The Fix Isn't In

Gavin Newsom has a plan to clean up the Bayview in five years. If only his programs were working as well as his PR machine.

By Ryan Blitstein

published: August 02, 2006

A flock of aides in suits and sunglasses follows Mayor Gavin Newsom, who strides up Griffith Street toward the wood-chipped landscape outside the Alice Griffith Opportunity Center, part of the Bayview housing project of the same name. Across the street, Carmen Mack spies him from her front stoop. "That Gavin?" the young mother asks, then waves and calls out like a schoolgirl: "Heeeeeeyy Gaaaaaaavin!"

Newsom drops his chin to his chest and raises a pair of fingers high in the air, like a sports star basking in the glory of fandom. Without pausing to speak to Mack, he continues toward the building to greet this morning's guest, California's first lady, Maria Shriver. Behind the mayor, just above the tree line, Candlestick Park looms on the horizon.

A few doors down from Mack, about a dozen Alice Griffith residents show little interest in the hullabaloo at the Opportunity Center. Many fit the profile of those Newsom says he most wants to help: high-school dropout, unemployed, father, ex-convict, and African-American. On most weekday mornings, without uniformed officers 20 yards away, these men might be drinking liquor, playing craps and dominoes, and smoking blunts in the same spot. Today, May 15, they're just hanging out.

Newsom signs an autograph for a young boy, and then engages with Shriver in the bland small talk politicians conduct when cameras are flashing and tape recorders are shoved in their faces. They enter the building with Dwayne Jones, director of Communities of Opportunity (COO), the mayor's five-year plan to improve the lives of southeast San Francisco's low-income residents. After a yearlong pilot project at Alice Griffith, COO will soon confirm two years of public and private funding, expanding the program throughout Bayview-Hunters Point. As Jones describes the initiative, the mayor puts his hands in his pockets, beaming in front of a sign that reads "Newsom Hall."

The Opportunity Center is a "green" building, constructed by local eco-friendly companies as a demonstration project, then bought by the city at a fraction of its market value and shipped to Alice Griffith (also known as "Double Rock") by barge last summer. Among the 33 buildings in the development, the modern, well-maintained center sticks out like a bionic thumb. Alice Griffith just failed its annual inspection by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the agency that funds public housing. Inspectors saw broken windows, holes in walls, exposed wiring, blocked fire exits, cockroaches, and graffiti throughout the property. They estimated "life-threatening" deficiencies in about one of every four units — 73 in all. (The embarrassing reports, the San Francisco Housing Authority says, are due to unreasonably harsh recent inspections.)

Upstairs in the Opportunity Center, Newsom steps before the cameras to announce that Alice Griffith is the country's first public housing development with free wireless Internet access. He opens his speech by recounting the early successes of the pilot project. The mayor boasts that 80 percent of the recent refurbishing, repaving, and landscaping was done by residents.

"Coming back now, a number of months later ... it looks the same," Newsom says, contrasting Alice Griffith with housing developments at which outsiders, not residents, performed the work. "[At the other developments], it's back to the way it was — brand-new playground equipment looks old and dilapidated because no one has a sense of ownership. But I think that the process here gave people a sense of ownership and a sense of meaning."

Newsom is either fudging or ill-informed. Since last year's resident-led cleanup projects ended, the weeds have grown high, the building walls have gotten tagged with graffiti, and the streets and sidewalks have become strewn with garbage and beat-up cars. But in the days leading up to Shriver's visit, residents watched laborers from the S.F. Housing Authority arrive in droves to make Alice Griffith presentable. To complete the Potemkin village effect, city workers placed several computers inside the Opportunity Center, only to pick them up within days.

"As soon as somebody of importance, like the mayor, wants to come down, they paint the walls, get the trash up, beautify the community," says Bradley Bradley (his real name), a longtime Alice Griffith resident. "[W]hy don't you do this while we are here?"

To residents like Bradley and Mack, COO seems like the latest in decades of all-talk-no-follow-through plans to overhaul the city's southeastern neighborhoods — longtime victims of blight, unemployment, illiteracy, and crime. In the parking lot after the press conference, a handful of Alice Griffith occupants berate Jones for 30 years of failed social programs he had nothing to do with.

Jones says this plan, the largest public-private partnership in San Francisco history, is different. Its goal is systemwide change: Instead of heading up just one department, he supervises programs across several agencies, including the Mayor's Office of Community Development (MOCD) and the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. Over the next five years, Jones will direct up to $200 million in city funds and private grants in an effort to provide job training and create small businesses, teach children to read and adults to be better parents, curb violence, and make residents feel safe inside their homes.

