San Francisco Bay Guardian News

Kathy Profit spent 25 years here in the Hunters View housing project, dwelling in a small, chewed-up row house slathered with a thick layer of baby-blue paint, the ground-floor windows defended by rusty burglar bars, the front yard a small rectangle of dirt.Profit's lengthy tenancy at 138 Westpoint came to an end Aug. 18, when she was evicted by the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), bringing to a close months of legal fisticuffs. The way Profit tells it, standing in the doorway of the empty house she used to live in, there's no reason for the housing authority to be booting her."I'm disturbed. I'm frustrated. I don't like it all," she says.Her troubles date back to Nov. 7, 2004. On that date her 25-year-old son, Terrell Joseph, got popped by the San Francisco Police Department for allegedly possessing a bag of weed, a bag of meth, and a cocked, loaded, semiautomatic handgun. He was standing outside, a few doors down from his mom's place.According to the housing authority, when Joseph got busted, he told the arresting officers he lived with Profit at 138 Westpoint, though he's not on the lease. And thus the agency, which has a zero-tolerance policy toward crime and drug activity in public housing, began legal maneuvering aimed at ousting Profit from her home.When the housing authority served her with a three-day eviction notice, in early February, it cited the incident, saying she'd violated the terms of her lease, which bars "all Household Members, guests, or other persons under the Tenant's control," from engaging in "any activity that threatens the health, safety," or peace of mind of other tenants.But both Profit and Joseph claim he wasn't crashing with Mom when he was arrested. "He's a grown man. He's 25. He wasn't living here," Profit insists."I ain't lived here since I was 18 or 19," says Joseph, who's tangled with the law numerous times, adding, "I feel terrible. I kinda feel like it's my fault" that Profit is getting booted.Mike Roetzer, the housing authority's public information officer, couldn't give us any information about Profit's situation, saying that doing so would infringe on her privacy.

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In recent weeks lots of people have been evicted from Hunters View — locals describe Wednesday as "eviction day," when housing authority employees go from home to home collecting the possessions left behind by ex-residents and fasten plywood over the windows of darkened units. At this point the place looks like a half-abandoned, WWII-era military base. Standing on Profit's stoop about a week after her eviction, we watched a group of Samoan grade-schoolers on scooters and skateboards play with a hunk of plywood ripped from the front of two boarded-over, windowless row houses. Someone had torn the screen door off Profit's former abode, leaving shards of the wooden door frame scattered about. Nearby, a rectangular street lamp on a tall pole glowed amber for no apparent reason — it was one in the afternoon.By the housing authority's own analysis, Hunters View, a collection of 267 ultra-utilitarian dwellings thrown up in 1956, is a disaster. The agency's documents refer to the territory as a "blight in the community," and say the row houses suffer from "cracked and clogged sewer lines, which frequently results in raw sewage collecting on-site, oozing in public areas and play yards, and backing up into units"; decaying foundations and plumbing; and an "obsolete electrical system [that] is a potential fire hazard, fails to meet current code and is completely insufficient for current households' electrical needs."Now, after years of entropy, change is afoot in the ’hood. Big-time change. On Aug. 11 housing authority officials voted to start negotiating with developers, who'll raze and rebuild the entire 22-acre hillside tract.Some folks are enthusiastic about the plans. "I was in on the meeting with the developers. I heard their presentation, and I liked what they said," Dorothy Smith said at a recent meeting of the Housing Authority Commission, a seven-member body that advises the agency.Others are skittish, unnerved by what they perceive as a wave of evictions. Those who remain wonder where they'll find cheap housing during the years that Hunters View is being reshaped and worry that, for one reason or another, they won't be allowed to move back into the development when the shiny new homes are unveiled. "We do need our places to be rebuilt," said Monica Autry, president of the Hunters View Tenants' Association. "But I do have lots of worries, and my tenants have lots of worries. I'm concerned about the recent evictions."There is one particularly controversial element to the plan, and that's the housing authority's intention to blend market-rate housing into the new development, which is slated to be twice as large, boasting 500 to 600 units. Obviously, at this moment in history, with real estate looking like the dot-com stock of the ’00s, and the median home price currently nestled at the $800,000 mark, the city doesn't really have a shortage of insanely overpriced market-rate property. What it does have, according to city planning documents, is a need for more than 12,000 new, affordable units.There's another interesting aspect to the scheme: Two of the triad of firms poised to rebuild Hunters View are for-profit corporations, Devine and Gong, Inc. and the John Stewart Company. The single document on the deal released by the housing authority to the Bay Guardian does not reveal how much money the companies are likely to pocket.

