A "Rude Awakening" at Hunters Point: Environmental Racism in the heart of Progressive America

Hunters Point Naval Shipyard sits on 638 acres of San Francisco waterfront. It was listed as a Superfund site in 1989. And 37 years later, plutonium has been detected in the air and soil — and still, nothing has been cleaned up.

This week on the Environmental Justice Lab, I am joined by award-winning broadcaster Sabrina Jacobs, host of A Rude Awakening on 94.1 KPFA in Berkeley, to unpack one of the most egregious environmental justice failures in the country — and why it keeps happening in a historically Black neighborhood that happens to sit on some of the most valuable real estate in America.

We trace the shipyard’s history from its 1870 origins as a commercial dry dock through Navy ownership, World War II radioactive testing, and deactivation — and into the decades of alleged fraud, secrecy, and delay that followed. The Navy’s contractor, Tetra Tech, was found to have falsified soil sample data, missing plutonium contamination. When an air sample turned up plutonium in November 2024, the Navy sat on the results for 11 months. Meanwhile, developers are already building luxury condos on cleaned-up parcels — while legacy residents, who moved to Bayview Hunters Point during the Second Great Migration, are left living beside contamination with no answers and no accountability.

We dig into Proposition P — the 2000 ballot measure that called for full cleanup and was opposed by the Chamber of Commerce and a list of police associations — and ask why the burden of cleaning up a mess the federal government created fell on the City of San Francisco. They discuss what gaslighting does to a community’s psyche, what it means to demand restoration rather than mere remediation, and why the fact that this is San Francisco — the supposed heart of American environmentalism — tells us everything about environmental racism.

Sabrina closes with the lesson she wants every organizer to carry: never give up. Because every movement that ever won was built on fire, steadfastness, consistency, tenacity — and a deep love and respect for oneself and for others.

Resources:
The Gaslighting of San Francisco at the Hunters Point Shipyard - Greg Schwartz
Lawsuit Filed Over Radioactive Waste at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard - Green Action

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