San Francisco's island of poverty

Nestled in the southeast corner of San Francisco, 45 minutes and many worlds away from Silicon Valley, lies Bayview-Hunters Point: an island of poverty in an otherwise upwardly mobile urban landscape.

A playground burns in Alice Griffith public housing, 2008. | (Alex Welsh)

The neighborhood and its residents are finally seeing signs of revival. But redevelopment has been promised and slated for decades, while residents lived in neglect.

In 2007, a housing project in Bayview-Hunters Point, called Hunters View, was rated the worst in the nation. That same year, Alex Welsh, then a photojournalism student at San Francisco State University, did a photo feature about the proposed plans for a new waterfront property, focusing on the residents' fears of further marginalization. When the story was complete, Welsh, who is white, returned to the predominantly black neighborhood, drawn to the young men and women who were his age but living vastly different lives. "I felt that the young men, in particular, were criminalized and not given a voice in the mainstream media," he said in an interview.

During a two-year period, Welsh was welcomed into the tight-knit community. And he captured neighbors, friends, and family experiencing the tragic as well as the ordinary and celebratory moments of life.

"[The] young men and women in marginalized neighborhoods across the country face seemingly identical and intractable obstacles such as violence, poverty, and criminalization in their day-to-day lives," Welsh said. Such obstacles, he said, are "rooted in the systematic inequalities of our nation as a whole."

Here are a selection of photos from Alex's project We Out Here:

Friends and family mourn Andre Helton, 18, who was shot and killed in his car, 2008. | (Alex Welsh)