Eve Milton and Paulette Spencer
"You can't be a working-class person and afford a house on Potrero Hill."

By Matthew Hirsch

THERE IS NO mistaking poverty in Potrero Hill. From the north, the Hill displays its vaunted real estate: single-family homes selling for $550,000 on average, with prices steadily increasing. The south side offers a starkly different view: World War II-era public housing projects that resemble military barracks adorned in alternating peach, yellow, and green pastels.

For Eve Milton, an elderly artist-writer supporting herself on Social Security and 40 years of rent control, eviction would mean moving into public housing if she wants to remain in Potrero Hill. For Paulette Spencer, who already lives in the projects, changing homes would mean leaving the Hill altogether.

Milton moved into her home in 1964 (when the property was valued at $15,000), and with other first-generation Potrero Hill activists, such as Enola Maxwell, she helped lead the early neighborhood campaigns, including the struggle to open the Potrero Hill Health Center.

Spencer came to the community several years after the health center opened in 1976 – funded by then-president Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Almost every year since, the clinic has faced deep budget cuts or closure, and every time it happens, Spencer enlists with Milton and the health center's advisory board to defend it from extinction. She serves partly because doctors at the clinic saved her life twice. She also thinks the center enriches an otherwise poor community.

Even by San Francisco standards, the most slender plot of land on the Hill goes for a small fortune, a safe investment when you consider what a hillside townhouse there would fetch in the unaffordable housing market. Atop the Hill, both Milton's home and the health center sit on valuable land, and the expansive projects on the southeast slope represent a veritable gold mine for future development, if they are ever converted.

That dynamic underscores why low-income Potrero Hill tenants and the health center can never fully escape the threat of being tossed out. "You can't be a working-class person and afford a house on Potrero Hill," Milton told me. And as city and state officials begin slashing funds for basic services like housing and health care, places like the Potrero Hill Health Center could be the first to go.

The center's fate was more secure until earlier this year, when it had to void private contracts with hundreds of employees from nearby businesses, many of them well-off local residents. Dr. Michael Drennan, the center's director, told me that with fewer and fewer resources, the clinic had to be more selective with its patient population. It chose to forgo revenues from the private contracts and to serve the uninsured instead.

Changes in the local economy have been good for some in Potrero Hill, Drennan recalled, but they haven't always reached the people in public housing. And the past few years haven't done away with the asthma, diabetes, and sexually transmitted diseases that continue to plague residents in the projects. "The need out there [for subsidized health care] hasn't gotten any less, and there is still a huge amount of people who don't have any other options," he said.

Early each year, community leaders, including Drennan, Milton, and Spencer, come together to plan the annual Potrero Hill Jobs and Health Fair for low-income tenants. Mention to any of them the overstated viewpoint that crime is the worst problem in the projects, and a common response is that you're more likely to find illness than violence where people are unemployed.

The fair started out in the health center's parking lot, a space not large enough to hold more than 10 cars. In time it moved across the street to Starr King Elementary School, until once more the venue couldn't hold the crowd that showed up. The Jobs and Health Fair, now held at the Potrero Hill Recreation Center, has recently become one of the largest events on the Hill.

Spencer told me nobody keeps track of how many people find employment at the fair, but to her, that fact seems almost beside the point. More important, she said, the fair brings her community together. It's a showcase of what Potrero Hill has to offer, even to those on the financial down-and-out.

"Enola Maxwell used to tell us, 'Don't tell anyone you're poor. Just tell them you don't have a lot right now,' " Spencer told me last month in the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House, another space for low-income and public housing tenants on the Hill.

With what Spencer and Milton have today, neither can afford a new home in Potrero Hill, but to them this point seems hardly relevant. Rather, it's about preserving space in Potrero Hill for the poor, nearby places they can still visit and places they can continue to call their own.

E-mail Matthew Hirsch