An Affordable city at the former Hunters Point Shipyard.

By Jim Reid

A vibrant community of 30,000 residents San Francisco Residents who live and work at the former shipyard. This small community could include a homeless rehabilitation center, A Worlds Fair site, clean industry and jobs, an artist's community with an arts and entertainment center with extraordinary public transit and a floating red light district for a little spice.

The land at Hunters Point shipyard belongs to the people of America. This precious piece of land will soon belong to the people of San Francisco and it should not become private property. It should be used for many creative purposes that serve all of us. Turning the land at Hunters Point into a market rate housing development would be a disgrace.

At a Redevelopment meeting at the Bay View Opera House in February, I learned more about the large artist community at Hunters Point. I heard many artists speak of their concerns about being displaced by future development of the shipyard. I have seen many creative people forced to move out of the City because their creativity does not generate enough money for them to afford to live here. I am a building contractor and I cannot afford to own the housing I build. This must change for all of us.

The land at the shipyard should become a land trust where we could build housing that is permanently affordable to the seventy percent of us who cannot afford market rate or affordable housing. When I am mayor, I will make this so. I will work to increase the artist community from 300 to 1,000 diverse artists, making it the largest in the nation. I will work with artists, musicians, architects, planners, and builders to plan and design a thriving self-supporting community where a diverse group of creative people can live and work without worrying about being displaced by better paid, yet less creative people. As Mayor, I will put a $200 million dollar housing construction revenue bond on the ballot that would fund the construction of only affordable and ultra-affordable housing with $20 million earmarked for build ultra affordable housing for artists at Hunters Point.

My personal vision of this community would look somewhat like the French Quarter of New Orleans that would have 20 city blocks of housing above street level commercial space. The mixed use development could be built four stories high, with galleries, performing spaces, theatres, bars, etc., that would serve to generate income for artists, musicians, poets, writers, comedians, sculptors, etc. This Artists Quarter would be a treasure to the City drawing City residents and tourists and their money.

There are plenty of artists, architects, designers, and builders more creative than I, who could flesh out the details and make this vision an achievable reality. Somewhere in the Bay Area there must be a financing genius who if helped to think out of the box could put the money together to make this financially achievable.

The Artists' Quarter would be a vibrant piece of a Worlds Fair development for the shipyard. A permanent red light district based on cruise ships could be housed easily at the shipyard and could be in a gated area that is restricted to adults. (see sex workers)

I would also see high-rise housing that would allow many people in the neighboring community and working class people throughout the city to afford to own truly affordable housing on shipyard land. We need to preserve economic and creative diversity in our city without creating ghettos.

The two largest costs of housing are land and labor. Material costs are the least of these three. We could provide the people who design and build this development with housing in exchange for their services. Imagine giving a dozen young architects a housing unit in the Quarter for four years of their time working on the project. Imagine paying carpenters, plumbers, electricians and other trades persons with housing rather than cash to four years of their personal work building the Quarter. Imagine permanently housing former homeless people for their four years of work on the project. Imagine artists, writers, musicians, etc owning housing units in the Quarter and paying their mortgages with the city by selling their work to City residents and tourists.

Imagine 200 former homeless people who are clean and sober who secure and maintain the Quarter in exchange for simple decent housing near the Quarter. Many homeless people who graduate from drug and alcohol treatment programs could be trained to do framing, sheetrock, plumbing, electrical, painting, masonry work, etc. and be given lifetime housing for their years of work building the Quarter. Old building contractors like myself and my concrete contractor friend David could be given permanent housing for our skills managing the development under our state contractors licenses.

My objective is to be elected mayor and guide this vision to a reality that will benefit all. I ride MUNI buses and trains four days a week, shaking hands with a thousand people a day. This action may get me elected mayor, and then the people of San Francisco shall own the shipyard in perpetuity.

I believe that we can develop this vision for a permanent artist community that will become a model for other cities to build on former military land.

"We are living in the 21st Century and we need to imagine and build diverse and vibrant communities that are based on common good, not profit and greed as we had in the last century."