What do you think?
Rate this book
Toxic City: Redevelopment and Environmental Justice in San Francisco
Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.
243 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 9, 2024
1 person is currently reading
22 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
October 18, 2024
None of San Francisco’s political scandals, past or present, are as noxious as its history of racial and environmental injustice toward the Bayview Hunters Point community.
Toxic City, a 2024 release by UC Santa Cruz Sociology Professor Lindsey Dillon, documents the city’s decades-long betrayal of the Black residents of Bayview Hunters Point. Dillon argues that the environmental racism they’ve suffered is “part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives.”
Though the radioactive contamination and health crisis the Navy left behind at the Hunters Point Shipyard draws our focus today, the Southeast corner of San Francisco was treated as the city’s wasteland long before the Atomic Age. In the late 19th Century, the cattle industry, meatpacking plants, tanneries, glue factories and iron foundries all made their home in the tidelands of Islais Creek and further north at Hunters Point.
In 1889 the San Francisco Chronicle said the area “is a perpetual recurrence of boggy road, clouds of dust, reeking malarious acres of black mud and stinks that battle comparison or description.” Historical hindsight describes the policies of cities like San Francisco as wastelanding. While the San Francisco rose as the financial capital of the West, the Hunters Point area became its dumping ground, a place where all the dirty work was done.
The Hunters Point Shipyard operated commercially in the early 20th Century until the Navy bought it in 1940. Along with Treasure Island, it was a central base of operations for Navy during WWII. When the war was over, the vast majority of Bayview Hunters Point residents were employed by the Navy and the shipyard businesses that served it. The majority were Black.
But it wasn’t the jobs that kept Black San Franciscans at Bayview Hunters Point. While white veterans received Federal Housing Administration (FHA) home financing after WWII, Black veterans did not. And the racist housing policies of the city gave them just two choices: Bayview Hunters Point or the Fillmore District. While both communities were underserved by city services (garbage collection, DPW street repairs, etc.) the Navy had an even bigger surprise in store for the residents of BVHP.
In 1946, the year after the U.S. ended World War II by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the Navy secretly opened the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) at the Hunters Point Shipyard. They brought in seventy-nine ships that had been used for nuclear weapons testing at the Bikini Islands. All of them were contaminated with radioactivity.
Navy tests included exposing volunteers to radioactive material so they could study its impact on the human body. Many Bayview Hunters Point residents came to suspect that the tests weren’t limited to the laboratory. Shipyard personnel tracked contamination into the community and into their very homes. During the 1960’s and 70’s, while the NRDL continued to poison the soil in and around Hunters Point, more and more Black San Franciscans arrived. ‘Urban renewal’ projects razed their homes in the Fillmore District leaving them with two new hard choices – leave San Francisco all together or move to Bayview Hunters Point.
By the time the Navy pulled out of Hunters Point Shipyard in 1973, 97% of the Bayview Hunters Point residents were Black, and they were in for even more nasty surprises. First, the discovery that companies leasing facilities from the Navy were dumping toxic waste in the Shipyard. Then, in 1989, after the EPA finally came in to examine the contamination left behind by the Navy and its tenants, they designated Hunters Point Shipyard as a Superfund site.
In 1991, the Navy officially gave all five hundred acres of Hunters Point Shipyard back to the City of San Francisco, but that was just on paper. They Navy was (and is) still responsible for the cleanup. They divided it up into eleven distinct parcels, each one to be cleaned up according to EPA standards, which are themselves rather dubious, calling for remediation rather than eradication of the radioactive contaminants.
Lindsey Dillon’s documentation of the thirty-three-year travesty perpetrated on the residents of Bayview Hunters Point during the Navy’s cleanup process is mind-boggling. Lies from Navy contractors. Loose EPA oversight. An out-of-state development corporation building new residents on land still contaminated. City, state and federal agencies treating residents with condescension and disrespect. Political leaders choosing their own self-interests over the community’s needs.
Losing patience with community demands, the Navy even had the gall to shut down the community advisory board (the Restoration Advisory Board or RAB) which is a federal requirement during the transition of U.S. military bases to local communities. They simply did not want to hear from residents, especially about the escalating health crisis in Bayview Hunters Point.
Attributed to high cancer rates and respiratory illness from environmental toxicity, the life expectance of people born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point is fifteen years less than in any other San Francisco district. Though the health problems are well-documented by researchers, San Francisco Department of Health has yet to declare a community health crisis.
Drawing on nine years of work within the community, Lindsey Dillon gives voice to dozens of impassioned community leaders who have spent their lives fighting for environmental justice in Bayview Hunters Point. Her book is dedicated to the memory of one of its strongest leaders, Marie Harrison. She worked tirelessly with an environmental justice group called Greenaction and inspired her daughter, Arieann Harrison, to continue her work.
After her mother’s passing in 2019, Arieann founded the Marie Harrison Community Foundation who continues to fight for the safety of her community. She will tell you that the fight is far from over.
Describing the racial and environmental injustice in Bayview Hunters Point James Baldwin said decades ago, “This is the San Francisco, America pretends does not exist.”
It’s become clear that it’s also become the San Francisco that San Franciscans pretends does not exit.
