So the thing you’ve probably figured out about me by now, is when you put a new thing in front of me, I will learn everything I can about it. Especially if it’s a little dusty, a little chipped, a thing with history.
Last night I went to Visitacion Valley to return a book at their branch of the San Francisco Public Library. It’s a thing I do: whenever I borrow a book, I return it to its home library, in hopes of seeing all the different library branches, eventually.
I had never been to Viz Valley before, so after I returned the book and looked around the library, I walked around for a bit.
Turns out, I’m not the only one who was completely ignorant about the neighborhood until last night. As I was walking around, saying hello to the local dogs out for their evening stroll, I thought:
“this feels like the last working class immigrant neighborhood in San Francisco. Is it possible there’s still a place in this town where working class people can afford to live?!”
So I looked up the properties available for sale. One of them is a Geneva Terrace Eichler townhome described in that SF Chronicle article above as an example of Viz Valley architectural heritage. With 4 bedrooms across nearly 1,800 sq ft, but listed for under a million, it is an incredible deal in a city where it now seems impossible to buy a 2-bedroom house for under $2 million (and if you know anything about Bay Area real estate, you know what a premium anything with the name “Eichler” attached to it commands!)
But Geneva Terraces were part of a larger housing project, one that included two 20-story highrises called Geneva Towers. But they were demolished in 1998, just over 30 years after their construction.
When the Geneva Towers were built, federal government subsidized and encouraged middle class housing projects nationwide. Just a year after they fell, Pres. Clinton signed the Faircloth Amendment, which capped the nation’s public housing at 1999 levels (thanks, Bill, even by today’s standards, you were a pretend Democrat at best!)
So when I saw the date Geneva Towers fell, I tried to figure out how many housing units disappeared with their implosion. But I quickly ran into inconsistencies: one article claims that there were two buildings, each with “573 two-and three-bedroom apartments,” another seems to say that were 576 units total, a third says 585.
and what replaced them? On the footprint of the Geneva Towers themselves stand the Heritage Homes, a low-rise, lower-income rental community managed by Mercy Housing with just 148 units. Other housing was built in the neighborhood as part of this redevelopment, but it totaled 300 units at most.
So after all, Visitacion Valley is truly a microcosm for the modern American housing crisis: a loss of at least 300 public housing units (depending how you count), just as the country decided that it wouldn’t allow any more to be built. Is it any wonder that an affordable home in this neighborhood is still a million dollars, even though it was just $200k a decade ago?!
I doubt that the incomes of Viz Valley residents quintupled in that time… its existing residents that is. Because anyone moving there now will need to afford to pay a $6300 mortgage and whoever was paying (just!) $3000 in rent for this home until now will need to find a new place to live. And it’s unlikely to be in San Francisco, never mind Viz Valley itself.
