A Call for Environmental Justice: Bay View-Hunters Point

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View of South San Francisco from Twin Peaks

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JOANNE ABERNATHY, a painfully skinny African American woman with a soft voice and a wild eruption of black hair, stood in the kitchen of her small, creaky three-bedroom apartment, which is located in a notorious public housing complex in southeast San Francisco, a place the locals call Oakdale.

Abernathy pointed to the ceiling. Pipes connected to her toilet, which is on the second floor, had leaked "every day for a year," she said. Day in and day out, water from the toilet saturated the ceiling, spilling down into the kitchen. In desperation, she threw down three buckets to catch the liquid mess. Yellow mold sprouted from the kitchen cabinets like mushrooms in a rainforest.