San Francisco, CA
People We Meet: For Arieann Harrison, eco-activism is in her DNA
Attend any neighborhood meeting in Bayview-Hunters Point, whether it’s put on by tenants groups, the neighborhood’s air protection program or the Hunters Point Shipyard’s citizens advisory committee, and you are bound to come face to face with Arieann Harrison.
Harrison, the CEO of the Marie Harrison Foundation, an environmental justice nonprofit named after her mother, is a formidable opponent to anyone with a key interest in projects that could pose a health risk to her neighbors.
That’s because Harrison has skin in the game.
Harrison lost her mother in 2019 after a long battle with lung disease. She had never been a smoker. Although it has not been proven, Arieann Harrison blames the Hunters Point Shipyard, a toxic Superfund site where her mother worked in her youth.
Later, as an adult, Marie Harrison tirelessly advocated throughout the 1990s for a transparent cleanup of the site, and fought on behalf of environmental concerns throughout the neighborhood.
Her efforts eventually helped lead to the closure of the Hunters Point Power Plant, which prior to 2006 spewed pollution over the neighborhood.
“I guess you could say it’s in my DNA,” said Harrison, when asked why she decided to turn to activism herself.
But it wasn’t an automatic calling. “I’ll be the first person to tell you,” Harrison said, sitting in Bayview’s Southeast Community Center, “I didn’t want to be nothing like my mother and father.”
As a teenager, Harrison had a taste for rebellion. At night, she would climb out of her bedroom window and change her clothes in the dark to follow the Bayview-Hunters Point-born, all-Black heavy metal band Stone Vengeance to their next gig.
“I was an angry kid,” said Harrison, who now laughs about it. “When you’re young and carefree, you don’t give a shit about anything.”
Harrison’s first love was for music. While following the band, she played her own music, writing lyrics and playing the keyboard in now-closed holes-in-the-wall across San Francisco and Oakland.
“It was a wild time,” Harrison said, recalling one memory in which she dared a member of Stone Vengeance to dive headfirst — in his leather pants — into a lake in Golden Gate Park.
“It got scary fast. It was so dark, we could just hear splashing,” said Harrison. “But it was so fun, we went back the next weekend.”
But when Harrison went to her first social-justice meeting at City College, it fit like a glove.
“I grew up in those rooms,” said Harrison, whose father was also an activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. “And I grew up with the notion that you had to do something.”
Harrison worked as a case manager in Bayview for decades, never moving from the Hunters Point waterfront, and often taking care of her younger sisters and brothers while her mother worked to gather evidence that the U.S. Navy had botched its cleanup of the shipyard.
When her mother died in 2019, Harrison was left with a very large shadow. Neighbors who knew her mother will often stop her in the street, including during Mission Local’s interview, exclaiming how they knew her mother.
“Hey, I know you!” called out one Bayview resident. “I knew her when she was just a little girl,” he said. “I knew her mother very well.”
But her fear, she said, is that one day her mother will be forgotten.
“I don’t want us to just be memorialized in pictures and street names,” she said, sitting in the community center’s cafe, in which murals of community activists are plastered over the walls. “I want our children to see the fruits of all that she’s done.”
The year after her mother died, Harrison hosted an Earth Day event. “Kids came from everywhere,” said Harrison. “There were so many kids, they covered it from the air to the ground.”
Harrison started the Marie Harrison Foundation in 2023, working with children in Bayview and across San Francisco to teach science and environmental justice.
“I wanted to see it through,” said Harrison. “I wanted to make sure that what she started did not end without a greater outcome.”
The foundation has also worked to pressure industries to reduce truck traffic and air pollution in the neighborhood and has worked to hold the U.S. Navy accountable at the shipyard. She’s also started a scholarship in her mother’s name.
When she watched her kids march into City Hall and towards the mayor’s office on Earth Day in 2019, Harrison stood back, in awe.
“I almost broke inside,” said Harrison. “Someting in me broke. I just thought, this is why. It’s like my mom’s spirit was with me, and I haven’t stopped since. And I won’t stop until we get the desired outcomes that we need.”
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder hosted her first community listening session Thursday night since returning from a three-month medical leave.
Dozens of District 9 residents packed the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center to welcome back Fielder and voice concerns about issues affecting their communities.
“We are thankful that you took time for yourself to equip yourself to be sitting here today,” one attendee told Fielder. “So I thank you and commend you for returning.”
Fielder returned to City Hall last month after taking a three-month medical leave.
