Back in April, Gloria Berry was alarmed by the city’s response to the public health crisis set off by the coronavirus in her neighborhood. So the Bayview resident did what she knew how to do well: Get busy.
Berry, a member of the influential SF Democratic County Central Committee, banded together with her peers, including Michelle Pierce of Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates and Gwendolyn Westbrook of Mother Brown’s Dining Room, to help the people of southeast San Francisco.
“Health care services that were run by the city got removed and some of the nonprofits that were contracted to provide those services had their funding threatened,” Pierce recounts. “We had no food banks out here for about six weeks, and then when they brought the food bank out here they contracted with a nonprofit that was not based in Bayview.”
The advocates, along with Maria Ahern of Beds 4 Bayview, started meeting daily to discuss strategies for aiding the unsheltered and needy. They began planning to deliver meals to those in quarantine, establish a tent encampment in Bay View Park so that unsheltered people could maintain social distance, and organize testing events in various parts of District 10.
An open letter to Mayor London Breed and district supervisor Shamann Walton in the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, cosigned by Berry, demanded that Mother Brown’s receive more support from the city, given that other homeless service providers had closed their doors. According to Westbrook, her team went from feeding 500 people to 1,400 people per day in a single week in March.
“We still feed everybody just like Mother Brown asked us to,” Westbrook says. “Nobody is supposed to go hungry in this community.”
Four months on, Berry reports that the situation has improved: There’s been more effective city outreach to Bayview-Hunters Point residents, and as a result more testing. In addition, many of the neighborhood’s homeless have been situated in trailers at Pier 94. Though pleased that the activism has been fruitful, Berry and company maintain that City Hall didn’t respond soon enough.
That’s a familiar sentiment for a corner of the city that historically has seen neglect, in substantial part by design. Two freeways, U.S. 101 and Interstate 280, cut off Bayview-Hunters Point from the rest of the city, and it’s also not well connected to other neighborhoods by reliable public transit. This isolation makes it difficult for residents without cars to get tested for COVID-19 in other areas, among other challenges.
Robin Abad Ocubillo, senior planner for the SF Planning Department and a former Bayview resident, says it’s not surprising that Bayview-Hunters Point has been hit harder by COVID than other areas. “That is part of a legacy of social, economic, and environmental injustice that the Bayview community as a demographic have endured for many decades,” he adds. For some self-quarantined Bayview residents, particularly those on public assistance, it became difficult to get around and stock up on food.
The work of Mother Brown’s, also known as the United Council of Human Services, has garnered attention across the city, and San Francisco software engineer Evan Owski even created a GoFundMe page that raised $15,000 in donations in less than two months. (The campaign is still going and has now brought the community kitchen almost $17,000.) In addition to the individual donations, Mother Brown’s received a grant from the city’s Department of Public Health to feed unhoused people in Bayview-Hunters Point.
Looking back on her 18 years of working at Mother Brown’s, Westbrook points out that this latest show of support is unprecedented. “With this COVID-19, we’ve gotten more attention and more funding than we have since I’ve been there,” she says.
That didn’t mean things had calmed down at Mother Brown’s. Westbrook was multitasking while speaking to The Frisc, bagging meals to deliver to folks living in tents and fielding queries from her staff. She grew up in the Haight-Ashbury and was inspired to become a community advocate by her mother, who worked at the long-shuttered Polytechnic High School by Kezar Stadium, and by her grandmother.
“[My grandmother] always told us to stand up for what was right, no matter what,” Westbrook says. “She was one of the first ones who had us out there hollering ‘I’m Black and I’m proud.’” When Barbara “Mother” Brown asked Westbrook to take over at the community kitchen in 2002, she jumped at the opportunity. To this day, she calls running Mother Brown’s the best job she’s ever had.
‘[My grandmother] always told us to stand up for what was right, no matter what. She was one of the first ones who had us out there hollering “I’m Black and I’m proud.”’
Now that resources had been deployed to continue feeding people, the problem of sheltering the unhoused remained. How could people self-quarantine and follow social distancing guidelines without a place to stay?
To that end, Westbrook, Berry, and Pierce put in a socially distant tent encampment at Bay View Park. This wasn’t sanctioned by City Hall, yet the advocates say the move was effective in getting the city to recognize the needs of the community’s homeless. “[The city department] Rec & Park had a fit because homeless people were sleeping out in the park with tents,” Westbrook says.
