Don’t halt the dream of a Hunters Point rebirth

San Francisco Examiner | April 26, 2009

The below opinion is co-signed by Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, and five leading ministers in The City’s African-American community — the Rev. Arelious Walker, Dr. James McCray, the Rev. J. Edgar Boyd, the Rev. Calvin Jones and Bishop Donald Green.

After years of community-led discussion, the first new homes are set to take shape at the Hunters Point Shipyard in the coming months. We are finally turning the corner in this neighborhood by turning abandoned land into parks, jobs and much-needed affordable housing.

That’s why it is so disappointing to so many of us to see one extremist group step forward and try to stop the progress we have fought so hard as a community to achieve.

Members of the local mosque of the Nation of Islam under Minister Christopher Mohammed are attacking the jobs, parks and housing plan that won the overwhelming support of the neighborhood and the entire city at the ballot box last year.

Most of us in San Francisco know this group for its intimidation tactics. In 2007, nurses from the Department of Public Health working in Bayview-Hunters Point reported being intimidated and harassed by members of the Nation of Islam. Since then, their threats of violence have become so severe that an emergency temporary restraining order was recently issued against a number of the group’s members.

What many people may not know is that a number of years ago, the Nation of Islam was awarded a school site in our community on the condition that it pay rent. It has never paid that rent. And soon after it was reported that it was not paying rent, it began to launch an otherwise unmotivated attack on a community-supported plan to bring economic vitality to the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood.

The revitalization of the Hunters Point Shipyard has already attracted more than $500 million in federal funds for environmental cleanup. The revitalization effort will eventually create more than 10,000 new homes, with the largest number of affordable homes in San Francisco history and the largest amount of new parkland in San Francisco since the establishment of Golden Gate Park.

The project will help keep families in their own neighborhood, stemming the exodus of African-Americans from San Francisco, and it will host new green-technology companies to bring thousands of high-wage jobs to our residents.

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, the Nation of Islam is arguing that efforts to transform the shipyard are unsafe. These opponents have conveniently and consistently ignored the repeated and substantiated findings of health experts from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, the California Department of Health, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, who have all concluded the shipyard was safe for residential development.

Last year community leaders asked Dr. John Balmes from UC San Francisco — one of the nation’s leading experts on environmental health issues — to analyze the many health findings. Dr. Balmes agreed with the other health experts that construction at the shipyard does not pose a risk to the community.

The Nation of Islam has been using intimidation and misinformation tactics to stop a plan the community supports. There are many construction sites in our neighborhood. But for reasons known only to its members, the Nation of Islam has chosen to attack the project with the most community support, the most community benefits and the most sophisticated system of health monitoring ever seen anywhere in San Francisco.

We call on all stakeholders in southeast San Francisco to continue to work together to improve the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood for working families and children. We call on all San Franciscans to reject the tactics of an unreasonable group that is trying to stop a plan our community supports and needs.

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