Price of Being Poor – Part 9
A federally subsidized “showpiece” of San Francisco redevelopment is telling its residents that mold, roaches, ventilation failures and a reported cluster of deaths are their problem – and that their overdue rent is the city’s. Before pouring billions more into Candlestick Point, the City and County of San Francisco owes the public an independent investigation into what has actually happened at Alice Griffith Apartments.
Editor’s note. This article distinguishes among documented facts, publicly reported allegations, and reasonable inferences drawn from the record. It does not accuse the John Stewart Company, McCormack Baron Salazar, the Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, FivePoint, RBC Capital Markets, the San Francisco Housing Authority, the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, or any city official of fraud. It argues that the public record, as it currently stands, justifies an independent fact-finding investigation – and it identifies the specific questions such an investigation should answer.
Candlestick Point Development to Finally Start Construction This Summer
Photo credit: https://sfist.com/2026/06/17/candlestick-point-development-to-finally-start-construction-this-summer/
SAN FRANCISCO – The letters did not arrive by mail. They were taped to the doors.
On July 14, 2026, tenants at Alice Griffith Apartments – the federally subsidized, LEED-certified affordable housing community that is publicly marketed as the flagship success story of the Candlestick Point / Hunters Point Shipyard Phase 2 redevelopment – came home to find identical, mass-produced “Balance Due” notices taped to their front doors and slipped into their door jambs, printed on management letterhead. Not mailed. Not sealed in an envelope. Left in the open, in the corridors and stairwells of a public housing community, where every neighbor could see whose door had one and whose did not. Some listed a few hundred dollars. Others listed thousands. Each warned the recipient to act quickly “to prevent further action on your tenancy.” Each was signed with a single word: Management.
One of those tenants, alarmed by the notice they had found waiting for them at the threshold of their own home, contacted this reporter directly. That contact is how this investigation obtained the two notices analyzed in the pages that follow, and how the pattern documented here – a landlord that moves at scale when it is collecting from tenants, and moves slowly, if at all, when tenants are asking it to protect them – came into public view. This reporter has been covering conditions at Alice Griffith Apartments at length in previous installments of “The Price of Being Poor,” published in partnership with The Davis Vanguard. The July 14 door-notice campaign is the newest, and one of the most publicly visible, chapters of that continuing record.
For months before those envelopes went out, residents of the same buildings had been publicly reporting a very different set of grievances: mold, water intrusion, ventilation failures, roach and rodent infestations, broken elevators, malfunctioning fire systems, recent roof concerns, and – most gravely – a reported cluster of approximately ten deaths since January 2026, including community activist Dewayne Gaines. Those grievances have not, to date, produced a comparable operational response from the landlord, from the property manager, or from the City and County of San Francisco.
THIS CONTRAST IS THE STORY. IT IS ALSO THE QUESTION.
How can the City and County of San Francisco ask taxpayers, bondholders, lenders, regulators, and future homeowners to believe Candlestick Point is a sound multi-billion-dollar investment when the only major completed component of that same redevelopment
- Alice Griffith – is repeatedly alleged to suffer from serious habitability failures?
- Central question of this investigation.
The answer this article respectfully insists on is not a press release. It is not another referral to a working group. It is a formal, independent fact-finding investigation – authorized by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and, in parallel, evaluated by the city’s newly appointed Inspector General, Alexandra Shepard – into how public redevelopment dollars, tax credit equity, HUD Choice Neighborhoods grant funds, HOPE SF bond financing, and regulatory oversight have been managed at Alice Griffith Apartments before the city commits to the next, and much larger, phase of Candlestick Point.
THE JULY 14, 2026 “BALANCE DUE” BLITZ – POSTED AT THE THRESHOLD
The two notices obtained by this reporter – provided directly by an Alice Griffith tenant who found one taped to their own door on July 14, 2026 – are dated the same day and printed under the banner “2700 A.G. at Candlestick Point,” the marketing identity for Alice Griffith Apartments at 2700 Arelious Walker Drive, San Francisco, CA 94124. Both are signed only “Management.” Both use identical boilerplate. Only the unit number, tenant name, and hand-highlighted balance change. Residents describe finding matching notices left in the open at hundreds of doors across the property – neighbors comparing papers in hallways, families passing them to each other, asking whether this was real. It is real. And, in a departure from the confidentiality any responsible landlord owes to a tenant’s private financial information, it was posted where every passerby could read it.
