Some developer, Lennar, or “Five Points” when they want to sound like they give a shit about community, throws a “Grand Opening” for luxury townhouses called “Monarch.” Because of course they’re called Monarch. Because nothing says “we care about the people who’ve been living here for generations” like naming your overpriced boxes after royalty.
And where are these palaces? Right next to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. You know, that Superfund site. That radioactive, toxic, contaminated piece of earth that the Navy used as a toilet for decades, testing nuclear materials and dumping God knows what else into the ground while the predominantly Black residents of Bayview got cancer and asthma and birth defects and were told, implicitly, that they didn’t matter enough to warrant clean soil.
This is the beautiful American grift in its purest form. First, you poison a neighborhood because the people there can’t fight back. Then you “clean it up”, and by clean it up, I mean you move some dirt around, declare victory, and sell the lie that it’s safe. Then you build luxury housing on top of the poison and sell it to people with money who either don’t know or don’t care what’s beneath their imported floorboards. And the people who lived through the contamination? They get priced out, pushed further to the margins, erased.
Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, the Mothers and Fathers Committee, Causa Justa, they showed up to this Grand Opening with signs and voices and the kind of fury that comes from watching your home be slowly murdered and then sold off in pieces. They understand what the marketing materials don’t mention: that “luxury” and “contamination” can occupy the same coordinates when you’ve got enough capital and enough shamelessness.
It’s environmental racism dressed up as urban renewal. It’s late-stage capitalism playing dress-up in sustainability jargon. It’s the same story that’s been told in Flint and Cancer Alley and every forgotten neighborhood where the poor and the brown live downwind from someone else’s profits.
And Lennar’s out there with champagne flutes while the ground beneath them glows.