Project Statement
Hunters Point is a decommissioned military
base in San Francisco now on the verge of redevelopment
with an emphasis on industrial uses by the city. The
landscape architects were hired by an environmental
justice non-profit organization to analyze development
issues and to create concept plans for a park at Hunters
Point Shipyard. Reconciling community desires with contentious
issues of site contamination and habitat potential,
the project resulted in a document that makes a case
for a large park as an economic generator, a catalyst
for clean-up, and a critical step in achieving environmental
justice for this community.
Narrative Summary
Hunters Point is polluted.
City policies have concentrated hazardous waste generation
and storage sites among low-income housing in the largely
African American neighborhood. The five-hundred acre
Hunters Point Shipyard received Superfund designation
in 1989, due in part to an unlined landfill that contains
waste products of naval radiological research and bomb
testing – just a few feet away from the bay shore
edge and residents’ backyards. The neighborhood
suffers significant health problems and job loss as
a result of these conditions, but the City has consistently
prioritized other areas of the city for investment.
When it was decommissioned in 1974, the Navy committed
to developing a park on the shipyard to restore community
access to the bay, but the waterfront remains inaccessible
today.
The clear priority of the
Redevelopment Plan is economic regeneration through
maximization of industrial development, while public
access to the waterfront is limited to a narrow shore-edge
park adjacent to the proposed industrial activity. The
Hunters Point Shipyard Waterfront Project demonstrates
that, if prioritized in the early stages of development,
a park can act as a catalyst for high-quality development,
thorough clean-up, and economic growth. This project
reconceptualizes the narrow shore-edge open space proposed
by the Redevelopment Agency as a waterfront park on
par with Crissy Field, a large park on San Francisco’s
northern shore, providing a balance of passive open
space, habitat restoration, and complementary retail
and cultural development. It makes an argument for the
acceleration of park planning with a high level of community
involvement as a first step toward environmental justice
in a neighborhood with a history of neglect.
This project was developed
as a short-term, grant-funded initiative by an independent
environmental non-profit organization to educate and
empower the Hunters Point community to intervene in
continuing planning efforts by the city. It resulted
in the development of four alternative visions for park
planning of the shipyard, beginning by exploring the
limits and potentials of the park footprint designated
by the San Francisco Redevelopment Plan. It expands
upon this to demonstrate the increased value of a larger
park for economic development, habitat value, and environmental
justice. The study was compiled in a book which has
been distributed across the city and presented in numerous
public meetings.
Analysis
Shipyard redevelopment is part of a renaissance occurring
in Hunters Point. Hunters Point is currently the site
of many projects intending to improve environmental
and economic conditions there, including a new light
rail system connecting the Bayview back to the City,
an African American community marketplace, and the restoration
of the long-neglected Yosemite Slough. A waterfront
park would complement and strengthen these efforts.
This project proposes planning of a park early in the
development process because it asserts that parks should
be a major factor in development, not merely residual
spaces. To allow for this reprioritization, we analyzed
the major issues that face development:
1. Clean-up analysis: Clean-up
is underway in the shipyard, but the landfill remains
a contentious issue. The cheapest solution is to complete
the cap, but the community is legitimately concerned
that capping is not adequate to remove the health
risks of the landfill, especially in an earthquake
zone where there is risk of liquefaction. Spontaneous
fires within the landfill in 2001 made the landfill’s
hazards palpable.
A long-standing principle of base closure clean-up
is that reuse objectives should drive clean-up standards.
Parks set a trajectory for high quality development
that would necessitate high standards of clean-up.
Clean-up would need to anticipate long-term use by
families and pets, as well as water access. Only complete
removal of the landfill guarantees this level of safety.
2. Economic analysis: The
Redevelopment Plan was approved in 1997, and, while
it prioritized job creation, it reflected market conditions
at the height of the dot-com boom when there was strong
demand for industrial development. As a result, most
of the shipyard is designated maritime industrial,
a use which currently has little value for job creation.
There are two major economic opportunities engendered
by dedicating a greater proportion of the shipyard
to park-related uses: to take advantage of economic
activity that parks directly generate, and to use
park development as a strategy to improve the marketability
and value of acreage that retains its designation
for industrial and other job-creating uses. A shipyard
waterfront park could play a major role in assisting
the shipyard to achieve its economic revitalization
goals. The park would contribute directly to the shipyard’s
economic future by providing jobs and businesses that
parks spawn, by increasing adjacent property values,
and by generating private investment. A park designated
as a regional destination will be able to bolster
the economic return on nearby industrial, commercial,
and residential land. As a tourist destination, the
park’s economic benefits would extend beyond
the shipyard and Hunters Point to the city as a whole.
3. Habitat analysis: While industrialized for almost
a hundred years, the shore-edge at Hunters Point still
supports significant amounts of wildlife. Located
along the Pacific Flyway, the site in a restored condition
will provide a very important regional habitat resource
for these birds and wildlife, and an educational and
aesthetic amenity for the neighborhood. Working with
an environmental restoration engineer, the landscape
architect designed a 20-acre stormwater wetland that
would satisfy these potentials, treating stormwater
from the site and adjacent neighborhoods. The park
would create a critical linkage between several discontinuous
shore-edge open spaces, including state park lands
and an adjacent salt marsh, exponentially increasing
their combined habitat and recreational value.