| NOTICE | UNIT | TENANT OF RECORD | ALLEGED BALANCE |
| Balance Due Notice, 7/14/2026 | n/a | n/a | $215.00 |
| Balance Due Notice, 7/14/2026 | n/a | n/a | $2,469.00 |
The template is revealing. It concedes that any alleged balance “may have accumulated since the beginning of your tenancy” – a striking admission that arrears may have been carried, unaddressed, for extended periods and only now surfaced in a coordinated mailing. It offers a “repayment plan” requiring full monthly rent by the 5th of each month plus an “agreed-upon repayment amount” by the 20th. It dangles up to $10,000 in potential Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) money but conditioned on the tenant not having received ERAP within the past year and having first completed three consecutive months of full rent plus repayment. And it closes with the phrase that tenants say is doing most of the emotional work: “prevent further action on your tenancy.”
Every notice went up on a single day. Every notice was posted at the door – in the open, where every neighbor could see it. Every notice is signed “Management.” No signature. No name. No accountable human being. The debt is personal to the tenant. The signature is not.
These notices do not, standing alone, prove any misconduct. Landlords are entitled to collect legitimately owed rent. But standing next to the resident-reported habitability record – and next to the property manager’s own public track record elsewhere in San Francisco – they raise a legitimate governance question this article respectfully asks in plain English: Why is administrative attention at Alice Griffith so visibly organized around rent collection while habitability, environmental, and public-health concerns remain publicly unresolved?
THE PUBLIC INVESTMENT BEHIND ALICE GRIFFITH
This is not private housing. Alice Griffith was rebuilt with an unusually generous stack of public and quasi-public funding, layered through a partnership involving federal grants, city bond authority, tax-credit equity, and a public housing authority. The identity of that stack matters, because it is the stack that ultimately answers to taxpayers – and to independent investigators – for how the finished product performs.
| Funding Stream | Source/Instrument | Public Significance |
| $30.5 million Choice Neighborhoods grant, 2011 | U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD); publicly announced by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi | Federal taxpayer money awarded specifically to “reverse the effects of historical economic and social disparities” at Alice Griffith. |
| HOPE SF program | City-authorized $95 million local bond funding to initiate redevelopment of Bayview-area public housing sites, including Hunters View and Alice Griffith | San Francisco taxpayer-backed debt supporting the program under which Alice Griffith was rebuilt. |
| Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) equity | RBC Capital Markets – Tax Credit Equity Group, publicly disclosed as investing $20,664,179 in LIHTC equity at Alice Griffith, financing closed December 2024 | Federal tax expenditure delivered to private investors in exchange for continued compliance with affordability and quality-of-housing requirements. |
| Exclusive Negotiating Rights Agreement (ENRA) | San Francisco Housing Authority with master developer and McCormack Baron Salazar (MBS), per SFHA’s own 2024 Annual Plan | The public-side contractual framework by which SFHA formally delegates redevelopment rights over Alice Griffith to the private development team. |
| Site management | The John Stewart Company – the largest affordable-housing manager in California, per Mission Local reporting | Day-to-day operational responsibility, including maintenance, tenant relations, and rent collection at Alice Griffith. |
| Master developer / redevelopment sponsor | FivePoint (a Lennar spinoff) | Long-term sponsor of the Candlestick Point / Hunters Point Shipyard Phase 2 redevelopment into which Alice Griffith is folded, with a bonded indebtedness ceiling raised to $5.9 billion by the Board of Supervisors in November 2024. |
In plain English: Alice Griffith is not a private problem. It is a public asset, financed with federal grants, city bond authority, and federal tax expenditure, and operated on the city’s behalf by a private manager. Every unresolved habitability complaint at Alice Griffith is therefore, in accounting terms, an unresolved public asset performance issue – a subject squarely within the mandate of the San Francisco Controller, the City Services Auditor, and the newly appointed Inspector General.
You cannot subsidize a project with federal grant money, HOPE SF bond authority, LIHTC equity, and an SFHA negotiating agreement – and then claim that what happens inside the walls is a private matter between a manager and a tenant.
