As public housing goes, Daly City’s Midway Village looks idyllic. Located between the Cow Palace and San Francisco Bay, some 150 families live in modern pink or gray apartment buildings surrounded by a large, immaculate playing field known as Bayshore Park. Toddlers play in a day-care center at the park’s edge.
But into this sun-dappled scene on one recent Thursday swept longtime resident Lula Bishop, a clutch of protest signs under her arm. Self-described as “very vocal,” the former nurse at Stanford University Hospital has raised three children at Midway Village. She was heading uphill for a rally before the locked gates of the adjacent Pacific Gas & Electric Co. transmission center, where a backhoe was piling up mounds of dirt. In her wake came 50 or so residents of diverse ethnic backgrounds and Anne Eng, a staff attorney with the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University School of Law.
