Opinion: How would you feel if San Francisco told you that you need to “live with a little bit more cancer” in your neighborhood?

Thirty years ago, I immigrated from Taiwan to San Francisco’s Sunset District. My husband and I bought a home on 26th Avenue and Irving Street near Sunset Super and raised our two children there. We are both public school teachers and have always believed that settling in the Sunset was a wise decision — close to retail and the park, relatively quiet, somewhat affordable, and surrounded by families.

But that sense of security was destroyed in 2021 when some of my neighbors came upon a public environmental review report issued when the Police Credit Union sold the land at 2550 Irving Street (a very short distance away from my house) to Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC), a non-profit developer of affordable housing. The report said that this site at 2550 Irving Street had unsafe and harmful levels of PCE vapors that employees in the building were breathing.

To our horror we learned the whole neighborhood—over 50 houses and businesses—was on top of an underground cloud of toxic PCE. PCE is an industrial solvent used by dry cleaners before it was banned. It causes cancer and is strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease.

Multiple air tests in my home and some of my neighbors' confirmed that PCE vapor was seeping into our houses. The poison gas was seeping into my home through our downstairs shower drain. For decades my family had been breathing at least four times over the health risk level set by the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC).

Although our neighborhood demanded that the toxic plume be fully removed before any construction on the site, no government agency or politician took any meaningful action toward removing the contamination.

Desperate, we called on the San Francisco Board of Appeals. All five members said the city and the state needed to remove the toxins but ultimately decided that requiring necessary clean up was outside their jurisdiction. The President of the Appeals Board lamented that the city, the state and TNDC were telling the Sunset residents that we were expected “to live with a little bit more cancer.”

Five years later, the building at 2550 Irving Street is complete, but the contamination remains.

These new apartments will provide 300 people (many of them Chinese speaking) with much needed affordable housing. But the city and the developer, TNDC, have no plans to let these residents know they will be living over a toxic site.

The only thing that will separate these new neighbors from the PCE vapors is a tarp. But even DTSC calls this a “temporary” solution that should only be used after the contamination has been cleaned up.

Meanwhile the surrounding homes and businesses remain fully exposed with no plans for our protection.

Across the street the Police Credit Union is now preparing to break ground on market-rate housing where the PCE levels are the highest in the neighborhood. If the contamination beneath this site is not removed before construction, our neighborhood may well be forced to live with this health threat permanently. This should be unacceptable to everyone in San Francisco.

Our Mid-Sunset neighborhood has a greater than expected number of rare cancer and Parkinson’s cases. This trend suggests a public health warning that has alerted a prominent UCSF epidemiologist to consider further investigation.

How would you feel if your entire family, like mine, must continue to breathe the same poisonous air every day? We all should be outraged and demand more from our elected officials. My father died of cancer in Taiwan, in part because the government failed to effectively stop the harms of secondhand smoke. I never imagined facing a similar betrayal in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

My husband and I still believe institutions can work and that public policy must prioritize protecting residents. I sincerely ask you to join me and my neighbors in demanding that our elected officials, especially Mayor Lurie and District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong, lead an effort to remove the toxins in the Sunset.

If our elected leaders can continue to ignore the health of our Sunset neighborhood, no other neighborhood in San Francisco should feel safe.

Please contact the following public officials immediately:

Mayor’s Office –

Amar Bhardwaj 415-554-6141

Amar.Bhardwaj.MYR@sfgov.org

Supervisor Alan Wong’s Office – Derek Lee 415-554-7460

derek.lee@sfgov.org

Petition link: https://form.jotform.com/260531968939068

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Yi-Kuan Lee is an immigrant from Taiwan and resident of the Sunset District for over 30 years. She is one of the leaders advocating for removal of the toxins at the 2550 Irving Street affordable housing site.