WHY THE JOHN STEWART COMPANY TRACK RECORD MATTERS
Fairness requires that this investigation recognize a documented, publicly reported fact: the John Stewart Company is not simply a private landlord that happens to appear at Alice Griffith. It is the largest affordable-housing manager in California. And on another San Francisco public housing property – Plaza East Apartments – it was already the subject of tenant litigation over habitability failures. Public reporting by Mission Local in July 2025 documented that Plaza East tenants sued the property manager, and that the John Stewart Company was subsequently removed from the site.
That prior removal is not, in itself, a finding about Alice Griffith. But it is a publicly reported precedent that any responsible investigator – and any responsible elected official reviewing the current record at Alice Griffith – is entitled to take seriously. It establishes that the operator now sending Balance Due letters to hundreds of Alice Griffith households has, on the record, previously lost the management of a different San Francisco public housing property after tenant complaints and litigation over habitability and maintenance failures.
The relevant public policy question is therefore not whether isolated complaints exist. It is whether a pattern is emerging – and whether the City of San Francisco is doing enough, fast enough, on Alice Griffith, before the pattern hardens.
ALICE GRIFFITH IS THE REPORT CARD FOR CANDLESTICK POINT
The strategic significance of Alice Griffith is not decorative. It is structural. According to the SFist report of June 17, 2026 and Austin Klar’s comprehensive July 2026 market analysis, Candlestick Point is planned to include approximately 7,200 residential units, 3 million square feet of commercial space, and roughly 100 acres of open space, with build-out extending into the 2040s. In November 2024, the Board of Supervisors raised the project’s bonded indebtedness ceiling from $1.7 billion to $5.9 billion and reassigned approximately two million square feet of commercial and R&D space onto the Candlestick side.
Candlestick Park Subarea Map – https://destination-freedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/candlestick-park-subarea-map.pdf
Against that scale, Alice Griffith is the only major residential component of the Candlestick Point Phase 2 redevelopment that has already been built and is occupied. In development terms, it is the finished demonstration project. In business terms, it is the operating specimen. In investor terms, it is the comparable that every future underwriter, insurer, and rating analyst will study.
No prudent investor evaluates a corporation solely by its future projections while ignoring the performance of its only completed product. Taxpayers should not be asked to finance billions more in redevelopment without first understanding whether the existing public investment is performing as promised.
That is the frame this article invites the Board of Supervisors, the Controller, the Inspector General, the Mayor, the SFHA, OCII, MOHCD, HUD, and the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee to adopt. Alice Griffith is not a side issue to be quietly “stabilized” while the ribbon-cutting at Candlestick Center is planned. It is the report card. And a report card cannot be filed away.
PROXIMITY IS NOT A METAPHOR
Let us speak in the language the city seems to actually respond to: valuation.
Alice Griffith does not sit down the freeway from Candlestick Point. It does not sit across the city. It sits inside the Candlestick Point / Hunters Point Shipyard Phase 2 footprint. The 2019 Design for Development document identifies the Alice Griffith block as the northern portion of the redevelopment site – a short walk from the future “Candlestick Center Innovation District” that FivePoint intends to market to biotech and AI tenants, and from the workforce and market-rate housing FivePoint intends to sell to future San Francisco homebuyers over the next fifteen to twenty years.
Anyone with experience in real estate underwriting understands what happens next. Prospective buyers, institutional investors, retail tenants, biotech operators, insurers, and municipal bond investors do not evaluate a project only from a rendering. They walk the neighborhood. They run the news search. They talk to neighbors. They read the litigation dockets. They will ask the questions the city has, so far, avoided answering.
WHAT WILL THEY FIND, ON THE RECORD AS IT CURRENTLY STANDS?
A federally subsidized, LEED-certified public housing rebuild – the flagship completed component of Candlestick Point – whose residents are publicly reporting unresolved habitability failures.
A resident-reported cluster of approximately ten deaths since January 2026 with no publicly disclosed cluster analysis by the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
An environmental history including artificial fill, tanneries, dry cleaners, industrial operations, and a 2022 Civil Grand Jury warning that rising groundwater could mobilize buried contaminants and create new vapor-intrusion pathways.
A property manager – the John Stewart Company – already publicly removed from another San Francisco public housing property after tenant litigation over habitability failures.
A coordinated, property-wide door-notice campaign on July 14, 2026 – Balance Due letters taped to tenants’ doors, threatening “further action on your tenancy” – while those habitability, environmental, and public-health concerns remain publicly unaddressed.