Anyone who wants to understand the depth and complexity of these issues – the impact of toxic contamination on communities all across America, needs to read Toxic City.
Toxic City, a 2024 release by UC Santa Cruz Sociology Professor Lindsey Dillon, documents the city’s decades-long betrayal of the Black residents of Bayview Hunters Point. Dillon argues that the environmental racism they’ve suffered is “part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives.”
Though the radioactive contamination and health crisis the Navy left behind at the Hunters Point Shipyard draws our focus today, the Southeast corner of San Francisco was treated as the city’s wasteland long before the Atomic Age. In the late 19th Century, the cattle industry, meatpacking plants, tanneries, glue factories and iron foundries all made their home in the tidelands of Islais Creek and further north at Hunters Point.
In 1889 the San Francisco Chronicle said the area “is a perpetual recurrence of boggy road, clouds of dust, reeking malarious acres of black mud and stinks that battle comparison or description.” Historical hindsight describes the policies of cities like San Francisco as wastelanding. While the San Francisco rose as the financial capital of the West, the Hunters Point area became its dumping ground, a place where all the dirty work was done.
The Hunters Point Shipyard operated commercially in the early 20th Century until the Navy bought it in 1940. Along with Treasure Island, it was a central base of operations for Navy during WWII. When the war was over, the vast majority of Bayview Hunters Point residents were employed by the Navy and the shipyard businesses that served it. The majority were Black.
But it wasn’t the jobs that kept Black San Franciscans at Bayview Hunters Point. While white veterans received Federal Housing Administration (FHA) home financing after WWII, Black veterans did not. And the racist housing policies of the city gave them just two choices: Bayview Hunters Point or the Fillmore District. While both communities were underserved by city services (garbage collection, DPW street repairs, etc.) the Navy had an even bigger surprise in store for the residents of BVHP.
In 1946, the year after the U.S. ended World War II by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, the Navy secretly opened the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL) at the Hunters Point Shipyard. They brought in seventy-nine ships that had been used for nuclear weapons testing at the Bikini Islands. All of them were contaminated with radioactivity.
Navy tests included exposing volunteers to radioactive material so they could study its impact on the human body. Many Bayview Hunters Point residents came to suspect that the tests weren’t limited to the laboratory. Shipyard personnel tracked contamination into the community and into their very homes. During the 1960’s and 70’s, while the NRDL continued to poison the soil in and around Hunters Point, more and more Black San Franciscans arrived. ‘Urban renewal’ projects razed their homes in the Fillmore District leaving them with two new hard choices – leave San Francisco all together or move to Bayview Hunters Point.
By the time the Navy pulled out of Hunters Point Shipyard in 1973, 97% of the Bayview Hunters Point residents were Black, and they were in for even more nasty surprises. First, the discovery that companies leasing facilities from the Navy were dumping toxic waste in the Shipyard. Then, in 1989, after the EPA finally came in to examine the contamination left behind by the Navy and its tenants, they designated Hunters Point Shipyard as a Superfund site.
In 1991, the Navy officially gave all five hundred acres of Hunters Point Shipyard back to the City of San Francisco, but that was just on paper. They Navy was (and is) still responsible for the cleanup. They divided it up into eleven distinct parcels, each one to be cleaned up according to EPA standards, which are themselves rather dubious, calling for remediation rather than eradication of the radioactive contaminants.
Lindsey Dillon’s documentation of the thirty-three-year travesty perpetrated on the residents of Bayview Hunters Point during the Navy’s cleanup process is mind-boggling. Lies from Navy contractors. Loose EPA oversight. An out-of-state development corporation building new residents on land still contaminated. City, state and federal agencies treating residents with condescension and disrespect. Political leaders choosing their own self-interests over the community’s needs.
Losing patience with community demands, the Navy even had the gall to shut down the community advisory board (the Restoration Advisory Board or RAB) which is a federal requirement during the transition of U.S. military bases to local communities. They simply did not want to hear from residents, especially about the escalating health crisis in Bayview Hunters Point.
Attributed to high cancer rates and respiratory illness from environmental toxicity, the life expectance of people born and raised in Bayview Hunters Point is fifteen years less than in any other San Francisco district. Though the health problems are well-documented by researchers, San Francisco Department of Health has yet to declare a community health crisis.
Drawing on nine years of work within the community, Lindsey Dillon gives voice to dozens of impassioned community leaders who have spent their lives fighting for environmental justice in Bayview Hunters Point. Her book is dedicated to the memory of one of its strongest leaders, Marie Harrison. She worked tirelessly with an environmental justice group called Greenaction and inspired her daughter, Arieann Harrison, to continue her work.
After her mother’s passing in 2019, Arieann founded the Marie Harrison Community Foundation who continues to fight for the safety of her community. She will tell you that the fight is far from over.
Describing the racial and environmental injustice in Bayview Hunters Point James Baldwin said decades ago, “This is the San Francisco, America pretends does not exist.”
It’s become clear that it’s also become the San Francisco that San Franciscans pretends does not exit.
Anyone who wants to understand the depth and complexity of these issues – the impact of toxic contamination on communities all across America, needs to read Toxic City.
Displaying 1 of 1 review