Of all the political events of this past Tuesday, that which interested me the most was a 6-5 decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to allow Home Depot to proceed with its plans to open a store in the Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighbourhood.

Home Depot’s been trying to get into San Francisco’s pants for about a decade, now (in 1995 they were in cahoots with Southern Pacific’s descendant corporation Catellus [now ProLogis] to build on land in Mission Bay that was dedicated to low- and moderately-priced- housing), but activists and politicians have constantly kept them back. And good thing, in my reading: Since the city’s mining days, large businesses have had an undue influence on city politics, and Home Depot’s politics are the kind that San Francisco could do without. They have been a major contributor to the Bush campaign and the GOP, they’re rabidly anti-union, and co-chairman of the board Bernard Marcus is also on the board of the Zionist Emet News Service. [Please see the correction here.] We get enough hate propaganda plastered around this city from Blue Star PR.

Israel and the GOP, however, had very little to do with the current anti-HD push. The new store is going to be built on Bayshore Boulevard, at the end of Cortland Avenue. If you look at the Google map I’ve linked to, you’ll see that, right next to this intersection, the map is split in two by Highway 101. On the right side of the map is the Bayview/Hunter’s Point neighbourhood. On the left, Bernal Heights.

Bayview/Hunter’s Point is San Francisco’s largest ghetto. The area is 59% black, and suffers a 40% unemployment rate. It has been under constant attack since the 1960s. In the Hunters Point Uprising of 1966, which manifested itself in race riots in multiple neighbourhoods around the city, police herded black people from other parts of town into Hunters Point. This city is a seller’s market, but there’s such stigma attached to Hunters Point that there are properties, there, which no one will buy. The latest threat comes from the new light rail station, which is bound to make this ghetto an appealing hotspot for the commuting would-be gentry. The damage is already being done: In 1980, Hunters Point was 77% black. Proportionally, the neighbourhood has lost one percent of its black population every year since then.

Bernal Heights, on the other hand, is a largely white neighbourhood, known for its small stores and boutiques, its progressivism, its dogs, and its small children. In the ’80s, Bernal Heights was a rough neighbourhood, but, over the course of the 90’s, the area got ‘cleaned up’, in the San Francisco Chronicle’s infelicitous phrase (echoes of Mugabe, anyone?).

For years, the battle against Home Depot has been led by the Bernal Heights Neighbourhood Center (BHNC). The arguments, at least as presented by the Chronicle and the Bay Guardian, have very little to do with the corporate influence on San Francisco governance, the growing influence of non-democratic conservative powers in the Bay Area, or Zionism. Concerns are, understandably, more immediately local: Home Depot may have a deleterious effect on locally-owned businesses, especially hardware stores (pace the buffoons at the Chronicle); the environmental impact report required by the Board of Supervisors and the traffic analysis are also suspect — Home Depot may very well cause a great deal of congestion on the neighbourhoods’ streets.

The Bayview Hunters Point Project Area Committee (BHP-PAC) sees things very differently: The neighbourhood’s unemployment rate is eight times the nation’s, and Home Depot promises to bring in 150 jobs for locals, with starting wages between $11/hour and $13/hour — substantially more than the city’s minimum wage. Folks from Bernal Heights have objected, pointing out Home Depot’s unconscionable labour record.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick (District 1 — the Richmond and the Western Addition) complained of Home Depot’s playing the ‘politics of resentment’:

“They have come into our community and caused deep and perhaps lasting harm by dangling jobs,” he added. “We want good jobs. We do not want poverty-level jobs.”

And certainly there’s been some plenty of funny business in Home Depot’s quest to find a location in the city, but there’s something a little more disturbing, here: The fact is that Bayview/Hunters Point and Bernal Heights are not one neighbourhood, and have not been for a long time. Home Depot did not introduce divisions: it benefited from divisions that were already present:

“I’m concerned by these people who seem to care so much about the people of Bayview getting good jobs,” the Rev. Arnold Townsend, who chairs the city’s Elections Commission, told the commissioners. “Have they ever said anything to the businesses they frequent (in Bernal Heights) about why they don’t have African Americans working there?”

Home Depot is taking advantage of us all. It won’t be good for Bernal Heights. In the long run, it won’t be good for Bayview/Hunters Point, and it’s certainly no good for the city. But middle class progressives have refused to recognise the part they’ve played in allowing this to happen by participating in gentrification and by taking advantage of structural inequalities in housing and employment, rather than combating them.

I’m not trying to blame Bernal Heights in particular, here — for all I know, every resident of the neighbourhood is a tireless housing and economic rights activist. District 9 (Bernal Heights and the Eastern Outer Mission) Supervisor Tom Ammiano has been a consistent advocate of tenants’ and homeowners’ rights. But the change that Bernalians fear that Home Depot will effect against their idyllic enclave is a late echo of the gentrification that they, and the funky former residents who paved the way for them, effected on their own neighbourhood. There are structural inequalities in San Francisco from which, like it or not, middle class people as a class (again, it’s not necessarily Bernal Heights per se that’s at fault, here) have benefited, and through which the poor have been oppressed. Though these injustices may offend our sensibilities, this counts for little when we encounter them passively and accept their benefits. When people like Rev. Arnold imply that we are racists, there’s a level on which they are right.

I’m not interested in judgement, here. (Well… save judgement of Home Depot.) But its important to understand how a progressivism that isn’t intimately engaged in issues of race and class passively assists in its own defeat.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 13 November 2005 at 20:30 and is filed under News Commentary, Race and Racism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.