“I’m just grateful for the outpouring of support that I had and glad to be back on the job,” Fielder said. “Mental health is really prevalent, and I’m not going to shy away from the fact that I had a mental health crisis. This is a challenging job, and I’m very privileged to be here.”
Fielder said she is hosting a series of town hall-style meetings to give residents an opportunity to voice their concerns.
“To me, the biggest issue locally is the homeless issue, and it’s citywide,” San Francisco resident Maggie Weis said.
Fielder was joined by members of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and San Francisco Police Department to answer questions about pedestrian safety, city budget cuts and other issues.
The supervisor said one of her priorities moving forward is expanding access to clean, well-maintained public restrooms.
“[We’re] still seeing a lot of feces around the district and city,” Fielder said. “Would love to see our city have more public bathrooms and be able to maintain them as well.”
The next listening session is scheduled for July 23 at 6 p.m. at La Fénix in the Mission.
Watch the full report from KRON4’s Sara Stinson in the video player at the top of the story.
(KRON) — A 32-year-old man has been missing in San Francisco for two days, police said. Gabriel Carreon was last seen at noon on July 7, when he left his home in the Castro neighborhood to go see a movie, the San Francisco Police Department said.
The following morning, a 911 caller told dispatchers that Carreon was missing.
Police described the missing man as Asian, 5’8’’ tall, and weighing 170 pounds. He has black hair dyed pink, and brown eyes.
Anyone who locates Carreon should call 911 and report his current location, police said. Anyone with information on his possible whereabouts should call the SFPD Missing Persons Unit Tip Line at 415-734-3070.
Sick of the TSA lines? Tired of playing musical chairs at the gate? Rather sit as far from your fellow airplane passengers for as long as possible, in the comfort of your own private, luxury airport terminal?
Soon you may get your wish. And San Francisco international airport wants to be your genie – for a fee.
The airport is hoping to build a brand-new terminal exclusively for passengers who pay a premium, gaining access to a luxurious airport experience complete with private security lines and valet service from terminal to tarmac. It will service commercial flights, not business or corporate jets, and the terminal will have its own Transportation Security Administration (TSA) lines as well as Customs and Border Protection (CBP) lines for international travel.
SFO is seeking bidders to take on the development, construction and operation of the private terminal, which is planned for a 75,000-sq-ft site located across the runway from all current public terminals. The airport will accept proposals between late September and early October, and is looking to award a contract by early December with hopes of opening the terminal in late 2028.
SFO’s interest in a luxury development comes from what airport spokesperson Doug Yakel called a “high level of demand” for “premium experiences” in travel, citing the popularity of existing credit card and premium lounges. A private terminal is essentially the next step up in exclusivity from those lounges – and the best chance at avoiding airport crowds entirely.
“Somebody that uses this product really wouldn’t see the other passengers they’re traveling with until they’re taken up the stairs of the jet bridge and onto the aircraft,” Yakel said.
Spending on “pay-to-play” luxury experiences at large is on the rise, according to a new report by Bain & Company and Altagamma. The airline industry has bought in, revamping lounge and onboard experiences with chef-designed menus and expanded premium seating for the highest-paying passengers.
Many see a market in San Francisco, where an AI-driven wealth boom is already agitating the local housing market, with homes sold at the fastest pace in five years and the single-family median home price clocking in at $2.2m.
Yakel said SFO felt now was the right time to enter the market of luxury travel.
“We see the level of interest that’s being invested onboard aircraft, inside terminals, around airports, and clearly this is something that other airports are rolling out,” Yakel said.
The price to pay for a private airport experience will be decided by whoever wins the bid for operations, and will be offered on a membership or per-use basis. The traffic experienced at public terminals likely won’t change, Yakel said.
Private terminals have become popular worldwide. London Heathrow and Paris-Charles de Gaulle airports in Europe have long operated luxury terminals, and São Paulo/Guarulhos international airport recently opened the first private terminal in Latin America.
If SFO is successful, it would become the next major American airport to open a luxury terminal. Los Angeles, Dallas Fort Worth, Miami and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta international airports all offer a private terminal through PS (formerly known as the Private Suite), a company owned by security firm Gavin de Becker and Associates. Multiple representatives from PS and Gavin de Becker and Associates attended a June conference hosted by SFO about the private terminal, and PS has said it hopes to open a private terminal at every major US airport by 2030.
Access to existing PS private terminals can cost passengers $1,295 for a one-time experience, or up to $4,850 for a yearly membership. Heathrow’s private terminal costs thousands of pounds per person.
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