A city administration that has raised the project’s bonded indebtedness ceiling to $5.9 billion but has not yet publicly reconciled the performance of the only residential component already built.
That is not a moral inventory. It is a material disclosure inventory. It is the underwriter’s due-diligence file writing itself. Every additional month that the record at Alice Griffith looks the way it currently does, the discount that sophisticated capital and sophisticated homebuyers will apply to Candlestick Point next door will grow. In plain business terms, the city risks devaluing its own asset by failing to visibly investigate the only piece of that asset it has already built.
You cannot sell a $5.9 billion vision of a waterfront innovation district while the already-built affordable housing next door is telling reporters about mold, water intrusion, unanswered deaths, and now hundreds of hand-highlighted Balance Due letters.
HOW TO READ THE PATTERN WITHOUT JUMPING TO A VERDICT
The integrated analysis previously published in this series identified three analytical frameworks that fit the record at Alice Griffith. They are frameworks for interpretation, not verdicts. Any determination of which – if any – actually explains the pattern is a matter for independent investigators with subpoena power, document access, and expert review. This article names them because naming them is what an accountable press does; it does not adjudicate them.
Framework 1 | Managed decline
The first framework interprets the pattern as a form of managed decline: chronic under-investment in maintenance, paired with sharpened enforcement of financial obligations on the tenant side. Under this reading, the July 14 Balance Due blitz and the unresolved habitability record are not two separate stories. They are two edges of the same operating posture. Whether that interpretation is correct at Alice Griffith is precisely what an independent investigation should determine – not what a journalist should decree.
Framework 2 | Regulatory capture
The second framework asks whether the agencies charged with enforcing housing quality, environmental protection, and public-health obligations at Alice Griffith – including SFDPH, the San Francisco Housing Authority, OCII, MOHCD, and the Department of Building Inspection – have become too identified with the political success narrative of the Candlestick Point redevelopment to police it aggressively. Under this reading, an unfavorable finding at Alice Griffith would be politically embarrassing for the same regulators charged with policing it, and that misalignment of incentives – not any single act of misconduct – is what an independent review would be positioned to examine.
Framework 3 | Environmental racism
The third framework is the oldest in Bayview-Hunters Point. Alice Griffith is inside a historically Black community – increasingly home to Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander families – built partly on artificial fill, shaped by tanneries, dry cleaners, industrial operations, a decommissioned naval shipyard with a documented radiological cleanup scandal, and shallow groundwater that the 2022 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury warned could mobilize buried contaminants. This framework asks whether a comparable pattern of resident complaints, reported deaths, and mass debt letters would be tolerated for a comparable length of time in a wealthier or whiter San Francisco neighborhood. That, too, is a question the record justifies asking – and an independent review is well suited to examine.
Whether one framework, two, or all three ultimately best explain the record is a matter for investigators, not for a single article. What this article argues is narrower and more disciplined: on the record as it currently stands, all three frameworks converge on the same governance question. That question deserves an answer from an independent authority – and the residents of Alice Griffith deserve to see that question opened, not shelved.
A CALL FOR AN INDEPENDENT FACT-FINDING INVESTIGATION
Destination Freedom Media Group calls upon the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to authorize an independent fact-finding investigation into the administration, oversight, maintenance, financial management, and regulatory compliance associated with Alice Griffith Apartments – and to do so before authorizing any additional bond issuance, material entitlement, or financing action for the broader Candlestick Point / Hunters Point Shipyard Phase 2 redevelopment.
We also respectfully invite Inspector General Alexandra Shepard – sworn in in October 2025 with authority to seek search warrants, review city contracting, and investigate wrongdoing, and reporting to the Controller and the City Services Auditor – to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to warrant an independent review of the following six questions. Ms. Shepard, a former federal prosecutor best known for helping to prosecute the Mohammed Nuru City Hall corruption case, has publicly pledged a new era of trust in how San Francisco polices itself. Alice Griffith is precisely the test that pledge was designed for.
The expenditure of public redevelopment funds associated with Alice Griffith, including the $30.5 million 2011 HUD Choice Neighborhoods grant, HOPE SF bond authority, LIHTC equity (including the $20,664,179 in RBC Capital Markets LIHTC equity closed December 2024), MOHCD stabilization loans, and any other city-administered or city-guaranteed funding streams connected to the property.
