Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex, among the last remaining public-housing sites in San Francisco, is coming down.
The World War II-era complex, formerly run by the San Francisco Housing Authority, will be torn down over the course of at least nine months, according to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development.
Plans to demolish the buildings were announced in 2017, and repeatedly delayed. Over the course of several years, the troubled buildings have been subject to lethal fires, squatting, and mismanagement.
The roughly 600 units in the public-housing complex will be replaced by a mixed-income project of 1,700 units, about half affordable and half market-rate.
Over the past nine weeks, photographer Thomas Hunter II documented the beginning of Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex’s demolition.
“It started with AT&T marking telecom equipment and PG&E performing gas shutoffs,” said Hunter.
“After that crews visit each building in waves: First, an asbestos abatement crew goes through a building, wearing hazmat suits, and fills up bags. Next, firefighters climb to the roof and practice vertical ventilation where they cut holes with big saws. Finally, a demolition crew knocks the building down with an excavator.”
“Despite all this, the neighborhood remained alive. Squatters sleep in a building at night and leave signs of their passing like a mattress, a scrawled message, a hole in a fence. Commuters walk down the main street and rubber-neck. Autonomous Waymos drive in, get discouraged, and make U-Turns. It’s quiet now that most buildings have been reduced to concrete foundations,” said Hunter.
Did y’all not actually read the article? It says pretty early in the piece that the 600 unit housing is being replaced but a mixed-income project of 1700 units half affordable and half market rate.
What will happen to the land here, will they build new affordable housing?
So what will replace this housing project? The mayor and most elected officials are constantly nattering about affordable housing. This project was affordable, so what is going to be the replacement? Hopefully not market rate housing.
Why does everything have to turn into a dig on the mayor? If you go back and read the article again, or most likely for the first time, you’ll notice that this housing project has been slated for replacement since 2017. It’s filled with seriously derelict barracks slapped up in the 1940s as a quick way to house the thousands of workers who contributed to the war effort. Needless to say, it’s been nothing short of a stain on our city that our poorest (housed) residents have to live in such crumbling conditions, in buildings that are decades past their useful life. Also needless to say, it always takes a very long time for the City—and this is true of any city—to find the funding and coordinate with the feds to be able to execute a replacement of a public-housing project of this size, which (again, as stated in the article ) is a one-for-one replacement of all subsidized units plus another 1100 market-rate units. There’s even a link included that you can click on to learn more. But sure, go ahead and register your distaste for a mayor who actually wants to address the housing crisis by…building more housing. Funny that you want to give him credit for a project that started nearly a decade ago, though.