Living at Double Rock

It boasts the best views in Southeast San Francisco—situated on a flat, grassy lot next to the bay, it’s difficult to reconcile the contrast between the this pastoral setting and the sight of the old tan and green dilapidated buildings sitting there rotting—Alice Griffith public housing complex. Most San Franciscans have never been back here, don’t even know that this community exists—unless they are 49’ers fans—the parking lot and stadium are a star quarterback’s pass away, and on game days, the crowd can be heard from the streets of Alice Griffith, better known as Double-Rock.

Jackie Williams has lived here for thirty years.

“Projects,” Williams says. “I hate that word. What do they mean ‘Project?’ To me, this place will always be called Alice Griffith Family Homes. That’s what it was when I was on the wait list for two years, that’s what it was when I moved in. This was a really nice place to live, with good families here.”

Williams, who runs the community garden at Alice Griffith, maintains that the buildings are the same as they always were, that it’s the people, not the buildings that make it hard to live here.

“The buildings are run-down, and the city doesn’t do much to change that, but it’s the people here that make it what it is,” Williams said. She said that the crime didn’t get really bad until the mid-eighties. Though she does not draw this parallel, crack is almost certainly to blame for the crime wave she describes. It decimated Bayview, already poor and full of jobless people, the neighborhood transformed into a war zone during the crack pandemic of the 80’s.

Alice Griffith public housing complex, also known as Double Rock, was built atop an old landfill in the 60’s, to house military personnel and was transferred in 1974 to the San Francisco Housing Authority to use as low-income housing. There are about 250 units in the complex, which can house 900 to 1000 people at their maximum occupancy.

To understand Double-Rock, (word has it that it's called Double-Rock because there are two matching rocks in the bay nearby,) one must be familiar with the complex history of the Bayview/Hunterspoint neighborhood. During the 1800’s and first half of the 1900’s Bayview was the meat packing and shipping district of San Francisco. Mostly Italian immigrants lived here, moving the cattle in and out, maintaining the railroad and processing meat. According to popular lore, the Hunters were a prominent family, and the neighborhood was named after them.

The community went through a transition in the 1940’s when the US Navy built a shipyard there. They needed a huge workforce to build warships, so they recruited mostly African American men from the South to come and work. People moved from Arkansas, Missouri and Louisiana, mostly. Williams’ family came from Little Rock, Arkansas so her father could work at the Hunterspoint shipyard.

The shipyard laid-off most of its employees at the end of the 60’s, and closed for good in the late 70’s. The power plant for PG&E was built here, the dump, the shipyard itself, which is now a Superfund cleanup site, and a sewage treatment plant. Asthma is four times as prevalent here as in other parts of the City, according to recent studies, and the breast cancer rate among black women in Bayview is the highest in the nation.

The population, 80 percent black at that time according to the 1990 census was now largely unemployed. Crack came along and with it more gun violence and gangs bloomed. People who lived through that time say that’s when Bayview/Hunterspoint became a war zone.

Since then, 50 percent of San Francisco’s black population has fled the city—too expensiv,too dangerous and not friendly to minorities are the usual complaints. Though Bayview has the highest percentage of homeownership in the City, many people who hold the titles to their homes are barely holding on. There are many tarps on roofs and rotting clapboards to be seen where people don’t have the income to fix their homes. Consequently, many people sell their homes out of desperation—they can stay in the City and starve, barely making their tax bills, not maintaining their homes with their Social Security checks, risking having their homes taken over by the city because of ‘urban blight’ or they can sell. Even a falling down house is valuable in San Francisco, where the median home price once topped $750,000.

In the middle of all that, sits Double-Rock. Poor, isolated from the rest of San Francisco, gated off from the rest of the world, one might expect it to be cold and unfriendly.

“I loved growing up here,” says 23-year-old Jasmine Marshall, counselor at Peacekeepers, a violence intervention after-school program for community youth. “My whole extended family lived here, so for me it’s memories of growing up, getting together with my Grandma and the rest of our family and sharing.” Marshall says she wishes people had a more accurate idea of what Double-Rock is like instead of just assuming that everyone in the community is a thug. She says she had a great childhood here, and that it’s a strong community where everyone knows everyone else—a rarity in a large city. “Even if you don’t like someone, your grannies were probably friends, and that’s enough for folks to respect one another here.” That’s the thing she values the most about her community—her least favorite part of living there has been watching the Police bully and brutalize young people in the community.

“They act like a gang,” Marshall says. “They abuse and cuss at people, beating them and trying to intimidate them—just like gang members. They don’t treat the people here like human beings.” Marshall says that when she was a child, they would play at an old playground of sorts. She said there was no swing set, but she remembers that she and her sister would play on the monkey bars all day long. She says she didn’t feel poor, but there was glass all through the sand under where the bars were, and one day her sister fell down and cut her chin on a piece. She had to get several stitches.

Mr. Alapati Sagote, Jr. has lived here for 10 years. “I haven’t been here long,” Sagote said. “This place is okay, I’ve raised my children here. I isn’t the place—look at this place, it’s beautiful—it’s the people in it. A few bad people in a good community, poisoning it for the rest of us.” It’s nice to live among other Samoans, he says, and there are many here. He says there isn’t much separation between races here and everyone gets along pretty well, for the most part. This housing complex mirrors the larger community of Bayview: 9 percent white, 48 percent black, 30 percent Asian, 1.3 percent Asian, Pacific Islanders, under 1 percent American Indian and about 10 percent ‘other,’ according to the block report from the 2000 census.

On a recent Sunday afternoon kids ride bikes and roller skate, people grill out on their tiny lawns, some are working on cars and chatting with one another. Strains of singing come from the church, where the Samoan choir practices. Sun beams down on the bay and the air is clear. Kids excited voices punctuate the lazy day. It brings to mind a small town—people wave and call out to each other. People are working in the garden, watering and planting. This is a tight community.

Marshall says she would love to see the community take control of their own lives. She’d like to see the people from the community fixing up the units, doing all the repair work and gardening. A community school with teachers form inside the gates would be great, she says. It would empower everyone, she says.

“It may be kind of dysfunctional, but I love this community,” Marshall said. All my memories are here. My family is here. I love this place.’