Inside a housing complex on the northwest corner of Treasure Island. San Francisco approved Lennar Urban's bid to redevelop the island based on a concession that there be a higher-than-usual ratio of affordable to market rate housing. Carlos Chavarría

Residents of Hunters Point and Treasure Island pull no punches when it comes to the past actions of Lennar and local officials who are friendly with the company, including mayors Brown and Lee. In a lawsuit against the company, Christopher Muhammad, a local minister for the Nation of Islam, called Lennar “a rogue company that can’t be trusted.” The asbestos-related suit cited Lennar’s construction in Hunters Point as the cause of the neighborhood’s high asthma rates in children, an issue around which the city eventually created a special task force.

“Our contention is that Lennar purposefully turned the [asbestos] monitors off,” Muhammad told the San Francisco Bay Guardian back in 2007. “The problem was that Lennar was looking at their bottom line and violated every agreement. They threw the precautionary principle to the wind, literally. And the city looked the other way.”

Longtime Hunters Point resident Marie Harrison works for the environmental justice group Greenaction. She said Lennar has been “nothing but shameful.”

“These guys, in my view, were so far out in left field when it came to doing the job that they were supposed to do, in protecting the community to the best of their ability, it was like community folks didn’t count,” Harrison said.

“They’ve been allowed to act with impunity,” she added.

Asked about health issues in the Shipyard, Bonner was canny in his response.

“Neither you or I are scientists or doctors, and I’m aware, and it’s been well documented, that Hunters Point has a higher degree of certain diseases. I do believe that there could be any number of reasons and several people have opined on what the reasons are,” he said. “The short answer is, yes, I’m certainly aware of it. I can only say that cleaning up the base, and bringing in healthy homes and healthy activities ultimately is in the best interest of the overall community.”

Beyond healthy homes, Lennar’s guiding interest is, of course, making profits, and when the Shipyard and Treasure Island projects are completed, the returns will be a sizable chunk of the $8.5 billion redevelopment contracts. The company declined to disclose its profit expectations.

However the more than $150,000 per year (according to self-reported estimates) that Lennar spent on lobbying efforts appears to have paid off. At the Shipyard, the company was chosen as the sole developer in spite of the advice of a financial consultant hired by the city to evaluate competing bids, and who recommended another firm. Under its negotiated agreement, Lennar is paying nothing for the land in the Shipyard and Treasure Island, but will share the cost of infrastructure with the city, and has agreed to profit-share with taxpayers — maybe. Under the agreement, the city can only share in the profits once Lennar has itself earned a 25 percent return on its investment.

The Navy is responsible for paying for the cleanup, which has been underway for decades. Harrison said it wasn’t too long ago that potentially contaminated sewage used to pop up out of manholes on Third Street in Hunters Point. Currently, one method of waste removal used by the Navy is to push potentially contaminated dirt near the shipyard 100 yards out into the bay.

“I’m not an oceanologist, I’m not an engineer,” Harrison said, “but even I can tell you that once that water flows out there to that 100-yard mark, it doesn’t get out there and say, ‘Oh, I can’t mix with the rest of this water because I’m contaminated.’ We already have an issue with mercury and PCBs in our water now.” The State’s Water Quality Control Board has been aware of this latter problem for years; potential carcinogens mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls are so prevalent in Bay fish, for example, the Board issued warnings against eating locally caught sea life.

Harrison’s voice turned bleaker as she listed recent deaths in the neighborhood.

“On my block alone in the past two years, eight people have died from different types of cancer. There is a block over from me, going toward the Shipyard, a fourplex apartment building — three of the adult women, not in the same family, have breast cancer. In the unit behind there, the guy there has breast cancer. On Quesada [Avenue], two of the houses down from where the fourplex is, both women in that duplex have breast cancer. But for some reason, that’s not seen as a cancer cluster.”

Last year, a contract worker who discovered high amounts of radioactive contamination on Treasure Island was subsequently fired, then blew the whistle by reporting the contamination to public officials. The contractor, radiation specialist Robert McLean, told the Center for Investigative Reporting at the time, “We found radiation, contaminated materials, in playgrounds and in areas that had previously been playgrounds." A Navy contractor later admitted to submitting false reports for areas on Treasure Island that were still affected by radiation.