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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard covers 500 acres on San Francisco's southeastern flank, jutting out into the bay like the fletching of a giant arrow. Acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1940, it was once one of the West Coast's largest shipyards, at its World War II peak employing up to 17,000 people, many of them African Americans who settled nearby. The Navy ended its work at the Shipyard in 1974, devastating the local economy, and it was eventually listed for cleanup as a Superfund-equivalent site. These days, it's a rusting city unto itself, its drydock and warehouses abandoned. For a long time, its only tenants were the city's crime lab and artists drawn by the cheap space and haunting surroundings: a boarded-up diner, its Pepsi sign intact; the giant crane where the Navy once tested rockets; deserted labs that hosted radiological experiments.
As one of the largest chunks of vacant land left in San Francisco - which has some of the highest land values and housing costs in the country - the shipyard represents an immense opportunity. And so last summer, after decades of wrangling and neglect, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved an ambitious redevelopment plan for the site. If completed, it will be one of the largest developments here since the creation of Golden Gate Park - and perhaps the most contentious.
The city has hired Florida-based Len-nar Corp., a major housing developer, to transform the site. Lennar's plan calls for 10,500 new housing units, and space for retail and artist's studios. It's chockfull of green goodies: parks, mass transit upgrades and a "green tech" campus. Thirty-two percent of the housing will be sold at prices well below the city's sky-high market rates. It's the kind of mixed-use, mixed-income development that sprawl-weary environmentalists have cheered from Denver to Portland - dense, transit-oriented, and built on reclaimed brownfields near the city center.
But many locals have received the plan with deep ambivalence. "The project is flawed from stem to stern," says Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology. The local nonprofit has advocated for the Shipyard's cleanup and redevelopment since 1984, but contends that the current plan won't benefit the community.
Bayview Hunters Point, which wraps around the...