Wallace’s Story

The evidence of Wallace Pellette’s efforts to build up his community sits right outside his front door.

Just half a block from his apartment on Sunnydale’s main street, workers are putting the finishing touches on a new 55-unit building. Pellette, a carpentry apprentice, helped build it from the ground up.

A half a block in the other direction sits the community center where Pellette runs counseling groups to help his neighbors cope with trauma and stress.

After living all of his 30 years in this neighborhood, Pellette is working to create the community –and be the role model — he wishes he had growing up. He especially wants this for his 13-year-old daughter, Wa’lae, who lives in the 2-bedroom apartment with Pellette, her mother, and their Maltese terrier mix, Polo.

Pellette’s bright smile reflects a disarming optimism that has helped him push through many challenges over the decades.

Pellette is intimately familiar with the hardships facing his Sunnydale neighbors. When he was just 10, his father died, leaving him on his own “to find out how to be a man.” Growing up, he floated from home to home, living with his great-grandmother and a collection of aunts and cousins. Pellette’s first tattoo, which he got on his left forearm when he was 15, pays homage to a 16-year-old cousin who died from gun violence.

“Wallace is a really good young man,” said Drew Jenkins, a community advocate and a program manager at Mercy Housing. “No matter how hard it had gotten for him, he still fought through any kind of negative that was coming at him and kept his head up and stayed positive. Me, personally, I’m very proud of Wallace.”

Jenkins said he watched police target Pellette and his friends when they were younger, wrongly labeling them gang members because of their race and where they lived.

When HOPE SF needed someone to help run a counseling group, Jenkins thought of Pellette.

Pellette says getting his neighbors to trust him wasn’t hard, because they already knew him and knew that he’s been through his own share of heartache and difficulty.

“They all know that we come from the same place and go through the same things,” he said.

He helps them with the small day-to-day barriers that can make life challenging– offering rides to the store for those who don’t have transportation, helping find someone to pick up kids from school, or just being a listening ear.

Four years ago, Pellette started working for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, first ordering and delivering parts, then washing buses. With the help of the Sunnydale Workforce Collaborative, in June of 2018 Pellette joined a carpentry apprenticeship program.

In the months after, he framed walls, built rooms, and put up drywall on the building down the street, which will be a mix of low-income and affordable tax-credit housing. He also helped lay turf and build a scoreboard for the new baseball diamond at the neighborhood park up the hill from his house.

Jenkins said contractors love Pellette, because he’s a hard worker and always smiling. Jenkins says Pellette is a great example for the community of a deeply involved, young black father: “He’s been building the community up after people have been telling him that he’s been tearing the community up – and that wasn’t the case,” Jenkins said.

Behind Pellette’s own aging unit, construction equipment churns up dirt to prepare for more new units, a project he is hoping to join soon.

All of this lends itself to the sense of hopefulness Pellette feels. The community is tight-knit now, and people watch out for each other’s children, he said. He still worries about the pervasiveness of addiction and poor health and nutrition, but he notices that violence and graffiti have dropped off, and that more children attend their afterschool programs.

Pellette makes use of ample analogies describing the way new resources are transforming his community. He describes a long dark tunnel – and finally finding a map and a light at the other end. He describes being parched for thirst, and finally getting a bottle of water.

Sometimes during his lunch breaks, he would climb to the top of the 55-unit building down the street, just to witness the construction happening elsewhere in his community.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for for so long,” he said. “It feels good and it just feels different, because I’ve never seen no change like this in this community. It’s still unbelievable to me.”