Maintenance and capital repair practices at Alice Griffith, including the age, backlog, and resolution timelines of open work orders relating to mold, water intrusion, ventilation, elevators, fire systems, pest control, and reported roof concerns.
Regulatory oversight by city agencies – including SFDPH, the San Francisco Housing Authority, MOHCD, OCII, and the Department of Building Inspection – of the property manager (the John Stewart Company), the developer (McCormack Baron Salazar), and their counterparties.
Compliance with applicable housing quality standards, including federal Housing Quality Standards, California habitability obligations, HOPE SF and Choice Neighborhoods programmatic requirements, LIHTC compliance obligations, and the requirements of the Maher Ordinance (San Francisco Health Code Article 22A) regarding contaminated soils and vapor intrusion.
Whether taxpayer resources have been used efficiently and lawfully in delivering and operating Alice Griffith as the affordable housing component of the Candlestick Point redevelopment – and whether the value delivered to residents is commensurate with the public investment made on their behalf.
Whether the evidence supports further investigation into possible fraud, waste, abuse, or gross mismanagement in the delivery and operation of Alice Griffith and related Candlestick Point redevelopment components.
These are appropriate subjects for an independent inquiry. They do not presume misconduct. They ask independent authorities – not journalists – to determine the facts.
This is the case Inspector General Alexandra Shepard’s office was built for: public money, public housing, publicly reported deaths, and a document trail that begins with a $30.5 million federal grant and ends with a hand-highlighted Balance Due letter.
IMMEDIATE PROTECTIVE STEPS WHILE THE INVESTIGATION PROCEEDS
Because the July 14 notices threaten “further action” against tenancies while the underlying habitability and public-health record remains unresolved, Destination Freedom Media Group further calls on the City and County of San Francisco to adopt the following interim measures on an emergency basis:
A moratorium on eviction filings, adverse credit reporting, negative rental history reporting, and any “further action on tenancy” arising from the July 14, 2026 Balance Due notices at Alice Griffith, until an independent audit confirms that habitability and health-safety obligations at the property are being met. The “Management’s”– which we will assume is the John Stewart Company only because they are the property manager of the Alice Griffith Apartments – records should also be audited by an independent organization to verify the validity of the “Balance Due Notice” monies claimed to be owed by the tenants in their letters. There is no mention in these letters of the method of payment, dates of missing payments, and the dollar amount for each such alleged missing payment allowing each tenant to review their records to rebut any claimed outstanding balance due.
An immediate San Francisco Department of Public Health cluster analysis of the resident-reported deaths at Alice Griffith (if not already commenced), including toxicology review, indoor air testing, vapor intrusion assessment, mold and ventilation evaluation, carbon monoxide screening, and a Maher Ordinance compliance audit – conducted transparently and with a public report and community hearing.
A public accounting from the John Stewart Company of every open habitability work order at Alice Griffith – the age of each order, the nature of the reported problem, and the timeline for resolution – published at the same cadence and with the same operational discipline that produced the July 14 Balance Due mailing.
A joint public hearing before the Board of Supervisors, convened with District 10 leadership, SFDPH, OCII, SFHA, MOHCD, and the Mayor’s Office, on the relationship between habitability at Alice Griffith and the entitlement, bonding, and financing schedule at Candlestick Point.
Immediate deployment of pro bono legal representation to Alice Griffith tenants through Open Door Legal and other qualified providers, so that the households now holding hand-highlighted Balance Due letters have real advocacy while the investigation proceeds.
A public commitment from the Mayor’s Office, OCII, and SFHA that no additional bond issuance, land conveyance, or financing action tied to Candlestick Point Phase 2 will be taken until the Board of Supervisors and, in parallel, the Inspector General have completed their independent review of Alice Griffith.
ANSWERING THE PREDICTABLE OBJECTIONS
This article anticipates three objections and answers them directly.
“Slowing down Candlestick Point hurts affordable housing.”
It does not. Slowing down Candlestick Point until the completed affordable housing component is honestly evaluated is the definition of protecting affordable housing. The residents inside the current buildings are the population any credible affordable-housing argument is supposed to protect first. Their safety cannot be traded for a groundbreaking photograph.
“These are private management disputes between a landlord and tenants.”
