, another San Francisco neighborhood, in 2011 because she saw it as the “final stand for black life in San Francisco” at the time.
Today, 15 years after she first moved to the neighborhood in search of a community, Fennell now has very little hope that Bayview-Hunters Point could ever be restored as a Black neighborhood.
“The train has already left the station,” she said, as the gentrification which has characterized San Francisco for decades pushes more and more Black residents to relocate, often moving to East Bay for more affordable housing.
Lives in Bayview–Hunters Point Above, from donated archival images, Jewell at about ten years old in 1952; on her wedding day at Egbert street in 1961; and in front of her home a year later. Below left, Beverly in front of her parents home in 1967; near school in 1981; at the Black Studies graduation ceremony at San Francisco State in 1990; San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
A Black redoubt in San Francisco
Bayview–Hunters Point is a stronghold in a city that has seen its Black population decline by half between the 1970 and 2010 decennial censuses. Where there once had been 15 census tracts with majority African American population, by 2010 there only two, both of them in Bayview. Here, the racial breakdown of San Francisco by census tract, showing five-year population estimates from the period 2020-2024.
Geoff McGhee/& the West
These sentiments were echoed by Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin, a Bayview-Hunters Point native who is currently working on her PhD at Stanford studying the history of Black residents in Bayview-Hunters Point through the lens of environment, race, and infrastructure.
While she said there will always be a Black presence in the neighborhood, the thriving Black community it once was may never be restored.
“The letter’s already sealed, I hate to say it,” Dunn-Salahuddin said about the future of Black residents in San Francisco. “Will these changes benefit them? I highly doubt it,” she said.
The 2019 film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” took an elegiac look at the decline in African American life in the city. A24 via Wikimedia Commons
Dunn-Salahuddin’s doubts are based on her belief that it is not impossible for San Francisco to stop losing Black residents, but that city officials don’t care enough to make a difference. “African Americans in the city need what many working class people need, which is income and access to economic mobility,” said Dunn-Salahuddin. To her, that means entry level jobs, training, and a true dialogue between the community and government to rebuild trust.
“African Americans in the city need what many working class people need, which is income and access to economic mobility.”
Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin
Thor Kaslofsky, the executive director of San Francisco’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, has been involved in redevelopment in Bayview-Hunters Point since 2005. He said the percentage of affordable housing the city designates for new developments is set primarily by the city’s budget. “Housing today is costing anywhere from $800,000 to a million one per unit. That’s the cost. So when the city’s paying for, you know, 30 percent of that, that’s the cost to put someone into an affordable unit. So the city has but so many of those units it can build per year based on its income,” said Kaslofsky.
However, it may be more complicated than just that. Other cities have proven more affordable housing is possible.
In the next 10 years, these questions will only get more urgent: The cleanup of more land in Bayview-Hunters Point is under way, and the extent to which Bayview-Hunters Point stays an affordable place to live depends on the decisions of a government that has yet to prove affordable housing is a top priority.
All the while, residents may never be certain the cleanup job was sufficient. Cleanups like Love Canal’s shows the EPA strategy — capping hazardous material with concrete and monitoring for leaks — can be fallible.
“[Residents on shipyard land are] spending a lot of money to be there and have that picturesque view of the bay. But what is it ultimately going to cost you?” said Holmes.
Edited by Felicity Barringer.
