Turf Divide Limits Youth Access to Resources
By Marna Anning
Ruth Jackson lives on the corner of Hahn Street on the border of two conflicting turfs: Towerside and Sunnydale.
“The violence never used to be this bad,” said Jackson who has owned and lived in her home for 30 years. “But they have a truce, for now.”
According to San Francisco Police Department crime maps, approximately 69 incidents of assault and vandalism have been recorded near her home since August and despite the truce, the homicide rate increased by 18 per cent in Vis Valley since 2003, with respect to other neighborhoods in the Ingleside district.
At “60 and a stone-throw,” Jackson is known as the neighborhood grandma for a majority of kids and parents in Vis Valley. Most of the community knows her by name or face because she runs a certified day care center out of her home and in some capacity or another she has raised nearly 500 Vis Valley children, including her three sons and four adopted children.
“Most of these kids nowadays don’t even know what they are fighting about,” said Jackson. ”The stuff they doing now has nothing to do with how this all started.”
Ruth Jackson runs a daycare center out of her home, which sits on the border of a years-long turf conflict in Visitacion Valley. Photo: Marna Anning
According to Jackson, the turf conflict began as a feud among drug lords in the early ‘70s and deteriorated to its current condition during the relocation of hundreds of Vis Valley residents following the Geneva towers implosion.
In the current turf war “Towerside,” named after a newly built housing development at the old location of Geneva Towers housing projects, is at odds with “Sunnydale,” a former military housing unit now converted to Section 8 housing managed by the San Francisco Housing Authority.
In 1998 Vis Valley virtually disappeared in the news after the widely publicized implosion of Geneva Towers. Eight years to date, as Vis Valley struggles to rebuild itself, more than 50 years of rivalry and territorial gunplay predating the Towers era has fiercely divided this small community into factions, keeping youth and residents in each area from crossing into either territory.
Shalom Kimble, Program Manager for the Boys & Girls Club at the Visitacion Valley Village Center, agrees with Jackson about the current disconnect between the original feud and the current turf conflict.
The Village Center is a hub of local community-based organizations, including the Boys and Girls Club, centered in a cluster of new town homes built on the former Geneva Towers site in the Towerside territory.
Kimble said that youth at the Village clubhouse under 11 years old are not aware of the turf conflict and generally “play with each other without issues.”
“Once they get in their early teens,” she said, “they learn from other kids who they can play with and who not to be around.” Kimble said teens from either side of each turf generally stick together when they hold joint Boys and Girls clubhouse functions.
When she started working at the Village Center two months ago, Kimble learned quickly about youth attitudes toward each other in Towerside and Sunnydale when one of her youth members shot a Sunnydale kid in mid September.
She said the shooter was ostracized by his family for fear of inviting retaliation from Sunnydale residents and disrupting the current truce on both sides. According to Kimble, the young man was forced to leave Vis Valley.
“When we take the van to pick up little kids from Sunnydale, we don’t let the ones from Towerside get out of the car,” said Michelle Jones, social recreation director for the Boys and Girls Clubhouse in Sunnydale.
Jones said the feud is sustained by a network of local families in each area who inform each other when an “outsider,” enters into either territory.
As a former Sunnydale resident herself, she said that the major conflicts are among kids in their upper teens and early 20’s, who make up approximately 30 percent of the Vis Valley community according to U.S Census data.
Jones admits that younger kids unaware of the turf conflict also run the risk of being identified from either side or may be “marked,” for future targeting.
“Turfs are not like gangs where one side wears one color and the other side has street signs marked,” said Sheila Hill, a 30-year Vis Valley resident and the longest standing Youth Coordinator of the Boys and Girls Club in the Village Center.
“Kids on the bus will ask each other where they’re from and will start throwing out block numbers to identify each other like that,” she said adding that she often catches teens at the Village clubhouse use hand signs to represent or “rep” their respective turfs: uphill, downhill, 1800, 1900 or border-side cliques.
“It’s a form of pride, ownership, and representation,” said Hill “and it is popular because a lot of kids want somewhere to belong to.”
Katherine Williams, Rose Architectural Fellow for the Vis Valley Community Development Corporation located in the Village Center, attributes the ensuing turf conflict with living conditions in Sunnydale.
According to Williams, violence in Sunnydale emerges out of frustration with the San Francisco Housing Authority’s poor maintenance of the housing units, and poor management.
“Residents who live there have generally no other place to go and are afraid to complain about their living conditions, and the structure of the housing units foster a bad neighborhood,” said Williams.
“In Sunnydale the houses face each other, this architectural structure doesn’t create a sense of personal space ownership,” she explains, citing this structure causes residents to feel crowded and resentful.
Williams said the need to own something exacerbates turf claims. She insists that by preventing kids from crossing over in the neighborhood, the turf war also keeps youth from accessing resources on either side.
Others maintain that the Sunnydale housing project is not the main cause of the turf problem.
Drew Jackson, 34, Ruth Jackson’s youngest son, was shot three times in 2004, at Towerside, in a case of mistaken identity. Drew said the assailant mistook him for a Sunnydale resident and shot him twice in the back and once in the leg as he ran away.
He now mentors youth at the Sunnydale Teen Resource Center taking young men on college tours, to football games and other field trips, encouraging them to rise above current conditions in the projects.
Drew blames the lack of resources for older teens and young adults not serviced in Vis Valley for fostering idle behavior among this group, leading to greater incidences of crime and turf affiliations.
“These kids have nowhere to go, nothing to do but hang out there on the corners,” he said “if more programs were available here the turf violence would not be so bad.”