They are not. Alice Griffith was rebuilt with a $30.5 million federal Choice Neighborhoods grant, HOPE SF bond authority, LIHTC equity, and an Exclusive Negotiating Rights Agreement between SFHA and the developer. Every management decision at Alice Griffith is therefore downstream of public commitments made on public money. That is precisely why the Controller, the City Services Auditor, and the Inspector General have jurisdiction to look.
“There is no proven causal link between the reported deaths and environmental exposure.”
Correct. This article makes no such claim. But absence of a formal finding is not reassurance. Public health systems are designed to investigate uncertainty, not to avoid it. When a resident-reported cluster of approximately ten deaths in a matter of months sits inside a federally subsidized property on environmentally burdened land, the standard that triggers investigation is not “proven causation.” It is “credible pattern.” That standard is met.
WHY THIS STORY MATTERS
The integrated analysis previously published in this series concluded, and this investigation reaffirms, that neglecting Alice Griffith weakens the legitimacy of the entire Candlestick Point redevelopment – regardless of which analytical framework ultimately proves most accurate. Unresolved habitability issues at Alice Griffith are not isolated tenant complaints. They are core project performance issues on the only completed residential component of one of the largest public-private redevelopments in California.
The stakes are civic. Bayview-Hunters Point has waited more than a decade for the Candlestick Point promise to become something real. It deserves a project delivered on honest books, with honest maintenance, honest oversight, and honest respect for the families already living inside the completed housing. It does not deserve a groundbreaking ceremony held while its residents are opening Balance Due letters and asking why their neighbors are dying quietly.
Alice Griffith is not adjacent to the Candlestick Point business plan. Alice Griffith is the Candlestick Point business plan – the only piece of it already delivered. The city is asking future capital, and future homebuyers, to trust a foundation it has not yet agreed to publicly inspect.
This series will not stop asking. Not until the Board of Supervisors authorizes an independent investigation. Not until the Inspector General publicly determines whether the record supports a formal review. Not until the residents of Alice Griffith see the same operational urgency directed at their safety that has already been directed at their debts.
Appendix A | Anatomy of the July 14 Balance Due Notice
Issuer: Alice Griffith Apartments (“2700 A.G. at Candlestick Point”), 2700 Arelious Walker Drive, San Francisco, CA 94124. Managed by the John Stewart Company. Contact number listed: (415) 604-3273. Website: AliceGriffithApts.com.
Date: July 14, 2026. Signed only “Management.”
Body: Alleges an outstanding balance that “may have accumulated since the beginning of your tenancy.” Offers a “repayment plan” requiring full monthly rent by the 5th and an “agreed-upon repayment amount” by the 20th of each month.
ERAP condition: Tenant must not have received ERAP within the past year, and must complete three consecutive months of full rent plus agreed repayment before potentially applying for up to $10,000 in emergency rental assistance.
Warning language: Urges tenants to act “to prevent further action on your tenancy.”
Examples obtained by this reporter from an Alice Griffith tenant who contacted the Vanguard after finding one on their own door: Unit 324, balance of $215.00 (Vandercourt); Unit 515, balance of $2,469.00 (Jeffery). Identical body text, identical formatting, hand-highlighted balance amounts – consistent with a coordinated, property-wide door-notice campaign posted publicly rather than delivered privately.
Appendix B | Questions the City Owes the Public
The following questions are posed to the specific offices that have jurisdiction and are asked to be answered on the public record. Silence is not a defensible response to any of them.
To the San Francisco Board of Supervisors:
Will you authorize an independent fact-finding investigation into the administration, oversight, maintenance, financial management, and regulatory compliance of Alice Griffith Apartments, and will you commit to no further Candlestick Point Phase 2 bond issuance until that investigation is complete?
To Inspector General Alexandra Shepard:
Will your office publicly determine whether the record supports opening a formal review of the six questions enumerated in Section VIII of this article – including public fund expenditure, capital repair practices, regulatory oversight, housing quality compliance, efficient and lawful use of taxpayer resources, and whether evidence supports further investigation into possible fraud, waste, abuse, or gross mismanagement?
To the San Francisco Department of Public Health:
Will you initiate a transparent cluster analysis of the resident-reported deaths at Alice Griffith, and publish – not paraphrase – the results?
To the San Francisco Housing Authority and MOHCD:
Will you publicly disclose the current status of the ENRA with McCormack Baron Salazar, the covenants attached to the $30.5 million Choice Neighborhoods grant, and the compliance status of Alice Griffith under HOPE SF and LIHTC program requirements?
