Memories of landgrabs past are hard to erase. The word on the street accused then-Housing Authority Executive Director Ronnie Davis of giving his staff free rein to evict outspoken tenants, forge documents, and take bribes. Davis was never convicted of any wrongdoing while in San Francisco but was later convicted of embezzling from his former job—the Cayahuga Housing Authority in Cleveland, Ohio. High-ranking officials under Davis’s watch in San Francisco were convicted of auctioning portable Section 8 vouchers to homeless families. One mother met the asking price by taking a loan from a local drug dealer, and ended up serving a short time on federal probation.6
Tenants: Putting the Hope back into HOPE VI
From the beginning, residents of San Francisco’s public housing and a handful of allies organized to put real hope back into the HOPE VI process. In 1995, an ad hoc group, Fillmore In Struggle Together (FIST), put the public housing issue on the map by mobilizing residents of Hayes Valley public housing to disrupt a conference of housing professionals gathering to discuss HOPE VI. Several officials expressed covert support for tenant activists by feeding FIST inside information about the Housing Authority’s intention to displace residents.7 In 1996, a small group of highly organized residents of North Beach public housing in San Francisco began to raise questions about the fate of their homes, slated to be demolished under HUD’s HOPE VI program a few years later. Because two other Hope VI Projects in the city had remained vacant mud lots for two years, residents invited the San Francisco–based Eviction Defense Network (EDN), which had led a campaign to prevent the evictions of undocumented residents, to help organize others in the development. The residents and EDN began a slow process of door-to-door organizing.8
Residents at North Beach had their work cut out for them. Very basic demands, such as the right to return to their homes after redevelopment and the hiring of local residents in the construction process were dismissed by Housing Authority officials or given superficial and vague lip service. Resident leaders were well aware of the treatment that tenants of other Housing Authority and HUD sites had received for organizing. Across town at Geneva Towers, all but the two dozen or so activist residents had been successfully relocated, intransigence that was largely believed to be passive-aggressive retaliation. It took a sleep-in, led by tenant association president Louise Vaughn, on the front lawn of HUD Secretary Art Agnos to wrestle relocation vouchers for the remaining residents.9 HOPE VI residents at Hayes Valley public housing revolted after the relocation process was accelerated and they were given just thirty days to find replacement housing. Valley residents were also shocked to discover that demolition plans were secretly approved by a former resident of their development, not an elected body as was then required by federal law.10 At North Beach, residents found that a sign-in sheet for a community meeting had been cut-and-pasted into a petition asking HUD to demolish the property. The Housing Authority also routinely offered vocal tenants employment or vacated evictions in exchange for support of HOPE VI. North Beach tenant activist Bethola Harper explained the game: “We learned that we couldn’t sign anything without it being used against us. We learned that agreements we made with the Housing Authority were meant to be broken as soon as they could demonstrate enough tenant support to satisfy HUD. Most importantly, we learned never to air out any differences in front of the city. If we had to argue, we needed to meet amongst ourselves to work out our own problems. They were always looking for ways to spread rumors and pit the races against each other. The end goal was to get as many of us out, and pay for as little relocation as possible.”
Calling out the demolition machine was dangerous business. In 1994, former Black Panther Party member Malik Rahim was hired by the SFHA to assist in educating tenants at the Bernal Dwellings (aka Army Street) about their relocation options in the HOPE VI process. At the time of his hire, the agency knew full well about Rahim’s radical past and five-year stint in prison for armed robbery. It only became a problem after he realized that the HOPE VI plan at Bernal would return as few as one-third of the original tenants. Rahim quit his job and started organizing tenants against the plan, calling meetings to build a greater tenant voice in the process and to demand the right to return. Defending public housing tenants was hardwired into Rahim’s political outlook; residents of Desire Housing Projects had militantly defended the New Orleans Panthers—his chapter—from an attack by the police.11
Rahim allied with former Bernal resident Jeff Branner to organize the residents. During the 1980s, the Branner family controlled the majority of the crack trade at the development. He had served five years in prison, and there was no evidence that he had returned to the trade post-release. However, after leaving the Housing Authority’s good graces, both men’s pasts were fair game again. A newspaper article alleged that violent convicts had taken over the tenant association, followed by a three-day investigative series on a local television channel. The truth could have not been more mundane; the tenant association was hardly controlled by the two. However, many residents were indeed alarmed by Branner’s return and had called the police to complain.
Shortly after the media flurry, the SFHA boarded up the tenant association’s offices. Branner and Rahim broke into the room to retrieve personal belongings and outreach records and were arrested for trespassing. The two faced charges that could have resulted in long prison sentences due to past convictions, but those charges were dropped thanks to the work of legendary activist lawyer, William Kunstler, who was no stranger to defending Black Panthers. It was Kunstler’s final case before his death in 1995. In a final attempt to put Branner away, police resurrected a 1993 cocaine possession charge. He pleaded guilty to possession but not to intent to sell. Under an unusual sentencing arrangement, he was sentenced to probation and 1,000 hours of community service for which he would advise the school district on gang-intervention strategies.
Organizing at North Beach was difficult but made easier by a group of dedicated tenant leaders, most of them with prior experience in organizing. One tenant leader, Gregory Richardson, had been active as a youth in fighting the destruction of the Western Addition. Alma Lark, a dynamic and cantankerous elder, did trench work in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the 1960s civil rights movement and was an associate of Ella J. Baker. Bethola Harper was a former member of the Black Panther Party. Other key leaders, such as Donald Hesbitt and Thomas Toy, had taken part in strikes as trade union members.
The partnership with the EDN worked in a variety of ways. One resident leader joked that the residents needed the outsiders because “the elevators are broken down and we’re too old to go up and down the stairs doing outreach all the time. The [EDN] people are young and don’t mind going up the stairs and doing some door-knocking.”
At first, the tenant response was limited to mobilizing at hearings of the Board of Supervisors. As indiscriminate evictions picked up in pace, they also had to open up new fronts. “One Strike” raised the stakes in any negative encounter that a resident might have with the police, private security, or Housing Authority staff.12 They asked the Coalition On Homelessness to train activist residents in the art of Cop Watching and to loan them the video cameras to do it with.13 They designed stickers that read “Police and Thieves Watch Out: This is a Working-Class Neighborhood,” alongside an icon of a VHS video camera. Since pubic relations is everything during a redevelopment process, the threat of being caught on videotape helped put the agency on notice and chilled out the behavior of their security forces.14
These evictions were part of a national policy shift, and were extremely effective in clearing residents out of HOPE VI sites. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law a bill designed to accelerate evictions in public housing. Dubbed “One Strike and You’re Out,” it was touted as a way to stop drug trafficking and violent crimes in public housing developments. Since One Strike was a civil procedure, tenants could be evicted even if they were acquitted of criminal charges. In effect, what One Strike did was provide an excuse for eviction based solely on innuendo and allegations of criminal activity. Housing authorities across the country evicted entire households based on the arrest of one member. In one case, a grandmother was brought to court after her grandson, whom she hadn’t seen in several years, was arrested on drug possession charges in the neighboring county.
In another case, Housing Authority resident Zelma Matthews was evicted because of her son’s drug charges. A Housing Authority document uncovered by one reporter, Angela Rowen, confirmed that One Strike would be