Stuck

Public housing residents get little help in escaping crime and violence.

By A.C. Thompson

BULLETS FREQUENTLY FLY in the Sunnydale public housing complex, and on Oct. 15 around 7:55 p.m., near the intersection of Santos Street and Sunnydale Avenue, one of them found Dante Rollins, burrowing into his back.

Wounded, Rollins ran toward Raquel McKinney's home on the first block of Santos. For a moment he stood on her cement front stoop. McKinney, a 35-year-old mother of three, doesn't remember Rollins knocking on the door or saying anything or making any sounds. And she doesn't know why he headed to her house. "I didn't know him," McKinney explains.

But she can't forget what happened next. Through her window McKinney watched as Rollins, 19, took a couple of steps and crumpled in her grassy front yard, landing on his right side. He was dead.

On a recent afternoon McKinney, who did not see the shooting, surveyed the crime scene. "See where that garbage can is? That's where the boy lay. I could see him fighting for life," she says, adding that her children saw the young man's final moments.

When police made their way to the killing zone, they pulled off the blood-soaked shirt Rollins was wearing, revealing his exploded torso. They dropped the shirt on a patch of sidewalk nearby, where it left a brownish bloodstain in the shape of a mushroom cloud, and they wrapped McKinney's place in yellow crime scene tape.

Not surprisingly, McKinney and her children – a 15-year-old son and twin 5-year-old daughters – are traumatized. The little girls have been wearing pots and pans on their heads, hoping the makeshift helmets will deflect any bullets coming for them. The kids have taken to entering and leaving surreptitiously through the back door. As for McKinney, she's beset with worries: What if the people who wasted Rollins come after me? What if they think I saw something incriminating? What if they mess with me 'cause they think Rollins was a friend or relation?

Haunted by all the what-ifs, McKinney has been asking her landlord, the San Francisco Housing Authority, for a little help: She'd like to pack up and move into another apartment in another public housing development before something happens to her or her children. But so far, she says, nobody at the Housing Authority has lifted a finger.

• • •

Hers is a common complaint around these parts. And it's just this brand of official inaction that infuses public housing dwellers – all of them poor, most of them black – with the sense that no one really gives a shit whether they live or die.

"The Housing Authority is challenged by a high volume of requests for relocation," says Sharen Hewitt, director of the Community Leadership Academy and Emergency Response Project, an activist group that advocates on behalf of people whose loved ones have been slain. Over the past three years Hewitt and her team have counseled roughly 150 public housing residents seeking to be relocated in the wake of violence.

People of means can – generally speaking – pick up and move when something horrible happens in or around their home. For folks dwelling in public housing it's a different story. For starters, there's the money problem – there ain't a lot of people in the projects sitting on the $2,500 to $5,000 it takes to move into a market-rate apartment in the Bay Area.

And then there's the Housing Authority. People who want to move from one public housing unit to another have to convince the agency to place them on a "priority transfer list"; priority is generally given to those who've witnessed a hardcore felony or had a family member slain, while people a half step removed, like McKinney, are placed further down the list. "It's hard. It's really hard," Hewitt says. "People are fragile. They're emotionally distraught. And they're trying to negotiate a very complicated bureaucracy."

The Housing Authority, to be fair, doesn't exactly have a huge surplus of extra apartments. "If we had the resources to move people immediately, we would, but we just don't have the resources," explains Gregg Fortner, the agency's executive director. "We don't have relocation funds; we don't have units set aside."

Vacancies, when they pop up, are most often in four of the agency's toughest developments: Hunters View, Sunnydale, Potrero Hill, and Alice Griffith. In a bid to improve safety in those developments, Fortner says, his agency is kicking in a million dollars annually for additional police services.

• • •

Chloe Young didn't expect any major hassles when she moved into a little one-bedroom apartment on Missouri Street in the Housing Authority's Potrero Hill development, a collection of aging barracks-type structures overlooking the 280 freeway. "I said to myself, 'I don't bother anyone. Nobody'll bother me. I'll be fine,' " recalls Young, a striking 23-year-old college student who grew up in neighborhoods all over the Bay, including Sunnydale.

But from the start things were anything but smooth. Neighborhood dudes – "from young guys to old dope fiends" – colonized a boiler room next to her ground-floor apartment, breaking the lock on the door so they could hang out and get loaded all night. Young was annoyed by the noise and litter the crew generated, and definitely didn't appreciate the attention the guys directed her way – and she let them know it. The guys, Young says, thought she "was stuck up."

"If my daughter had gone out there and drank with them and hung out with them, it probably would've been OK," says Young's mother, Kimball Delcombre.

At one point Young called the cops when she caught a man leering through her bedroom window, Peeping Tom style, in the middle of the night. Later Young caught a woman, probably a crack addict, prowling around in her apartment after coming through the bedroom window. The woman took off when Young started yelling.

By February 2005, Young says, she'd requested a transfer from the Housing Authority, noting that she'd had to call the police on repeated occasions. "I called everybody [at Housing]," she says. "It got to the point where I called so much that once I said my address, they knew what the problem was."

It seems she was low on the transfer list, however, because she was still living in Potrero Hill on the night of Sept. 29. After visiting a friend, Young returned to her apartment at about 2:15 a.m. to learn that somebody had burglarized the place, shattering a window to get in and leaving the door open when they took off. Her CDs were gone, but otherwise nothing of note was missing. "I grabbed a knife and called the police," she says.

Young called at 2:20, she says. And again at 2:30. And again at 2:50. "The third time I called, the dispatcher told me somebody was being held somewhere in the city at gunpoint and my situation wasn't an emergency. I said, 'You mean to tell me every officer with the SFPD is at that crime scene?' "

(At the police department, spokesperson Sgt. Neville Gittens says, "Thirty minutes on a cold burglary is not that unusual. I don't think 30 minutes is a long period.")

Eventually Young got tired of waiting for the cops to show. She grabbed two outfits and headed for her dad's house in Hayward.

When she returned the next day, her stereo, TV, and living room set were gone. "They took my towel racks off the wall. My food was gone. My seasonings were gone. My toothpaste was gone. Who steals your toothpaste?" After another call, the police came out, though Young claims they didn't bother to take any fingerprints or do any substantive investigation; she also asked the Housing Authority's maintenance crew to board up all of her windows so no one would grab the remainder of her possessions.

The crew came out and bolted plywood over the broken window, but within a day, somebody had smashed another window and taken her clothes, mattress, kitchen table and chairs, and washer and dryer. The apartment was completely emptied. In the span of two days, she'd gone from poor to utterly destitute.

Now Young is paying rent on a gutted, empty apartment, a place she's scared to inhabit, and she plans to pay rent again next month while she waits for her transfer to go through. "I just want something done," she says.

• • •

Young may be in for quite a wait. Back in her Sunnydale apartment, where the smoke detector hangs, broken, from a cord in the ceiling, Raquel McKinney is thinking about an earlier murder she lived through: that of her husband, Charles Hines, who was killed in 2001, just down the street from her apartment.

McKinney first asked to be relocated when he was killed. Obviously, she's still waiting.

"When you get slammed like that, you feel like it ain't nothing you can do," she says. "I've seen too much. My kids have seen too much."

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