Bayview-Hunters Point (San Francisco, California)

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Hunters Point, named after a local family during the 19th century, is in the extreme southeastern part of San Francisco, strung along the main artery of Third Street from India Basin to Candlestick Point. Of San Francisco's microclimates, Hunters Point has the warmest of anywhere in the city. Bayview-Hunters Point, or "HP", as it commonly called, is a predominantly African American area with the highest percentage of homeownership in the City.

HP is home to many family businesses, community organizations, home recording studios, and churches that have thriving congregations. Many of the African-Americans in the area are the children of the massive southern migration of the 1940s, where thousands of African-Americans came from Southern states for job opportunites at the burgeoning war industries at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Between 1940 and 1950, the population leaped from 16,500 to 147,000; the neighborhood's predominance of African-Americans is a legacy of the restrictive housing covenants of the past.

Many consider Bayview-Hunters Point a marginalized community, with nearly one-third of San Francisco's toxic waste sites with concurrent endemic health issues from those toxins. A 30% unemployment rate along with marginal city services create a volatile social powderkeg. Black-on-black crime is a huge problem with gang wars surrounding territorial drug trade accounting for a high murder rate. Blacks comprise less than 8 percent of the population, yet they made up 63 percent of San Francisco homicide victims in 2005. s The neighborhood's population is changing — a traditionally Black-community established the Hunters Point Shipyard and blue-collar factory jobs and the reasonable housing prices has recently seen a decline due to gentrification. Many African-Americans from the Bayview-Hunters Point region (Fillmore and Western Addition) have moved to other Bay Area cities, notably Antioch, Oakland and Richmond while Latinos, Asians, and whites represent a growing part of the neighborhood drawn by warm weather, cheaper housing prices and new construction surrounding the city's current projects with this neighborhood is the Third Street Light Rail Project, expanding mass transit system into less-serviced neighborhoods.

The Bayview-Hunters Point area is rapidly morphing — the old infrastructure of factories and shipyards in some of the last available land in San Francisco is being torn down. Murals featuring Black pride are common in Hunters Point — residents there hope that those murals will still be there when the noise and dust of construction clear and that the new improved Bayview-Hunters Point community will provide new opportunities.

Many community groups, such as the India Basin Neighborhood Association work with community members, other organizations and city- wide agencies to strengthen and improve this diverse part of San Francisco.