Residents in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood are dismayed by what they see as a covert effort by city officials and a private developer to muscle a mixed-use, affordable housing project onto the site of a long-planned community center at 1550 Evans Ave.

Since 2015, the nearly 5-acre site has been pegged as the future home of an all-new Southeast Community Facility, a neighborhood hub that provides educational resources, social services and career-placement programs. Working closely with Bayview residents for the past seven years, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns 1550 Evans, has envisioned a 45,000-square-foot building with ample green space and other amenities.

But the recent release of emails among several city departments and developer Build Inc., which was working with the city to meet its affordable housing requirements at a nearby India Basin development, shows that the city has a very different concept of 1550 Evans than the neighbors and the city’s PUC do.

The emails have raised serious concerns among Bayview residents that their plans for a new community center could be derailed in favor of a mixed-use housing proposal conceived without their input or consent.

“No one comes into this community to dictate to this community,” said Oscar James, a Bayview resident and activist, speaking at a recent Southeast Community Facility Commission committee meeting. The commission’s seven members are appointed by the mayor charged with overseeing operations at the center.

One email, a memorandum sent to Mayor Ed Lee two days before his death in December, neatly sums up the city’s proposal for 1550 Evans: “We believe that this piece of land — a rarely available, almost five-acre city-owned site — should be more intensively developed to include affordable housing development, in addition to the uses that (the PUC) currently plans. The PUC has expressed concerns that they are already moving forward with a nonresidential project and that any change would cause delay and upset community members. We do not agree.”

The city guessed wrong.

The emails “really alarmed us,” said Rodney Hampton, a Bayview resident. “They’re working in opposition of a vision that’s been talked about, and decided upon, years ago. That’s like a dagger in the heart,” he said.

“I want to see the campus that was promised to us. The city owes that to us,” said Gwen Jackson-Fagan. Her mother, Espanola Jackson, was a Bayview activist who helped broker the deal with the PUC that created the original Southeast Community Facility. The center was intended to mitigate the impact of the 1980s expansion of the nearby Southeast Treatment Plant, the sprawling and often foul-smelling site that processes 80 percent of the city’s wastewater. Espanola Jackson died in 2016.

“I feel like these people in City Hall and people behind the scenes — it’s like they’ve done in the past, taking things from us without us even knowing,” Jackson-Fagan said.

City officials working on the housing proposal say the plan eventually was to bring a fully realized pitch to the PUC and the Bayview community.

“It was just the beginning of a dialogue that we hope could still happen,” said Kate Hartley, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. Hartley was one of four housing officials who sent the December memo to Lee, along with Planning Director John Rahaim; Ken Rich, the director of development at the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development; and Jeff Buckley, a senior adviser on housing in the mayor’s office.

“All we were doing was gathering information so we could go back to the community and say, ‘Here is a concept that may be workable,’ and then get feedback,” she said. “There was never any idea that housing alone would replace those community-serving spaces.”

The campus would replace the current Southeast Community Facility, a drab and outdated building at 1800 Oakdale Ave., less than a mile away.

The recently released emails also came as a surprise to city PUC officials, who say they were largely cut out of the city’s deliberations about the site. The agency said it is not inclined to tear up its designs for the community facility to add housing.

“When I saw the (emails) I got really upset,” PUC General Manager Harlan Kelly said.

He had been approached by city officials in the past, including Lee and District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen, who represents the Bayview, about developing housing at 1550 Evans, but said he was clear he had reservations. Kelly thought the matter had been settled and said he was blindsided to see the emails, some sent as recently as last month, showing that other city departments had not given up on the housing idea.

“I’m shocked that they were planning stuff on property that the SFPUC owns,” Kelly said. “They’re trying to build something in the background. How it played out is inappropriate.”

Former Build Inc. partner Michael Yarne said the site was one of several the developer was scouting for affordable-housing development along the Third Street transit corridor.

“We did our study, like a good neighborhood partner does, and we shared it with various folks with the city,” Yarne said. “We had neighbors who loved the (housing) idea, and we had some Bayview folks who thought it should only be a community center. Either way, we don’t control it and we’re not the ones deciding what happens there,” he said.

Part of Build Inc.’s study of the site included design plans released along with the bundle of emails. Those designs show a U-shaped housing complex crowned by the community center.

“It looks exactly like a prison,” said Steve Good, chairman of the Southeast Community Facility Commission. “We’ve been having commission meetings for years now on this,” he said. “There were thousands of surveys, thousands of doors knocked on. Where was this conversation about housing then?”

In an email, Build Inc. President Lou Vasquez said the firm had “halted all internal analysis of 1550 Evans in February.”

Rahaim agreed that Build Inc.’s conceptual drawings for the space were problematic.

“Frankly, it’s not very good, and it’s not a plan that I would support,” he said.

The PUC may own 1550 Evans, but it needs Planning Commission approval to build the community center. Rahaim said the Planning Department received the PUC’s preliminary paperwork for the community center project “two or three weeks ago.”

The next step, he said, “is to formally respond to their proposal, which lays out a road map for the approval process.”

But he said he was optimistic the city and Bayview residents will reach an accord over the site, which he said could “easily accommodate” the community center and affordable housing.

Hartley, from the mayor’s office of housing, said the city still intended to coordinate “with (the PUC), with the goal of creating a cooperative plan for community outreach and dialogue.”

It may be too late for that.

“I can’t imagine the city derailing the project at this point,” Good said. “It would be a slap in the face to the Bayview community. I don’t think anyone wants that on their back.”