San Francisco officials have backed away from a controversial proposal to build a mixed-use affordable housing development at the site of a long-awaited community center at 1550 Evans Ave. in the city’s Bayview-Hunters Point district.

For the past three years, 1550 Evans has been envisioned as the future home of the Southeast Community Facility, a neighborhood hub providing a range of educational, job-placement, child care and social services programs. The site was selected after a lengthy community outreach process led by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, which owns 1550 Evans and has been using it as surplus office space.

In February, the release of emails exchanged among several city departments and a private developer showed that officials had spent months quietly working out a plan to construct more than 250 units of affordable housing alongside the proposed community center. The developer, Build Inc., was working with the city to meet its affordable housing requirements at the nearby India Basin development.

Word that the city had been piecing together an alternative plan for 1550 Evans sparked anger and dismay among Bayview residents, who felt as though officials were working behind closed doors to derail the long-planned vision for the community center without seeking their contributions or consent.

“The community had already decided what they needed for themselves,” said Shakirah Simley, acting executive director of the Southeast Community Facility Commission, which oversees operations at the center, now located at 1800 Oakdale Ave. “This is a neighborhood that has long fought for its own self-determination, and it’s important that that’s respected and uplifted.”

The issue came to a head in late March, when dozens of Bayview residents attended a Planning Commission meeting, waving protest signs and chanting, “Whose Bayview? Our Bayview!” as they filed into City Hall.

“The community is very emotional about this,” said Linda Richardson, a longtime Bayview resident and community activist. “The old-timers, some of them are dying. They spent their lives putting this community together, and then when we get to this stage people are changing it?”

But the city has since tried to make amends.

In the midst of a punishing affordable housing shortage, the prospect of building hundreds of new units on a nearly 5-acre, city-owned parcel was an enticing one for San Francisco housing officials. In some ways, the issue pit the city’s need to build more housing against a community’s autonomy.

But John Rahaim, the city’s planning director, said it was clear that Bayview residents and the city Public Utilities Commission had gone through a painstaking, community-led process to determine what to do with 1550 Evans and that their plans for the site should be honored.

At a recent Southeast Community Facility Commission meeting, Rahaim, to the relief of many Bayview residents, made it clear that the city was “no longer interested in pursuing housing at that site,” he said.

“The issue is that they had worked out an agreement with the SFPUC quite some time ago, and they felt like they were close to seeing that through, and that we were stepping in at the last minute,” Rahaim said. “This site had been in the works for such a long time, which I didn’t know when I found out about this plan. I can understand from their standpoint why they were concerned.”

The utilities commission was also largely cut out of deliberations about the housing proposal. After reviewing the emails, Harlan Kelly, the agency’s general manager, said he was “shocked” that other city agencies would dream up plans “in the background” for a parcel of land owned by the commission.

Officials at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, the Planning Department and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development said the plan all along was to bring a detailed proposal to the Bayview eventually that accommodated both the community center and affordable housing units.

Kate Hartley, director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, estimated that one-bedroom units would have rented at $1,100 a month, with the potential to offer even lower-priced apartments “to serve community needs.”

Apart from being an important neighborhood gathering spot, Simley said the community center is an important symbol for many in the Bayview.

Billed by the agency as “a Bayview legacy realized,” the new campus would replace the drab and outmoded community center on Oakdale Avenue. Groundbreaking is tentatively scheduled for next spring on what will be a 45,000-square-foot facility with room for arts and educational programming, ample open space and other amenities. The new facility is tentatively scheduled to open in 2021.

“Our kids don’t have amenities like the rest of the city. This is a long-neglected part of San Francisco,” Richardson said.

For those who live there — especially for longtime residents — the community center is an emblem of the hard-won concessions the neighborhood’s leaders fought for in the 1970s and 1980s, when the city expanded the Southeast Treatment Plant, the huge wastewater facility that handles 80 percent of San Francisco’s sewage. In return for building an unwelcome, often foul-smelling sewage plant in the Bayview’s backyard, the city agreed to build the community center, which opened in 1987.

The whole saga, Richardson said, “sends the message that City Hall needs to respect people here.”

“The community is not against housing,” Simley said. “They’re just saying, ‘Sure, build it, just build it where you said you were going to build it,’” she said, referring to the India Basin development.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa