Shelter Skelter (Part I)

Anderson, who moved to a private-sector, one-bedroom apartment with her son -- until the landlord raised the rent and her son lost his job -- now lives in a quiet, well-kept senior housing project near the Castro. She remembers the gains at North Beach, but mostly she remembers the noise, the anxiety, the fear that her son would get caught up in a gang. "All in all," she says, "it's really a terrible place."

Halikias does not agree. "There are good people back there," she says. And if it hadn't been for happenstance, she might be there still.

Urged on by friends, Halikias submitted an application for one of the low-income condominiums at the building where she now lives. She didn't win the lottery that was used to pick finalists, but the manager asked if she wanted her name on a waiting list. Within weeks, Halikias' name came up, and she was shown a unit -- but turned it down. "It had a view of an ugly parking lot," she says. The manager offered her an alternative: a one-bedroom with views of the waterfront. It did not have what she'd said she wanted 11 years ago: a place to dig in a garden. But it had a view.

What made her say yes?
"I wanted to keep living in the projects so bad," Halikias says, not answering directly. "I'd become accustomed to it after so many years." She sits at her dining room table. The sunlight through her windows searches in vain for a crack in the wall, a chip in the paint.

Which reminds her of one of the last things she saw at North Beach. "One day I saw a roach in my kitchen that looked as big as a mouse, I swear," she says, and taps her fingers lightly on my arm for emphasis. "So I went to the basement to see what was going on, and the whole wall was covered with them, covered with them, they were plastered on the wall like wallpaper."

She is grateful, she says, that friends helped her leave.
"The serenity and peace and quiet here -- it's heaven," she says, and pauses as if the silence can't be trusted. "Can you believe how peaceful it is?"

Continued...