State Vulnerability Metric Overlooks SF Neighborhoods, Excluding Them From Billions in Funding 

Shirley Jackson, 73, has lived in her single-room occupancy unit at the Seneca Hotel in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood for 15 years. She has survived breast and kidney cancers and has asthma, allergies and hay fever, all of which have made her vulnerable to poor air quality outside and in her home. 

“It’s horrible,” Jackson said, describing conditions in her room. “My doctor has mentioned before that my asthma could be from the air quality in my unit. She suggested I keep my window closed, but if I do that, then I have no air.” 

Her building doesn’t have a ventilation system, so she keeps a window open and runs a fan to circulate air. But the open window brings new problems: Street smoke and the smell of drugs and urine waft in and black soot sticks to the sill. 

Inside, there’s no escape. Mouse droppings accumulate on the floor. The mice have also bitten her. Mold has grown around her front door and toilet. Running an air purifier helps, she said, but when nearby construction stirs up more dust, it’s not enough. 

Jackson’s unit is in a census tract that was, until this month, deemed a disadvantaged community by a state mapping tool. 

But the latest version of the tool is set to rescind her census tract’s disadvantaged status, even though, Jackson said, conditions in her neighborhood haven’t improved. 

Several dense San Francisco neighborhoods — including Chinatown, the Mission and swaths of SoMa — scored too low in the recently updated tool, CalEnviroScreen 5.0, to qualify for a preliminary list of the state’s most disadvantaged communities. 

The shift cuts them off from billions in state cap-and-trade funding. Since 2015, the program has directed more than $1 billion to San Francisco, and more than $786 million has gone to disadvantaged communities. 

Advocates said the areas left off the list are home to many vulnerable residents who live in cramped SRO units. Many of the residents share bathrooms and kitchens, sleep in less-than-80-square-foot rooms and suffer from environment-related illnesses. 

The problem, advocates say, is that the state’s data isn’t precise enough to assess dense, urban neighborhoods. It fails to capture the challenges that vulnerable populations like SRO residents face. Gentrification skews the numbers further: Wealthy new residents depress vulnerability metrics, which masks the persistent needs of long-time locals. 

“To me, this tool and its gaps reflect a big disconnect between environmental science and lived realities,” said Eddie Ahn, executive director of SoMa-based environmental justice organization Brightline Defense. “We know the communities that need to be served, that historically have a lot of need.” 

Álvaro Alvarado, supervising toxicologist and branch chief overseeing the program at the state’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, acknowledged the tool was imperfect and said it was best used to compare communities, rather than paint a detailed picture of any single enclave. He also said it was a priority for the agency to find a way to account for gentrification in the next iteration of the tool.

The cost of being left out

Local leaders and residents are worried about the immediate implications of this iteration. 

CalEnviroScreen is a mapping tool meant to measure environmental justice statewide. It calculates a score for every census tract using pollution, poverty and other demographic data. 

Census tracts that score in the top 25% are designated as “disadvantaged communities” by the California Environmental Protection Agency. Those communities and the organizations serving them then get priority access to a cut of California’s cap-and-trade program revenue, which state agencies distribute through grants. 

California law requires that 35% of that cut, which totals about $12 billion, goes to programs that benefit disadvantaged communities and low-income households. In practice, about 76% has gone to those communities, far exceeding the legal requirement, according to Sarah Izant, deputy secretary for climate policy at the California Environmental Protection Agency. 

When a neighborhood is left off the disadvantaged-communities map, government agencies and nonprofit organizations in the area miss out on priority access to state grants that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and can support the neighborhood in a variety of ways, from increasing climate resilience, bolstering community health, improving transit or supporting urban development. 

Individual community members lose access to no-cost rooftop solar installations and energy-bill discounts, which are available to income-qualifying single-family homes. 

The losses are already arriving. Cyndy Comerford, climate program manager at the San Francisco Environment Department, said her agency just lost a grant for an urban greening program, in large part because many of the census tracts it would serve were not on the state’s disadvantaged communities list. 

Though the state doesn’t deem those areas disadvantaged, San Francisco considers them environmental justice communities, meaning their environmental and socioeconomic burdens rank in the top third citywide. 

The current tool “underestimates our environmental burdens and it leaves the city ineligible for a lot of funding,” said Comerford. 

Imprecise data underestimates need

CalEnviroScreen struggles to capture vulnerability in San Francisco, where some of the city’s residents who are most in need of help live in SROs. CalEnviroScreen doesn’t account for indoor air quality, and in SROs, cramped quarters, poor ventilation and old buildings trap dust and mold. These conditions can lead to, or exacerbate, a variety of health complications, including respiratory illnesses. 

