The Hunters Point Power Plant generated electricity for San Francisco from 1929 through 2006, operating through eight decades of the city's growth. The plant's fossil fuel combustion released particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants into the air of a neighborhood where asthma rates and other respiratory illnesses were already elevated. The environmental burden fell disproportionately on Bayview-Hunters Point's residents -- a pattern of environmental racism in which polluting facilities are concentrated in communities of color and low-income areas.

The plant finally closed in 2006; the Potrero Generating Station continued operating until 2011, when it became the last electric power plant within San Francisco's city limits to shut down. The Potrero Generating Station continued operating elsewhere in the city, but Hunters Point's closure removed one of the most visible sources of pollution from a community that had borne it for three generations. The closure was the result of decades of community activism by Bayview-Hunters Point residents who organized, protested, and lobbied for the plant's shutdown. Their success demonstrated that persistent grassroots pressure could overcome the inertia of utility companies and regulatory agencies.

The Hunters Point Power Plant's story is a case study in environmental justice -- the principle that no community should bear a disproportionate share of environmental harm. The plant's placement in a Black neighborhood during the era of residential segregation, its continued operation through decades when its pollution was known and documented, and the community's long fight to close it all illustrate how environmental burdens track along lines of race and class. The plant's closure did not erase seven decades of health impacts, but it acknowledged what the community had always known: the air they breathed was not the air the rest of San Francisco breathed.