Since Newsom first announced the program almost two years ago, Jones has converted many doubters into supporters, both in City Hall and at Alice Griffith. Given the results of the pilot project, though, the residents' skepticism may still be warranted.

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Carl Newt III sits on the edge of a sidewalk tree planter, looking out at the Alice Griffith Opportunity Center, weighing his options. It's almost 10 a.m. on a Friday, and the Heritage summer camp kids are about to leave the center for a water park field trip. Newt, a 31-year-old father of one, is thinking of joining as a chaperone. It wouldn't pay anything, but he'd get free admission to the park.

Though Newt's legal address is just outside the development, Alice Griffith is the place he calls home. He grew up here and spends his days here, and from where he's sitting he can point out the apartments of his uncles, his cousins, and his father, who's lived here for decades. He was on the crew that retrofitted the Opportunity Center after it was shipped by barge to Alice Griffith last summer. Since then, he hasn't held a job.

"I need one. I need a job right now," Newt says. "I'm just sitting out here smoking."

His frustration is not unique. Among the families that Gavin Newsom's Communities of Opportunity program aims to help, only 40 percent of adults aged 16 or older are working. Job training and creation — along with safety — are the immediate goals of the initiative. Yet many residents who participated in the pilot jobs programs remain, like Newt, unemployed.

Last year, COO hired the nonprofit San Francisco Conservation Corps to work with young adults at Alice Griffith to replace and refurbish playground equipment and landscape the Opportunity Center. Only a handful of the participants completed the program and moved on to full-time work. Another nonprofit, Young Community Developers, trained a team of about 20 in a similar program last year. A few participants now work for the city or local businesses, but most are still at Alice Griffith, hoping for job offers that haven't arrived. Dwayne Jones encouraged one group of residents to found a landscaping business, but it was aborted after a few months of planning.

Residents, community organizations, and the mayor's office disagree not only on what caused these disappointing outcomes, but also on whether the outcomes can even be called "disappointing." What is clear is that in February 2005, when at a press conference Newsom promised a "job pipeline" giving Alice Griffith residents "access to over 800 jobs," he was making a pledge that's far from fulfilled.

After the initial jobs programs and the hoopla around the Opportunity Center ended last fall, frustration with the project mounted. Around Christmas, groups of angry young men from Alice Griffith began visiting the office of Ellouise Patton, executive director of Young Community Developers, asking, "Where's my job?" They didn't understand why, after going through the training and working under Jones for months, they were still unemployed.

"To me, it was all temporary, like throwing a dog a bone so he can be quiet. After beautifying, we throw you back to the corner you came from," says Lavelle Shaw, president of Alice Griffith's tenants association. "Bringing the Opportunity Center was a good thing, but you need to have programs to make it work."

Jones says he made it clear to residents that the programs were "transitional," and that not everyone who worked would be offered a city job after they were finished.

"It was a lot of false promises," says Shaw, who still counts himself among the supporters of COO. "[Newsom] came down here and promised jobs. When you tell people in public housing they're going to get jobs, they're going to expect to go to work."

The residents, too, bear some responsibility for the programs' mediocre outcomes. Many on the work crew trained by Young Community Developers failed marijuana tests, rendering them ineligible for city employment, according to Patton and some members of the crew. Others had not graduated from high school or had criminal records, but weren't willing to spend the time to get a diploma or go through transitional programs for ex-offenders, they say. Many lacked the intangible "soft skills" — knowing how to write a resume and make follow-up phone calls to potential employers, understanding that you should come to work on time every day and shouldn't steal company property — that seem basic to those who've been employed most of their adult lives. The city could have spent more time training residents in such soft skills (or explaining the consequences of testing positive for drugs). Yet even community nonprofit veterans expected an earnest effort from the participants in their programs, something they didn't always find at Alice Griffith.

"We're here to open opportunities," says Janet Gomes, the director of corps member services at San Francisco Conservation Corps who oversaw the Alice Griffith program. "If I put my hand out to you, I hope you shake my hand. Otherwise, I take it back."

It's a barrier that few government programs, no matter their ambition, can overcome. In order to succeed, COO would have to change an entire culture.

"If I've got a 21-year-old, and he's been in that culture for 21 years, it's going to take more than 12 months to change him," says Patton. "You can't just throw him in a job and say, 'You did great.' You've gotta be with him, you've gotta call him, almost babying him until you wean him, because he's so dependent on the social system."

