With the wooden frames of 88 town houses and flats marching up the hillside off Innes Avenue, Lennar is putting the final touches on its "welcome center": a 3,500-square-foot industrial chic modular building with a fireplace, comfy seating and an expansive deck overlooking the bay.
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.Read more at grist.org
From The Bay View,The Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing on the ethics of the Department of Public Health and the Lennar Corp. related to the department’s role regulating environmental health impacts Thursday, June 23, at 1 p.m. in City Hall, Room 263. The hearing was called in response to a community report released by Bayview Hunters Point community organizations in the SLAM Coalition earlier this spring exposing email communication the Health Department and Lennar in an effort to conceal information about adverse health impacts.More at The Bay View
The report details a series of emails since 2006 between EPA, the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) and Lennar that reveal a manipulation of facts in order to conceal information regarding asbestos exposure from construction activities at the Shipyard and present false claims in support of Lennar’s redevelopment plan. The emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The SLAM Coalition of Bayview Hunters Point Community Organizations and the New Orleans-based Advocates for Environmental Human Rights held a press conference outside US EPA Region 9’s San Francisco office today to protest the contents of a string of emails they obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that they claim “show conspiracy by the US Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 and the San Francisco Health Department officials to cover-up dangers of the Lennar Corp.’s development project at the Hunters Point Shipyard.”
“Since 2006 when heavy grading and excavation began by the Lennar Corporation at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, residents of the Bayview Hunters Point Community, a majority African-American, Samoan and Latino low-income community, suffered from health problems including nose bleeds, rashes and headaches that they believed were caused by asbestos and heavy metals being unearthed from these actions,” the SLAM/E.H.R.’s press release states. “However, little did residents know that officials in the Environmental Protection Agency Region 9 and the San Francisco Department of Public Health were conspiring with the Lennar Corporation to conceal the health threats of asbestos laden dust.”
Read more at BloombergEmile Haddad, a former Lennar Corp. executive, sold 12,000 acres in California for a $277 million profit at the housing market’s peak four years ago. He and his partners then reacquired it at half the price in 2009. Now, Haddad says, it’s time to build.
Haddad, chief executive officer of FivePoint Communities Inc., is developing four new master-planned communities with a combined 45,000 residences, two in the Los Angeles area and two in San Francisco. Construction of the first homes is scheduled to begin in the second half of this year. Investors including Lennar, Michael S. Dell’s MSD Capital LP, Ross Perot Jr.’s Hillwood Development Co. and Rockpoint Group LLC are banking on the projects as the state emerges from a five-year housing bust.
