Plan to Replace Battered Housing Project Stirs Threats, Fear : San Francisco: City says new affordable townhouses would help revitalize drug-plagued area, but residents aren’t convinced. Officials accuse tenant organizers of intimidating the others.

The hallways reek of urine. Waist-high heaps of moldering trash are stacked in nearly every corner.

There’s no grass where children can play. Instead, they peer from broken windows at a bleak vista broken only by other graffiti-marred, bullet-pocked buildings.

Signs of drug and gang activity are everywhere.

Who wouldn’t want the Bernal Dwellings public housing project rebuilt?

At least half the residents, according to two tenant organizers.

But police and housing officials say those organizers, both ex-felons, have forced that support by threatening residents into silence. The pair, police allege, stand to lose a drug-peddling gold mine if the $50-million Hope VI project goes through.

“We are not the thugs or monsters they make us out to be,” counters tenant organizer Malik Rahim, a former member of the Black Panther Party who did time in the 1970s and 1980s for armed robbery. “What it’s all about is when you stand up for your rights, when you stand up for your community, then you become a problem.”

The tenant organizers argue the city should deal with the social ills that have come to define the violence-prone complex before spending money on making the place aesthetically pleasing.

Housing officials disagree, saying a sparkling new complex is the necessary first step in revitalizing the neighborhood. Besides, they can’t pass up $50 million in federal funds.

Police say they’ve received more than 100 complaints about Rahim and Jeffrey Branner, a former drug dealer turned deacon now awaiting trial on drug charges.

“People say they have been threatened. They are afraid,” said Cmdr. Richard Holder. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night thinking of some of the stories people have told me.”

The city is going ahead with plans to use federal Hope VI funds to replace the dilapidated Bernal project with affordable townhouses.

Tensions over the plan have reached such heights that at one Housing Commission meeting, Rahim suggested cutting the throats of the commissioners. At another meeting, some housing staffers were afraid to leave because Rahim and Branner were outside, said Carmen Rosales, the housing department’s director of programs and grants.

“I know these guys carry a lot of power and they could easily do me. But that’s the price I and my colleagues pay for trying to do what we know is right,” Rosales said.

Rahim, a community organizer from New Orleans, points out that it was the housing department that recruited him, in 1993, to bring order to the tenants’ organization.

Rahim’s contract with the city expired last year, but he and Branner continue to act as spokesmen for residents in 10 public housing projects.

The pair say that, despite the contentious relationship with housing officials, they are committed to ensuring that residents have a voice in whatever the city plans for public housing tenants.

“They (commissioners) could come up with two or three who would probably say a bunch of negative things against us. For every two or three against me, I could come up with a hundred that are for me,” Rahim said.

“I’m still Jeff,” Branner told the San Francisco Examiner. “I’m still on the streets, but now I’m doing positive, not criminal or violent activities. . . . I’m doing things like registering people to vote.”

Rahim and Branner are angry that the city is proceeding with the project, leaving residents to suffer with the crime, unemployment, teen pregnancy and increasing school-dropout rates that plague the projects.

“If you have problems that are so bad you need to tear it down, let’s start trying to solve the problems that are there now,” Rahim said.

“If the same conditions exist (after rebuilding), how will they be safer? It’s the same amount of unemployment, same amount of gang activity. . . . Hope VI could be a beautiful thing if . . . the problems that are here now aren’t shifted to other developments.”

But Barbara Smith, the housing department’s director of housing development, anticipates that the fresh surroundings will encourage residents to take pride in--and care of--the property.

The housing department says it will help residents find other housing for the duration of the construction. When the units are finished, former Bernal residents will get first pick of the new government-subsidized townhouses, Smith said.

But residents don’t hear those messages, nor do they feel safe discussing the project because of pressure from Rahim and Branner, housing officials say.

“For some reason Jeffrey and Malik are operating under the assumption that they need to approve every step of the process. And they don’t,” said Commission President Barbara Meskunas.

Meskunas said she hasn’t received any personal threats but says residents tell her that they no longer attend commission meetings for fear of reprisals.

Police have declined to discuss details of residents’ complaints.

At a Jan. 12 commission meeting, Rahim told then-housing department executive director Felipe Floresca he wished Floresca had the “nerve to hire me and Jeff to clean up the commission; we’ll get a whole bunch of them out of there. . . . Right now it looks like you need to stand up there and cut their throats, man. That’s all you need is to cut their throats,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

Other staffers have attended tenant meetings only to be told they weren’t allowed to speak. At other meetings, Rahim and Branner told residents not to speak, Smith said.

Rahim and Branner deny using threats or intimidation. There is no evidence that anyone has followed through on the alleged threats, police say.

Few residents were willing to speak on the record. Some just smiled and declined comment, others put their hand up and shook their head no, while one man quickly walked away when the topic was raised.

But those willing to talk said they were leery of the city’s plans.

“It might even help self-esteem to come back to a place that’s nice and clean, but I just want to make sure the end justifies the means,” said a resident who gave his name only as R.R.

Resident Kim James, 31, who was reared at Bernal, said Rahim and Branner have pumped a sense of empowerment into the projects.

“If anything, Jeffrey and Malik are telling us to speak out for what we want in these projects,” James said.

She noted that even with the demolition scheduled for this fall, the city recently spent $40,000 on a beautification project to build a picnic table and barbecue pit.

“The only thing that ends up there are dead cats,” she said. “Taking the people out of the projects doesn’t mean you take the projects out of the people.”