A 2021 Brightline Defense survey found that 57% of SRO residents had chronic conditions worsened by poor air quality from disasters like wildfires, though only 18% could afford an air filter. The tool only tracks asthma-related emergency room visits, missing the full range of respiratory and chronic illnesses that trouble SRO tenants.

It also fails to perceive vulnerability across the great diversity of communities statewide, multiple advocates said. It compares rural census tracts in the Central Valley, which might be home to 1,000 people, with tracts in San Francisco that might have 11,000 people, said Comerford, who has worked with the city and state to improve CalEnviroScreen for more than a decade. 

In a densely populated area, many more people could be exposed to a given pollution source, and the state agency should consider those tracts more vulnerable, she said. 

CalEnviroScreen also doesn’t capture urban homelessness, and its data on air pollution is far less detailed than the city’s localized air quality monitor data, she said. 

Since the previous iteration of CalEnviroScreen, data for some census tracts have suggested that neighborhood conditions have improved drastically, flouting the on-the-ground reality, Comerford said. One tract in Bayview showed diesel emissions had been cut in half, but that was merely a data anomaly, she said. 

Comerford said she wished state agencies would work more closely with the city to gauge vulnerability.  

Alvarado said his team considered accounting for population but ultimately decided against it. 

“It would skew scores toward dense areas and disadvantage rural areas,” he said. 

Alvarado added that it is important to maintain consistent data-collection methods across the state, rather than use local data sources, even if they are higher quality. 

“The more affluent communities are going to have the most data,” he said. 

A 2024 research paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence found CalEnviroScreen highly sensitive to small changes, which led to large fluctuations in which tracts qualified as disadvantaged from one update to the next. 

Those fluctuations are financially consequential, the researchers warned: Their analysis estimated that receiving “disadvantaged” status yielded a 104% increase in funding, equivalent to an additional $2 billion over a four-year period for 2,007 tracts statewide. 

CalEPA created its disadvantaged communities list based on data, while spending little time on the ground in communities, said Pratibha Tekkey, director of community organizing at the Central City SRO Collaborative, which serves the Tenderloin and SoMa. 

“It’s different to be in the community and feel and see the air quality and what’s going on,” Tekkey said. “Certain things are not captured in the demographics.” 

Gentrification stymies tool and safeguards 

The tool relies on census-tract averages, blending demographics and pollution across entire neighborhoods. In San Francisco, luxury high-rises sit next to SRO hotels, and as gentrification brings wealthier residents, tract-wide measures of illness and poverty often drop. 

While on paper those neighborhoods look less disadvantaged, long-time SRO tenants remain in old housing, breathing the same indoor air pollution the map fails to measure.

As a result, the Mission and Excelsior neighborhoods were also excluded entirely from the preliminary disadvantaged communities list. Edges of the Tenderloin were left off, too. Chinatown, the city’s lowest-income neighborhood, has never been on the list.

Bayview-Hunters Point has kept its disadvantaged status for now, but it saw its scores drop due to an influx of affluent residents. 

In 2021, advocates successfully pushed the California Environmental Protection Agency to grant disadvantaged status to tracts in Bayview-Hunters Point, which harbors notoriously heavy pollution burdens and includes the radioactive Naval shipyard. But that success is on the chopping block. 

In the most recent tool update, multiple tracts in Bayview-Hunters Point scored below the top 25% cutoff for disadvantaged communities. In a change that baffled residents and leaders, the tract that contains the toxic, radioactive Naval shipyard saw its score plummet. 

The tool doesn’t account for radioactive pollutants like those that contaminate the shipyard. Further, since the last iteration of the tool, a developer constructed luxury homes and wealthy residents moved in, further suppressing the tract’s score. However, the area is still saddled with pollution, and many longtime residents face health problems. 

State rules allow tracts to keep their disadvantaged designation for one additional iteration after their score drops below the threshold. Therefore, even though Bayview-Hunters Point tracts fell out of the top 25% this year, they will be carried over into this update’s set of disadvantaged communities. 

But the carryover won’t extend further. If its score remains too low, the tracts’ disadvantaged status could vanish in the next update.

“You might as well just erase those of us who have been here for generations,” said Arieann Harrison. 

Harrison is the founder and chief executive officer of the Marie Harrison Community Foundation, an advocacy organization in Bayview-Hunters Point named after her late mother, also a neighborhood activist. 