Design Concepts
The Hunters Point Waterfront Park Project presents four
park alternatives which, as they increase in scale from
60 to 167 acres, demonstrate increased potential to
fulfill the economic, habitat, and environmental justice
goals for development at the shipyard. These goals are:
- Reconnect Hunters Point to the water
through recreational and cultural use of public trust
land.
- Link to Bay Trail system and continue
trail system along waterfront to increase recreational
and commuter use.
- Create viable habitat areas by assuring
adequate depth of habitat areas and protection from
recreational areas.
- Maximize flexibility of open areas
to accommodate the desires of the community for large
and small scale programming, as well as open space.
- Attract tourism and regional visitors
through variety and uniqueness of park offerings.
- Anticipate complementary
mixed-use, retail, and cultural developments.
The community has a strong desire for
a park that will do more than provide public open space.
In addition to typical park offerings: barbeques, food
festivals, basketball, playgrounds, live music, and
picnics, Hunters Point residents want the park to offer
a rich and varied mix of recreation choices, including
a community greenhouse, an open mic, rapping contests,
job fairs, alternative medicine centers, after-school
programs, an environmental monitoring center, and a
community learning center. They also desire the park
to be a center of community information, hosting political
protests and community forums, platforms from which
to broadcast community voices, needs unmet by existing
facilities.
At each increasing scale, additional recreational,
habitat, and cultural development possibilities are
added. The largest alternative explores possibilities
for alternative energy generation and a large-scale
venue/ festival plaza located on historic pier, utilizing
the historic re-gunning crane as an icon for the park.
At the largest scale, the Hunters Point Waterfront Park
will draw visitors regionally, host hundreds of migratory
bird species, provide needed athletic facilities, accommodate
large public events, create views to complement residential
development, fortify the market for job-rich land uses,
and anchor a chain of parks that transforms the city’s
southeast waterfront and alters common perceptions about
Hunters Point.
Community Participation and Environmental
Justice
Environmental justice establishes a standard for providing
minority and low-income communities’ access to
public information on, and an opportunity for public
participation in, matters relating to human health and
the environment. With these goals in mind, the waterfront
park project developed three scales of investigation
to assess community needs and goals and to anticipate
future changes.
First, a survey was distributed to the
entire community. Asking a series of questions about
desired park programming and services, it attempted
to establish a vision of the kind of park that would
satisfy the goals of the community. This process tapped
into the heart of the neighborhood by utilizing its
youth, the future of the community, through an environmental
youth organization to coordinate distribution and collection
of the survey responses.
Second, the project organized a series
of community dinners to discuss its progress at a Hunters
Point restaurant. Over a hundred community members,
including artists from The Point artist studios located
on the shipyard and life-long community members, attended.
These meetings consisted of equal parts presentation
by the project and feedback from the community.
Third, youth from a neighborhood organization
conducted interviews with nineteen community members
to acquire a variety of personal and in-depth visions
of the park’s potential, and an organization of
community elders obtained similarly detailed feedback
from the local watershed council.
While developing a dialogue with the community
was critical, equally critical was facilitating communication
with the agencies and planning organizations involved
in the development decisions. The landscape architect
engaged key stakeholders and organizations, exchanging
information and ideas with the City’s Redevelopment
Agency, the Shipyard Citizen’s Advisory Committee,
the Hunters Point Project Area committee, the Shipyard
Restoration Advisory Board, the shipyard developer and
its architects, the Mayor’s Blue Greenway Task
Force, Candlestick Point State Recreational Area, State
Parks, and the State Parks Foundation. All who participated
supported the development of a park as a key part of
improving conditions in Hunters Point.
Summary
At this early stage of shipyard redevelopment, when
broad development decisions are still being made, it
is critical to familiarize neighborhood residents with
development issues. This project focused on gathering
community input and providing the community with information
that will enable it to more forcefully argue for what
it desires from development. Through pro bono graphic
design services by the landscape architect, the project
findings and studies were compiled in a book designed
to make information, results, and design options accessible
to a range of ethnicities and educational backgrounds.
Highly visual, it presents information in both general
and specific terms. To maximize distribution and accessibility
to a wide audience, the book size was scaled down from
typical book format to fit a printing and mailing budget.
It was sent to agencies, city officials, community members,
and funding sources and has been presented in numerous
public meetings.
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Project
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Landscape
Architect:
Hargreaves Associates
George Hargreaves, Mary Margaret Jones, Marcel Wilson, Amy Seek
Consultant:
Far West Restoration Engineering
Roger Leventhal, PE
Client:
Arc Ecology
California Coastal Conservancy
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Team partner:
Eve Bach, Arc Ecology, Literacy for Environmental
Justice (LEJ), Bayview-Hunters Point Community
Advocates
Project Affiliates:
Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ)
Bayview-Hunters Point Community Advocate
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