Across the Street
On the first morning in our new apartment, I throw on a sweatshirt and venture out to find coffee, because the coffeemaker is still packed away in a box.
The street is quiet early Monday morning. At the cafe on the corner, which boasts a long line for Saturday and Sunday brunch, I order from a man behind the counter who asks if I live “pajama-close.”
“Yes,” I say, “we just moved in up the street.”
“Wow,” he says as he pours the coffee, shaking his head. “A while back, no one would want to move here. Used to be the most dangerous neighborhood in California.”
“Really?” I ask. Worse than Richmond? East Palo Alto? He’s wearing the kind of hat that makes me think he cares a lot about music and apothecaries, and I can’t help but consider his credibility as neighborhood historian.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “Before they tore down the projects across the street, crime was off the charts. But when they rebuilt them, they instituted this super harsh policy that wouldn’t let anyone move back in who had a felony in their family. Even if it was a distant uncle who wasn’t going to live there.”
The housing development he’s referring to is called Valencia Gardens. It was built in 1943 as a home for the “deserving poor,” (the official language of the 1937 Housing Act)—or, white families still suffering after the Depression. In 1954, the NAACP won Banks v. the San Francisco Housing Authority, which led to the formal integration of all San Francisco housing developments, which led to white flight. And by the eighties and nineties, the development was home to mostly black families, and known for its drug dealers and violent crime, its pest infestations and faulty plumbing.
Of course, it both is and isn’t that simple.
“Severely distressed” is the Housing Authority’s official term for unlivable. From 1994 to 1995, San Francisco won five HOPE IV grants from the federal government to tear down and rebuild severely distressed housing developments. Valencia Gardens was rebuilt in 2006. It cost $66 million and the new construction is informed by architectural theories about crime prevention (“defensible spaces”) and now the 260 units have their own entrances and front stoops, their own backyards or porches. And cameras throughout the complex keep watch through the night.
I call the Valencia Gardens management company to inquire about their eligibility requirements. “No,” the woman on the telephone says, “we do background checks on anyone over 18 who will live on the premises, not on everyone in the family.” She is vague, though, about the extent of the background check performed. Too often, these checks uncover charges they shouldn’t — misdemeanors or felonies that have since been expunged.
But the crime rate has dropped. It both is and isn’t that simple. And when my new neighbor instructs me to call the police if I see any “gang-related activity,” I think to myself that I won’t be doing that, because it seems like the kind of instruction that results in false positives as it’s passed from neighbor to neighbor on this side of the street. “Also you have to try the eggs benedict at the cafe,” she says. “It’s amazing, worth the wait.”
An Asian man smokes cigarettes in front of his doorway. Young black men hang out in the afternoon a few doors down. An Indian woman with grey hair and an orange sari talks to herself on her second-story porch, and we laugh together when I think she’s talking to me. Children’s voices follow me all the way up the stairs and into my bedroom, and I look out the window to see them playing across the street.
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Cover photo: Chris Carlsson