But Jones is the sole staff member of COO until the program expands this fall, and such one-on-one social work is beyond the program's scope. Because the initiative doesn't track individuals, even programs that initially seem successful may have little long-term effect.

This spring, Jones tried to recruit a team of locals to found a small business that would take over landscaping at Alice Griffith (ostensibly via a no-bid contract with the city). The Bayview Business Resource Center offered to train them, but after several weeks of false starts, the group gave up. In the meantime, Alice Griffith lawns sprout weeds, and piles of garbage bake in the sunlight on the street.

For COO to work, government and citizens must meet each other halfway, but the sides seem to be confused as to where that halfway point resides.

"It's a put-up-or-shut-up relationship," Jones told residents at a recent community meeting. "If you want a small business, we'll facilitate it. If not, don't say that you do."

Whoever bears responsibility for the results, what has happened inside Alice Griffith this year falls short of the mayor's statements. Until things change, exasperated residents will answer questions about COO and its director with a simple, curt response — of the sort several residents have offered during the past few months: "Man, fuck Dwayne."

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By now, Jones is used to the criticism, and so is MOCD director Fred Blackwell, who works closely with Jones on the COO program.

"We get cussed out, laughed at," says Blackwell. "Even city staffers — people who've been here for a long time, seen department heads come and go, seen mayors come and go — are highly skeptical. They wonder if [COO] is just a PR campaign for the mayor or something he's doing to pacify folks in these communities."

Criticism aside, the program has great potential, and has already seen some success. Rather than requiring residents to travel to service sites, for example, the Alice Griffith Opportunity Center has brought government and nonprofit programs directly to their neighborhood. The project's occupants praise the summer camp, the repaved streets, and the dozens of donated computers, handed out free of charge.

Jones has convinced local foundations — including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, and the Annenberg Foundation — to synchronize their grants with city priorities: Of the estimated $4 million spent thus far, about $1 million was private money. The program will soon implement a projectwide "business plan," created by the San Francisco wing of the Bridgespan Group, the nonprofit spinoff of Boston-based consulting firm Bain.

Any government initiative, especially a long-term project, will have its share of setbacks. Jones and Blackwell don't expect widespread change until the program has been running, fully funded, for several years.

But this nuanced view is lost in Newsom's public events.

"We always have a back-and-forth on [the press conferences]," Blackwell says. "The mayor wants people to know about good things being done, but at the same time, Dwayne [Jones] and I are cautious about having press conferences, because we're aware of the level of cynicism out there, the feelings out there around that skepticism. So we've tried as much as we can to fly beneath the radar screen."

In the past year and a half, Newsom visited Alice Griffith to announce a "top-to-bottom overhaul" of the project, to launch Communities of Opportunity, to announce the Opportunity Center opening, and to announce the Wi-Fi network. He also held an Arbor Day press conference at Gilman Playground, just outside the development's gates. Next week the mayor and ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes will participate in a joint promotion, the Communities of Opportunity/SF Connect 1st Annual Stadium to Stadium 5-Mile Run/Walk.

Newsom's presence draws much-needed attention to an underserved community, but these announcements and events do little for residents like Carmen Mack. In the year she's lived at Alice Griffith, burglars have broken into her home four times, once stealing her washing machine. She's spent months trying to get the Housing Authority to fix a leak that leaves a dark stain across her kitchen ceiling. Her neighbor Gloria Johnson, a great-grandmother, has spent years begging for the repair of a toilet leak, which leaves a stalactite of peeling ceiling material leaking onto her stove — despite what Jones calls a "solid and genuine partnership" between the Housing Authority and the mayor's office. (Jones is working on a nascent program to train and hire residents to do repairs.)

Around the corner from Mack, just steps away from the Opportunity Center, a young male resident, Andre Donaldson, was gunned down in broad daylight on May 30. Only days before, Jim Martin of San Francisco Housing Development Corporation, which manages the Opportunity Center for the mayor's office, had helped the young man secure a job.

Jones was encouraged by the community response to the murder, which remains unsolved — calls to the Opportunity Center asking for grief counseling, the creation of an end-the-violence baseball league for young boys (facilitated by Martin and lifelong Alice Griffith resident Sammy Vaughan), and, best of all, no retaliatory violence. But Mack, who is grateful to send two children and a niece to the COO summer camp, feels the city's reaction to the killing — installing two monitoring cameras near the crime scene — rings as hollow as Newsom's early job promises. She still doesn't feel safe even inside her own home.

