San Francisco residents pay $1M to live next to radioactive nuclear dump site

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David and Rick looked all over San Francisco for a home under $1 million, to no avail.

When the couple stumbled on the San Francisco Shipyard, a middle-class neighborhood rising on the site of a former nuclear-testing facility, they thought they'd found their real-estate bliss at an affordable price.

They came to the shipyard in 2017 because of an ambitious pitch from the mega-developer Lennar and its spinoff, Five Point. Together, the builders sold them on a vision of turning the abandoned shipyard, which has a history of radioactive contamination, into a live-work community with 12,000 new homes.

The shipyard is one of the last affordable areas in San Francisco, where a critical lack of housing has caused home prices to soar. The median price of a house in the city is $1.5 million.

Residents like David and Rick, who declined to give their last names because they feared backlash from the developers, considered themselves pioneers of the next hottest housing market in San Francisco. Beginning in 2014, hundreds of buyers put down money for homes costing roughly $450,000 to $1.5 million; the average cost of a two-bedroom condo is around $1 million.

Homeowners signed up with the expectation, they said, that they would essentially live in a construction zone for the next 10 to 15 years. Lennar told them the development wouldn't be completed until the early 2030s. But people held out, thinking the wait would be worth it when the promised amenities, like parks, office space, supermarkets, and an outdoor mall, arrived alongside their industrial-chic condos.

The shipyard residents who spoke with Business Insider said they now believe the development's timeline is no longer realistic amid reports suggesting the land around the new construction may still be contaminated with nuclear radiation left over from the US Navy's nuclear-testing facility.

The city of San Francisco, which accepts land from the Navy and transfers it to the shipyard developers, won't allow development in the surrounding area until the Navy can show that it's clean and safe.

Five Point says the $8 billion project is still expected to be finished by the early 2030s.

Last fall, the Navy received the results of a third-party data review that found Tetra Tech, a government contractor tasked with identifying and removing hazardous waste at the retired shipyard, had botched the cleanup before construction even began.

Former Tetra Tech workers claimed to have faked soil tests to expedite the city's largest redevelopment project. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, as much as 97% of the cleanup data in some areas may have been falsified or suspect. The Navy now plans to redo Last fall, the Navy received the results of a third-party data review that found Tetra Tech, a government contractor tasked with identifying and removing hazardous waste at the retired shipyard, had botched the cleanup before construction even began.

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