Similar turnover has eroded the disadvantaged status of Jackson’s tract in SoMa. Between when her tract first qualified as disadvantaged in 2017 to the most recent tool update, new residents moved in and roughly doubled the median household income. In that time, her tract fell off the disadvantaged communities list and hasn’t been carried over in the latest update.

Chinatown left behind

Chinatown has long been excluded from the map of underserved communities, even as residents suffer from respiratory issues tied to their environment. 

The first draft of CalEnviroScreen 5.0 would have included the neighborhood as a disadvantaged community, yet the final version left it out once again. 

In a statement, District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter said the tool’s vulnerability measures, such as housing burden and linguistic isolation, are major challenges for Chinatown residents and that the community deserves investment to help correct generations of exclusion and socioeconomic challenges. 

Malcolm Yeung, chief executive officer of the Chinatown Community Development Center, said being left off the map means Chinatown either loses access to funding entirely or is at a competitive disadvantage for grants, making it harder to improve aging housing and protect residents’ health.

“For an area that has the highest density of residents and some of the oldest housing stock,” he said, “it’s going to get harder and harder for us to improve these buildings in a way that benefits the health of our residents and community.”

Ming, 63, who is using a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation from her landlord, said she began to worry the Chinatown SRO unit she had lived in for 18 years was harming her family when her son’s doctors came by for a checkup a couple of years ago. The doctors told her that the conditions in her home were the reason her 7-year-old has had asthma since he was a baby. 

“The doctor said the building is too old and has too many cockroaches, along with poor air ventilation, which caused a bacterial infection,” Ming said in Mandarin. 

The doctor gave her a letter instructing her landlord to improve her apartment’s condition, but she never delivered it out of fear of losing the $200-a-month unit.

In their 80-square-foot room, Ming has carved out spaces for living, food storage and two sleeping areas. Her son still suffers from frequent coughing, nosebleeds and fevers. She wants to move, but affordable housing either requires a minimum income higher than hers or is too expensive. Ming said her only hope is a housing subsidy that could take years to get.

Another tenant, who asked to be identified only as Ho, also out of fear of retaliation from her landlord, has lived in a cramped Chinatown SRO for 12 years. Since moving in, she has had a constant runny nose and scratchy throat. Like Ming’s home and the four other Chinatown SRO units that Public Press reporters visited, her room has little air ventilation. She keeps her door shut to keep mice out and blocks her only window, which faces a trash-filled gap between buildings.

Sandy Jiang, a community organizer supervisor with the Chinatown Community Development Center, said her team serves about 300 SRO residents and hears similar stories. She said many residents have normalized the environmental injustice they live with and often don’t realize their sickness is connected to pollution in their living environment.

“Because they’ve been dealing with these kinds of conditions for such a long time, it’s become part of their lives,” she said.

A way forward

Eddie Ahn of Brightline Defense said he hopes the California Environmental Protection Agency will consider including more tracts in the disadvantaged-communities designation by expanding the top 25% threshold to 35%. That would add back some Chinatown tracts that would have qualified under an earlier draft of CalEnviroScreen 5.0, before they dropped below the cutoff in the final version. One of those tracts has a percentile score of 74.5 — just a half point below the threshold to gain disadvantaged status.

Ahn also wants the agency to combine the disadvantaged tracts from the last three CalEnviroScreen versions to protect that disadvantaged status further into the future. A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Stanford found this approach would reduce the tool’s sensitivity to small changes by 71%, whereas the current approach of honoring designations from the last two iterations of the tool only curbs sensitivity by 41%. 

But the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Izant said her agency wanted to avoid diluting the resources set aside for the communities with greatest need, and that data from previous versions of the tool were outdated.

“We’ve assessed that if we were to carry forward census tracts from 3.0, that would end up bringing over census tracts that, using the current, updated information, would not be near that threshold of the top 25%,” Izant told the Public Press in a community workshop. 

Comerford, Tekkey and Ahn all said they felt both state agencies had lacked community engagement and public process in the rollout of the tool and designation of disadvantaged communities. The California Environmental Protection Agency is accepting emailed public comments at DACinquiries@calepa.ca.gov until Aug. 14 at 5 p.m. 

Miryam Aspajo, 62, said she felt disempowered after learning that much of her SoMa community was left off the disadvantaged-communities map. This isn’t the first time the calculator has missed San Francisco communities in need. The SoMa resident and tenant organizer advocated for central city tracts in 2021, when the previous version of the tool threatened to exclude them.  

“I can’t understand why our communities are being left out again,” Aspajo said in Spanish, through a translator. “I wish the people in charge would go into the communities and see how people live.”