Gentrification Amid Contamination: The Redevelopment of Treasure Island AUTHOR: Ariel Gans
ABSTRACT: Treasure Island’s environmental conditions, paired with its complex geography, position it at the junction of military brownfield site redevelopment, urban gentrification, and displacement. Using Treasure Island as a case study, this project engages the stakeholders of the Treasure Island Redevelopment Project to uncover how redevelopment decisions are made, who is included and excluded, and why, and to shed light on larger processes of military base redevelopment and displacement in high value land areas. The following analysis finds that the different ideas of what “successful” redevelopment looks like lead to conflict and exacerbation of social issues, environmental issues, and displacement.
INTRODUCTION Across the Bay Area, brownfield sites are contributing to and are symptomatic of community decline—particularly in issues of disease, crime, education, and unemployment (Bonorris xiv-xv). On top of this, these spaces are often heavily polluted and located in economically poor communities of color, making their remediation and reuse inordinately complicated (“Overview”). Treasure Island, a 393-acre, man-made, former naval base in the San Francisco Bay is a modern-day example of this. The island is severely contaminated from over 50 years of use by the U.S. Navy, is rapidly shrinking due to sea-level rise and subsidence, and has held low-income subsidized housing since 1997—when the Navy leased it to the City of San Francisco. In 2017, the City of San Francisco signed a contract to construct up to 8,000 upscale housing units on the island starting in 2018, which will displace the majority of its 1,800 residents to move-in another 20,000 to 25,000 (qtd. in Brinklow). Its residents, as of 2012, comprised the third most diverse neighborhood in the U.S.: seventy percent were minorities, and the majority were low-income (Kolko). This paints a picture in which low-income people of color are living in subsidized housing in close proximity to toxic waste on an island that was declared safe by the City of San Francisco. It is known from extensive research, however, that racial and ethnic minority groups and low-income communities have significantly poorer health outcomes than other communities in America due to systematically higher rates of exposure to environmental hazards and social stressors such as poverty, poor housing quality, and social inequality—all of which are present on Treasure Island (Morello-Frosch et al. 879). The cumulative effects of these conditions
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must be properly addressed by legislators and decision-makers through policies that carefully consider individual susceptibility and social vulnerability. Thus, using Treasure Island as a case study, in the following paper I will evaluate what the history of decommissioning and redevelopment on Treasure Island can tell us about stakeholder processes and associated outcomes in developing former military bases in urban areas. METHODS I collected my data primarily online from peer-reviewed online research databases, reputable news sites, and national organization and corporation webpages—all of which were either primary or secondary sources. I also conducted an interview with Sheridan Noelani Enomoto, a Community Organizer and Policy Advocate with the grassroots organization, Greenaction, who I found and selected using a mini snowball sampling method from interviews I conducted for my previous iteration of this project on Berkeley zoning laws. Noelani Enomoto supplied valuable primary data and provided an additional perspective for me to interpret my results. I also attended the April Treasure Island Development Authority (TIDA) Board of Directors meeting at Treasure Island and independently photographed the Treasure Island community. These pictures are primary sources and are listed in Appendix B. RESULTS When the Navy left Treasure Island and leased it to the City of San Francisco in 1997, it left behind the former houses of naval families, which the city reopened as low-income subsidized housing despite health concerns and lingering toxicity (Environmental Protection Agency 22). Noelani Enomoto, who works closely with the community leaders and residents of Treasure Island as part