After park officials ordered for the second time in one month that the tents be removed, Westbrook recalls that she received a call from SF Human Services Agency executive director Trent Rhorer offering the trailers at Pier 94. Breed granted official permission, and in late May Westbrook and her staff started getting people from the park to the RVs. (Rhorer’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
As of August 1, there were 127 people in the trailers; nearly half of them attended the first meeting of a drug treatment class Mother Brown’s is offering, according to Westbrook. “The clients down there love it. They’re off the street, they want to get off the drugs, and they want to do what’s right for themselves,” she says.
Up to the test
Another point of contention for the group was the lack of sufficient testing and community outreach in Bayview-Hunters Point. “It took too long, in my opinion, to get testing out here,” Berry says. “It wasn’t feasible to have the Bayview people go down to the Embarcadero to try to get the testing down there.”
Like Westbrook, Berry has a personal story that drives her advocacy. The Fillmore native and Navy veteran began attending City Hall hearings to speak out about the polluted Hunters Point Naval Shipyard more than 10 years ago. In 2012 she became homeless, and it wasn’t until 2015 that she was able to get another apartment, this time in the Bayview.
Along with addressing the military’s toxic legacy, Berry knew she wanted to work on the disparities between Bayview-Hunters Point and other SF neighborhoods. But it wasn’t until she attended a Board of Supervisors meeting with the city district attorney and the police department in the aftermath of the fatal police shootings of Mario Woods and Jessica Williams that she decided to run for office. In an election this March, she became the District 17 Assembly delegate for the DCCC, which is the governing body for the local Democratic Party. Since then she has been appointed head of the DCCC’s Black Lives Matter committee.
On testing, the activists found allies too: The environmental nonprofit Greenaction made an Earth Day appeal to Mayor Breed and the Board of Supervisors. Berry says access to testing has grown, but adds that her team had to take the lead on arranging testing with UCSF, an effort the city joined later.
Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates executive director Michelle Pierce had been thinking about how to expand access to testing, and tapped an existing relationship with Dr. Kim Rhoads from the UCSF Office of Community Engagement. Rhoads was happy to help, and incorporated data from the Mission’s testing campaign (in which UCSF was also a partner) to determine how best to stage a similar campaign in southeast SF. She organized planning meetings, and along with Pierce’s fellow activists and the SFDPH, set up three two-day testing events — including one specifically for unhoused folks supported by Mother Brown’s. Nearly 250 homeless people from the community came out to get tested on June 6 and 7, according to Westbrook.
For effective outreach and testing, Pierce says that institutions have to follow the community’s lead. As a counterexample, she mentioned a SFDPH initiative that entailed a Public Health worker driving through the Bayview and handing informational pamphlets out a car window.
“That doesn’t work for us,” Pierce explains. “If you’re scared of the neighborhood and scared of the neighbors, you’re never going to reach our community.” The SFDPH did not respond to a request for comment.
“Gwendolyn Westbrook is still serving 1,500, 2,000 meals a day,” she says. “So that’s 2,000 contacts, 2,000 opportunities to educate on COVID per day. And that’s the kind of thing that’s most effective.”
Reconnective tissue
They’ve made remarkable strides in feeding and sheltering many of the neighborhood’s homeless, increasing access to testing, and addressing some of the city’s outreach issues, but Bayview-Hunters Point’s people aren’t done yet.
As testing, outreach, and support for homeless services have improved, some Bayview activists want greater attention on the neighborhood’s lackluster transportation. Under particular scrutiny is the T-Third light rail, an expensive and time-consuming project that many see as slower and less useful than the 15-Third bus that preceded it.
“The transportation’s bad here,” says Berry, who believes that the 15-Third was superior to its successor. “A lot of people are kind of stuck in this neighborhood and don’t have a lot of access to resources.” Ocubillo confirmed that there’s “a lot of transit justice-oriented critique of the T-Third line,” and that the city began to supplement it with bus service last weekend.
Other issues that Berry and Westbrook list as community priorities are the construction of low-income housing and the creation of more neighborhood youth programs.
Their only option, Westbrook says, is to keep working: “This is our community, and I’ve always said if we don’t help each other, who is going to help us? Nobody.”
Max Harrison-Caldwell covers skateboarding and local news in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter: @low___impact