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"Hello! Hello! Hello!" exclaims Dwayne Jones, grinning and clasping his hands together. "I have not seen my family in a long time."

A few dozen of his "family" members — residents of Alice Griffith — sit in metal chairs to Jones' left, slurping Chinese noodles from paper plates. To his right are city employees and officials, including the executive director of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families. Except for a few brave souls, the two groups are physically separate, like boys and girls at a middle-school dance.

After two years of soliciting residents' ideas at neighborhood meetings, Jones has come tonight to the Bret Harte Elementary School gymnasium, across the street from Alice Griffith, to present the project's occupants with the latest COO plan. When he first started coming to such meetings, they were packed with people ready to lob complaints at him. Now, it seems most residents are either satisfied and think the meeting isn't worth their time, or have decided there's nothing Jones can do for them, and would rather not listen to yet another mayoral plan for fixing their community.

Jones studied social science at UC Berkeley, then spent 10 years working in East Oakland, and says he fell in love with the Bayview almost as soon as he'd discovered the neighborhood. He has spent almost a decade in the area, as a nonprofit manager, consultant, and, since early 2004, in the Newsom administration. He's the kind of guy who crosses between worlds with ease — he has taken executive management classes at Yale, but last year went to Alice Griffith at 6 a.m. every day for three months to join residents in landscaping. The project he heads shares his two-pronged approach, a meld of business schoolÐstyle policy plans and a grassroots ethos that aims to go beyond empty handshakes.

But Newsom's PR methods seem to err on the side of empty — or at least to willfully overlook both the programs that haven't worked and the community's many remaining problems.

"You know, there wasn't long ago where most of the lighting wasn't working here, where there weren't the trees that you see here," says the mayor, sleeves rolled up, microphone in hand, on the large video screen behind Jones. "It's a milestone that pulls rhetoric aside and directs some real action. And you see visible results."

Jones, wearing a pink shirt and broad-shouldered gray suit, leans toward his laptop to click off the video, and the overhead lights bathe the room in harsh fluorescence. He talks about the successes of the past year, then says, in a serious tone: "The physical improvements are real easy stuff. Now begins the hard part: changing attitudes and raising expectations."

Jones' vision for the Bayview is the best-case scenario — a hip, safe, clean, economically stable neighborhood populated by the same people who live there now. Even the unemployed would contribute to the community network, he explains, planting gardens or offering to drive neighbors to work. "It's terrifying that folks don't recognize what a jewel people have here," he says later that night. "Alice Griffith is right by a state park, close to amazing views of the bay."

At times, it seems Jones believes he can change the minds of an entire community through sheer affability, if he spends enough time walking the streets of the neighborhood and holding meetings.

Yet meetings like this only serve to demonstrate the disconnect between the mayor's team, however well intentioned, and the people they're trying to help. For example, aides hand out a "schedule" of upcoming COO events — really just an internal spreadsheet calendar created by consultants from the Bridgespan Group. Headlined "Public Launch Plan Emphasizes Repeated Interactions With Each Node," it contains a confusing mess of colored rectangles and dates. Another handout is an overview of all the city services available through COO, with 60-odd boxes containing policy jargon like "FSS Expansion/IDA" and "SB163 Wraparound."

Even Jones knows the handouts send the wrong message. He says, to the residents on his left, "Some of [these program names] will make absolutely no sense to you." It's hardly an auspicious start for an initiative aimed at simplifying community access to government services.

When Jones asks if anyone has questions, the residents simply want to know why the much-celebrated Wi-Fi network isn't working. Though the network has been spotty for its entire two-month existence, Jones only heard about the most recent problem the day before. He says he'll make sure it's fixed within 10 days. (At press time, two weeks later, it's still not functional.) The folks who live at Alice Griffith didn't know to call Jones about the Wi-Fi, and many still don't know whom to call to ask about the free computers and Internet training the Opportunity Center offers.

Near the end of the meeting, Jones mentions that the residents may soon receive a phone call inviting them to be in a photo at City Hall. Communities of Opportunity publicly launches there in early October: It's the end of the pilot plan, and the official beginning of the five-year initiative. Jones emphasizes how important it is that he "secure at least 50 families" from each housing development "willing to engage in the system."

"We want to show the world who is responsible for changing your community," says Jones. "This is not our thing — this is your thing."