But help may be on the way, at least for some.
To curb the violence in Vis Valley and to create better relations with cops, a group of community-based organizations joined the San Francisco Police Department in 2001 to form the Vis Valley Violence Prevention Collaborative Committee.
In November 2006, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a federal grant of $175,000 to the committee for an initiative to create a Community Resource Network also called a “Weed and Seed” Program.
The Department of Justice and the San Francisco District Attorney’s office are also collaborating in this effort.
Michael Bennett, lead coordinator for the committee, said police would be charged with “weeding” crime out of the neighborhood, while community members would “seed” positive elements that can sustain the neighborhood.
At a committee planning retreat in late October, San Francisco Police Department School Resource Officer Frances Terry said the Ingleside outpost servicing Vis Valley intended to use its portion of funds to pilot a substation at the designated “safe haven,” a neutral location chosen by the police department and committee as a funnel for all programs and resources created through the initiative.
Bennett hopes that this two-pronged approach and collaboration with the police will reduce factors causing turf violence, reuniting Vis Valley community as a whole again.
But Vernon Long, a 30-year Vis Valley resident and former Boys & Girls clubhouse manager said the committee is rife with divisions and does not represent the interests of the entire neighborhood because it omits provisions for the development of services in Sunnydale.
Long complains that Sunnydale residents feel distrust in the collaborative because they “do not have beneficial or long standing relationships with the cops.”
He said many have experienced police harassment, brutality, and lack of prompt emergency response from officers at the local Ingleside district outpost on Hahn Street,.
He feels the safe haven at the Village center limits access for Sunnydale service providers and residents.
Bennett denies Sunnydale residents were kept from joining the collaborative, he said “cbo’s all around the neighborhood are entitled and expected to benefit from the Weed and Seed program.”
Although except Ruth Jackson living on “the border,” no Sunnydale providers are currently a part of the collaborative.
“We chose to work with the ones that were participating,” said Bennett. “Since cbo’s from the Village Center are participating in planning more than Sunnydale, we thought it only natural to have the safe haven located there.”
Bennett wanted to “take advantage of the Village center’s newly built facilities” and said the committee’s decision to work with the police was unanimous.
He said efforts were made to include Sunnydale residents in the collaborative although many “refused to participate in the planning process,” and were not present at planning retreats when the safe haven was chosen.
“They just would not come to the table,” said Bennet.
But Sunnydale youths claim that the Sunnydale Projects is where programs and resources are needed in Vis Valley. Taloma Ufaleama, is a 15 year old student living in Sunnydale, but he also has family living at Britton Courts, a housing complex located across the street from the Village Center.
Ufaleama can travel through the neighborhood with no problem because of his family, although he admits his Sunnydale friends cannot.
“Most of the time, we don’t think about what goes on there” he said adding he feels safer attending the after-school program held at Britton Courts because “nothing happens there.”
Kelly Komasa, program coordinator for the San Francisco Institute for Civic and Community Engagement at San Francisco State University, recently joined the collaborative to provide networking services and referral resources for young mothers in Vis Valley.
“The turf war between Sunnydale and Towerside is a real problem facing the collaborative,” said Komasa. “We are working on a plan of action to include Sunnydale organizations in efforts to assess the entire community’s needs.”
Komasa agreed the safe haven location at the Village would not be accessible to all members of Vis Valley because of the turf conflict.
“We would like to have this be a neutral area that people know is safe,” she added. “The committee intends on establishing a real non-violence program that anyone can come to, regardless of turf.”
On a cold morning, Vis Valley youths Eddie, Lui Ledbetter and Oscar remove paint materials from an old storage shed behind Sunnydale housing projects. They paint over graffitti in an abandoned school they hope will one day serve as a community center and gymnasium. Photo: Marna Anning
It’s a cold Wednesday morning in December, Lou Ledbetter and three of his friends, Lydell, Oscar and Eddie just got to the “bungalows,” a series of dilapidated, graffiti-clad buildings in the former John Mclaren Park High School site above Sunnydale.
The school was officially closed down nearly than 15 years ago by San Francisco Unified School District because of budget cuts.
Ledbetter, 25, leads the three young men into the bungalows to paint over the graffiti covering every wall in the abandoned school yard.
Over the past two months, these young men have carefully, weeded the yards, cleaned the walkways, and painted the walls every morning for a small weekly paycheck as part of a local nonprofit group called Communities of Opportunity.
Ledbetter lives on the border, Lydell and Oscar are from the Towerside territories, and Eddie is from Sunnydale, although none of them claim any turf affiliations anymore.
“I don’t live at Towerside, I live at Geneva Towers,” says Lydell. “Besides, that turf shit is old and those names are just tags they use to gang-affiliate and separate us.”
They hate the job, but work hard because of a promise that inspires them to laugh and talk of their hopes in the empty schoolyard as they paint.
“We want a gym, and a basketball court, a place where we can all kick-it with no drama” says Lydell, 30, who graduated from John Mclaren High in 1992. “We want this whole neighborhood to look like Excelsior and those other San Francisco neighborhoods; we deserve that too, not just in some parts.”
Dwayne Jones, program coordinator for Communities of Opportunity, has promised the young men that when they are done, the abandoned school will be the site of a community center for all kids from the neighborhood, and it will have a gym.
“Keep dreamin’ nigga,” says Eddie to Lydell, and they all laugh.
“Keep painting ya’ll,” says Ledbetter in a suddenly serious tone, “that shit could happen.”