To OCII:
Will you publicly reconcile the current performance of Alice Griffith with the entitlement and financing assumptions embedded in the November 2024 amended development agreement for Candlestick Point Phase 2 – and identify any material change since?
To FivePoint:
Will you publicly commit to sponsoring an independent third-party audit of the already-built Alice Griffith component before requesting any further bond authority, land conveyance, or entitlement action?
To McCormack Baron Salazar:
Will you publicly disclose the current capital reserves, maintenance schedules, and compliance certifications for Alice Griffith, and identify any deferred capital repairs known to your team?
To the John Stewart Company:
Will you publicly disclose, at the same cadence as the July 14 Balance Due mailing, the full inventory of open habitability work orders at Alice Griffith, the age of each order, and the timeline for resolution?
To the Mayor of San Francisco:
Do you consider a resident-reported cluster of approximately ten deaths inside a federally subsidized public housing property, coincident with a property-wide door-notice campaign of Balance Due letters from the site manager, a matter deserving of your public attention – and if not, will you say so on the record?
Appendix C | Sources and Background
SFist, “Candlestick Point Development to Finally Start Construction This Summer,” June 17, 2026.
Malik Washington / The Davis Vanguard, “The Price of Being Poor – Part 7: Built on Promises, Standing on Questions – What Is Really Happening Inside Alice Griffith Apartments?” April 27, 2026.
https://destination-freedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/The-Price-of-Being-Poor-Part-7.pdf
Austin Klar, “Candlestick Point Redevelopment: What’s Actually Happening in 2026,” July 2026.
Destination Freedom Media Group, “Alice Griffith / Candlestick Point Integrated Analysis,” July 19, 2026.
Mission Local, “SF public housing tenants sued property manager. Now it’s out at Plaza East,” July 21, 2025 (documenting removal of the John Stewart Company from Plaza East Apartments following tenant litigation).
Office of Nancy Pelosi, “Pelosi Statement on HUD Grant for San Francisco’s Alice Griffith Housing,” August 31, 2011 (announcing the $30.5 million Choice Neighborhoods grant).
Affordable Housing Finance, “San Francisco Public Housing Site Undergoes Transformation,” August 15, 2017 (documenting McCormack Baron Salazar’s role and the public-private financing structure at Alice Griffith).
RBC Community Investments public disclosure, LIHTC equity investment of $20,664,179 at Alice Griffith, financing closed December 2024.
San Francisco Housing Authority Annual Plan (2024), documenting the Exclusive Negotiating Rights Agreement between SFHA, the master developer, and McCormack Baron Salazar.
San Francisco Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure, “Approval of Proposed Amendments to the Candlestick Point / Hunters Point Shipyard Phase 2 Project,” September 3, 2024; Board of Supervisors action, November 2024.
San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, “Alice Griffith Stabilization Loan Evaluation,” 2025.
2022 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury Report on rising groundwater and mobilization of buried contaminants in Bayview-Hunters Point.
Balance Due Notices dated July 14, 2026, issued under Alice Griffith Apartments letterhead (Units 324 and 515), posted at tenants’ doors on July 14, 2026, obtained by this reporter from an Alice Griffith tenant, and transcribed for this record.
Malik Washington / The Davis Vanguard, prior installments of “The Price of Being Poor,” an ongoing investigative series documenting conditions at Alice Griffith Apartments and related San Francisco affordable-housing properties.
San Francisco Chronicle, “She prosecuted S.F. corruption for the feds. Now she’s the city’s first inspector general,” January 21, 2026 (Alexandra Shepard).
San Francisco Examiner, “SF Inspector General Alex Shepard pledges new era of trust,” January 25, 2026.
This article does not claim a proven causal link between environmental exposure and the reported deaths at Alice Griffith. It does not accuse the John Stewart Company, McCormack Baron Salazar, the Tabernacle Community Development Corporation, FivePoint, RBC Capital Markets, OCII, SFHA, MOHCD, SFDPH, the Mayor, or any elected or appointed official of fraud. It documents a pattern that, on the public record, justifies an independent fact-finding investigation – and it identifies the specific questions that investigation must answer.
Our song/video for this article is: Sunshine Anderson “Heard It All Before”
