With the loss of the federal grant and the city’s desire to add 8,000 new homes to the Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island neighborhoods, Goncalves said San Francisco needs to aggressively pursue funding to demonstrate to primarily low-income island residents that they still matter.
“We are working diligently to be more acknowledged in the city as a San Francisco neighborhood that needs all of the amenities that all of the other neighborhoods enjoy,” Goncalves said.
Her nonprofit is in the process of applying for grants and has received some funding from a private foundation, which Goncalves called “a drop in the bucket” in the scope of need on the underdeveloped island.
Suany Chough, assistant deputy director for planning with the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, said the administration paused the project in January and sent a termination letter in early May. Chough said the loss of the grant, which was meant to “prioritize the projects that the community wanted,” was devastating.
Chough said her agency is on the lookout for other ways to pay for the transportation upgrades, and is working with the city attorney’s office to figure out if there are any legal options left on the table. But with plans for new development on the island, funding is needed if the city and developers are serious about thousands of new residents in the coming years.
“The community is undergoing a great transition,” she said. “There were something like 2,000 folks living there for a while, and now the development program is starting to take shape. Up to 1,000 new residences have been built in the last few years, and there’s a lot more activity taking place.”
Dorsey said the loss of funding doesn’t change his optimism for Treasure Island, which he said could have a future population of as many as 20,000.
“The city is going to continue to build housing here, and we will have to find a way to pay for the infrastructure that we need and make sure that people can get around on the island,” he said. “We want this to be an attractive place for people to come to work and go to great restaurants there and a place for people to live.”
Dorsey said he’s tasked the city’s transportation authority with finding new funding, which could include federal dollars. But with the current administration, he is unsure if any future grants will include the term environmental justice.
“Whether we call it environmental justice or not, this is ultimately about making sure that a major American city, with an expanding population and infrastructure needs, can be a thriving economic powerhouse,” he said. “We should be getting help from our federal partners to succeed. What happens in San Francisco is ultimately good for the economy of the United States of America.”
Goncalves said weeding out the term environmental justice isn’t an option.
“I’m not going to change what we do,” she said. “We are focused on building a mixed-income, diverse, inclusive neighborhood on Treasure Island where everybody has a sense of belonging. We’ve been doing this for over 30 years. This is just a blip in our plan.”