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The day-to-day affairs of Joseph and the housing authority have been uncomfortably intertwined for many years now. See, Joseph, in a way, is partially responsible for a major financial crisis at the agency, and the housing authority, in the eyes of the courts, is partially responsible for the death of his daughter.

On a December night in 1997, a fire erupted at 132 Westpoint — three doors down from Profit — eviscerating the unit and leaving six people dead, one of whom was Joseph's three-year-old daughter, Markeisha. Joseph, recalls Profit, "tried to run in the house while it was engulfed in flames, trying to get his daughter out of there."The housing authority blamed the blaze on an errant cigarette or match, but after being sued by Joseph and several other people who lost family members to the flames, agency officials, in court documents, acknowledged a host of blunders: The home's furnace "was in need of repair"; the unit was missing a smoke detector, though tenants had repeatedly asked the agency to replace it; the electrical system was troubled. A housing authority employee complained orally and in writing about SFHA inspection and maintenance problems at the unit, "but her complaints fell on 'deaf ears.'”

In 2001 a jury ruled against the housing authority, finding the agency 80 percent at fault for the blaze and liable for a $12 million judgment, a judgment that's since been upheld numerous times on appeal. So far, though, the housing authority has refused to pay, saying it doesn't have the money and might even try to file for bankruptcy protection if forced to cough up the cash.Until relatively recently, 132 Westpoint remained charred and unoccupied, a silent reminder of the tragedy and, for some, a symbol of the neighborhood's neglect.Today, Profit thinks the housing authority's beef with her has something to do with her son's ongoing legal dispute. "I think they was biased towards me ’cause of the lawsuit," she says. "I think housing authority has been biased towards me, and I'll say that till the day I die."Profit, who isn't a party to the lawsuit, doesn't understand why the agency wouldn't enter into a legally binding agreement with her, a pact allowing her to stay in her unit as long as she barred her son from ever setting foot in it. Such are the choices people are forced to make around these parts.

E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson@hushmail.com.

