Lark says she'd love to live in a revamped North Beach Place as much as anyone. After all, who wouldn't want to go from a sewage-infested, off-pink and browning-yellow concrete bunker to the lush, vibrant landscape in the architect's renderings? The drug dealers operating nightly out of the deserted east block would be replaced by a Trader Joe's market, anchor for the retail space on the ground floor of the new project. The uninviting, almost prisonlike feel of the current project would be replaced by near-Victorian flats -- some with terraces -- that actually look like apartments, rather than cells.
As enticing as the new development sounds, Lark fears the cost of renovation will include the loss of many of her neighbors.
Paul Trapani
Ben Golvin of North Beach Development Associates explains why tenants need to move.
Paul Trapani
Alma Lark has lived in North Beach for three decades.
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"This is the best community you could ever want to live in," she says. "We have Samoans, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians, Cambodians. It's like the U.N."
It's a remarkable community, she says, but it has been gripped by fear ever since the Housing Authority shredded the contracts that gave it peace of mind. "And now, with this relocation, we know they don't have nowhere to put us," she says. "That's the most disturbing thing: how scared everybody is. ... We don't think we'll be able to come back. So we ain't movin'."
Lark is speaking for the tenants' association at North Beach, for which she serves as treasurer. She says the simplest way for the tenants to ensure not being taken advantage of is to refuse to move, regardless of what the Housing Authority is saying.
The authority has repeatedly told residents that everyone who leaves will be allowed to return, provided they remain "in good standing." On its face, the promise seems reasonable enough: The new development will have exactly the same number of public housing units (229) as the old development, plus an additional 118 affordable units. But tenants cite one major reason for skepticism: the ripped-up exit contracts.
Gen Fujioka of the Asian Law Caucus, which represents several North Beach Place tenants, says the Housing Authority has such little credibility with its residents that each additional misrepresentation or broken promise is traumatic. "The message from the [Housing Authority] has been that, unless the tenants take what they're offering, they'll get someplace less desirable, maybe not even in San Francisco," Fujioka says. "That kind of threat to people with so little choice -- who need to be near their doctors or families -- it's almost life-threatening. It's really like putting a gun to their heads."
A possible solution for North Beach Place -- and the tenants who inhabit it -- emerged, appropriately, while tenants and Housing Authority staff were shouting at one another.
At a community meeting facilitated by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, Juan Monsanto, a Housing Authority flak-catcher filling in for the out-of-town Fortner, and Lark, the treasure of the North Beach tenants' association, were berating each other over the merits of the Housing Authority's relocation plan. Lark -- backed by the entire tenant board -- is saying that the plan is a cookie-cutter left over from past projects, and that it doesn't address any of the very specific needs of North Beach Place's residents. Monsanto is screaming right back in the Housing Authority's defense, when, suddenly, he's interrupted by the developer.
"Why doesn't the Housing Authority just hire a third party to do the relocations?" the developer blurts out. The blunt suggestion is met by the kind of silence that -- at confrontational public meetings like these -- is unmistakably affirmative.
Peskin is at the front of the room, with one foot up on a chair in front of him, arms thrown open, standing as if at the front of a vast ship and staring out at the New World. "Now this," he says, "is why I wanted to have this meeting."
In the month that's elapsed since, the sense of revelation has seemed appropriate. Lawyers representing the tenants, the Housing Authority, and the developers have been trying to hash out an agreement on relocation that would save North Beach Place from becoming entangled in litigation that would likely mean an end to the revitalization plan.
Stewart's solution involves paying a pair of North Beach Place tenants to devise a relocation plan adequate for the complicated needs of this project. Normally, this is the Housing Authority's job, but -- in North Beach -- no one seems to mind that it's farming the responsibility out. "The best thing they [Housing Authority officials] could do," Alma Lark says, "is to not be involved at all [with relocating us]. That would make everybody feel a lot better."
The Housing Authority, for its part, doesn't seem to have much of a problem with farming out one of its core responsibilities because it seems to understand its tenants won't deal with it otherwise. "Clearly, there's not a lot of trust there," says Barbara Smith, who runs the relocation program. "If [us not being as involved] is what it takes to give people peace of mind, so be it."