Home sweet none In the housing projects, a woman faces eviction for her son's crimes By A.C. Thompson The intersection of Westpoint and Middlepoint Roads is both one of the most depressing places in San Francisco (the countless murders, the frequent exchanges of gunfire, the myriad decrepit, boarded-up public housing units), and one of the most beautiful (the numerous leafy trees lining the streets, the absolutely stunning view of the bay's dark waters). Kathy Profit spent 25 years here in the Hunters View housing project, dwelling in a small, chewed-up row house slathered with a thick layer of baby-blue paint, the ground-floor windows defended by rusty burglar bars, the front yard a small rectangle of dirt.Profit's lengthy tenancy at 138 Westpoint came to an end Aug. 18, when she was evicted by the San Francisco Housing Authority (SFHA), bringing to a close months of legal fisticuffs. The way Profit tells it, standing in the doorway of the empty house she used to live in, there's no reason for the housing authority to be booting her."I'm disturbed. I'm frustrated. I don't like it all," she says.Her troubles date back to Nov. 7, 2004. On that date her 25-year-old son, Terrell Joseph, got popped by the San Francisco Police Department for allegedly possessing a bag of weed, a bag of meth, and a cocked, loaded, semiautomatic handgun. He was standing outside, a few doors down from his mom's place.According to the housing authority, when Joseph got busted, he told the arresting officers he lived with Profit at 138 Westpoint, though he's not on the lease. And thus the agency, which has a zero-tolerance policy toward crime and drug activity in public housing, began legal maneuvering aimed at ousting Profit from her home.When the housing authority served her with a three-day eviction notice, in early February, it cited the incident, saying she'd violated the terms of her lease, which bars "all Household Members, guests, or other persons under the Tenant's control," from engaging in "any activity that threatens the health, safety," or peace of mind of other tenants.But both Profit and Joseph claim he wasn't crashing with Mom when he was arrested. "He's a grown man. He's 25. He wasn't living here," Profit insists."I ain't lived here since I was 18 or 19," says Joseph, who's tangled with the law numerous times, adding, "I feel terrible. I kinda feel like it's my fault" that Profit is getting booted.Mike Roetzer, the housing authority's public information officer, couldn't give us any information about Profit's situation, saying that doing so would infringe on her privacy. *** In recent weeks lots of people have been evicted from Hunters View — locals describe Wednesday as "eviction day," when housing authority employees go from home to home collecting the possessions left behind by ex-residents and fasten plywood over the windows of darkened units. At this point the place looks like a half-abandoned, WWII-era military base. Standing on Profit's stoop about a week after her eviction, we watched a group of Samoan grade-schoolers on scooters and skateboards play with a hunk of plywood ripped from the front of two boarded-over, windowless row houses. Someone had torn the screen door off Profit's former abode, leaving shards of the wooden door frame scattered about. Nearby, a rectangular street lamp on a tall pole glowed amber for no apparent reason — it was one in the afternoon.By the housing authority's own analysis, Hunters View, a collection of 267 ultra-utilitarian dwellings thrown up in 1956, is a disaster. The agency's documents refer to the territory as a "blight in the community," and say the row houses suffer from "cracked and clogged sewer lines, which frequently results in raw sewage collecting on-site, oozing in public areas and play yards, and backing up into units"; decaying foundations and plumbing; and an "obsolete electrical system [that] is a potential fire hazard, fails to meet current code and is completely insufficient for current households' electrical needs."Now, after years of entropy, change is afoot in the ’hood. Big-time change. On Aug. 11 housing authority officials voted to start negotiating with developers, who'll raze and rebuild the entire 22-acre hillside tract.Some folks are enthusiastic about the plans. "I was in on the meeting with the developers. I heard their presentation, and I liked what they said," Dorothy Smith said at a recent meeting of the Housing Authority Commission, a seven-member body that advises the agency.Others are skittish, unnerved by what they perceive as a wave of evictions. Those who remain wonder where they'll find cheap housing during the years that Hunters View is being reshaped and worry that, for one reason or another, they won't be allowed to move back into the development when the shiny new homes are unveiled. "We do need our places to be rebuilt," said Monica Autry, president of the Hunters View Tenants' Association. "But I do have lots of worries, and my tenants have lots of worries. I'm concerned about the recent evictions."There is one particularly controversial element to the plan, and that's the housing authority's intention to blend market-rate housing into the new development, which is slated to be twice as large, boasting 500 to 600 units. Obviously, at this moment in history, with real estate looking like the dot-com stock of the ’00s, and the median home price currently nestled at the $800,000 mark, the city doesn't really have a shortage of insanely overpriced market-rate property. What it does have, according to city planning documents, is a need for more than 12,000 new, affordable units.There's another interesting aspect to the scheme: Two of the triad of firms poised to rebuild Hunters View are for-profit corporations, Devine and Gong, Inc. and the John Stewart Company. The single document on the deal released by the housing authority to the Bay Guardian does not reveal how much money the companies are likely to pocket. *** The day-to-day affairs of Joseph and the housing authority have been uncomfortably intertwined for many years now. See, Joseph, in a way, is partially responsible for a major financial crisis at the agency, and the housing authority, in the eyes of the courts, is partially responsible for the death of his daughter. On a December night in 1997, a fire erupted at 132 Westpoint — three doors down from Profit — eviscerating the unit and leaving six people dead, one of whom was Joseph's three-year-old daughter, Markeisha. Joseph, recalls Profit, "tried to run in the house while it was engulfed in flames, trying to get his daughter out of there."The housing authority blamed the blaze on an errant cigarette or match, but after being sued by Joseph and several other people who lost family members to the flames, agency officials, in court documents, acknowledged a host of blunders: The home's furnace "was in need of repair"; the unit was missing a smoke detector, though tenants had repeatedly asked the agency to replace it; the electrical system was troubled. A housing authority employee complained orally and in writing about SFHA inspection and maintenance problems at the unit, "but her complaints fell on 'deaf ears.'” In 2001 a jury ruled against the housing authority, finding the agency 80 percent at fault for the blaze and liable for a $12 million judgment, a judgment that's since been upheld numerous times on appeal. So far, though, the housing authority has refused to pay, saying it doesn't have the money and might even try to file for bankruptcy protection if forced to cough up the cash.Until relatively recently, 132 Westpoint remained charred and unoccupied, a silent reminder of the tragedy and, for some, a symbol of the neighborhood's neglect.Today, Profit thinks the housing authority's beef with her has something to do with her son's ongoing legal dispute. "I think they was biased towards me ’cause of the lawsuit," she says. "I think housing authority has been biased towards me, and I'll say that till the day I die."Profit, who isn't a party to the lawsuit, doesn't understand why the agency wouldn't enter into a legally binding agreement with her, a pact allowing her to stay in her unit as long as she barred her son from ever setting foot in it. Such are the choices people are forced to make around these parts. E-mail A.C. Thompson at acthompson@hushmail.com.