The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s final report proposes a long list of ideas to monitor future city policies for racial impact, break down barriers to home ownership and promote public health and education. It also endorses the hot-button proposal to give eligible Black city residents payments of up to $5 million.

On Tuesday Supervisor Shamann Walton, whose district includes the historically Black Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, introduced a resolution to accept the final plan, which the supervisors could vote on as early as next week. 

Echoing his enthusiasm for the proposal, hundreds of Black San Franciscans converged on City Hall before the meeting, calling for local leaders to “cut the check” and act on the committee’s recommendations.

“What we are asking you to do is now making an investment in the future of San Francisco, by centering and prioritizing Black San Francisco,” said Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the committee, at the supervisors’ meeting.

[See our previous coverage on reparations]

Two other supervisors pushed for the creation of the office, saying it was necessary to repair past and ongoing racial harms. While all supervisors acknowledged the need for reparations, the discussion was light on specific policies board members were ready to support, or how to implement them.

In setting up an Office of Reparations, Walton said, the city must “identify a funding source to implement some of these recommendations,” in concert with the city’s Human Rights Commission.

At a Sept. 11 committee meeting, the Rev. Amos Brown, leader of the reparations panel’s health subcommittee, predicted that the plan would face additional roadblocks.

“Our task is just beginning, because even after we present this report and the board accepts it, there still has to be lobbying, pushing and practical deliverance,” he said.

In an email in July, the mayor’s office wrote that Breed’s position was that reparations, including cash payments, were best handled at the national level, but that she was interested in policy reforms to address systemic problems.

The proposed $4 million earmark for the office is a far cry from the $50 million Walton initially requested. But he expressed optimism about what such an office could accomplish, including identifying potential recipients and acting on some of the committee’s recommendations.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen, whose district includes the Mission, said she feared that money set aside to create an Office of Reparations would not be spent. She called on the committee and board to “fight that together, because that’s the first step.” Tuesday’s hearing did not include a vote, and Ronen encouraged colleagues to back up their words with action. 

Diverse Reform Ideas

At the hearing, reparations committee members highlighted several recommendations they said were community priorities, including an apology to Black San Franciscans for historic harms, the creation of a committee focused on equity in city policies, and ideas related to economic empowerment, fair housing, education and health. They also advocated fully funding Black cultural centers, creating an Afrocentric K-12 school, interrupting the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and encouraging Black business and home ownership.

Perhaps the most controversial of the 150 proposals, to provide $5 million in cash payments to qualifying Black San Franciscans, was one that the community strongly supported, Hollins said. 

“We fully expect that we will see financial reparations,” she said, adding that while the committee recommended $5 million, “we continue to look and figure out what financial compensation can look like for Black San Franciscans.” 

Others expressed doubts about broad public support for the payments. A recent survey by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies focused on a parallel effort in Sacramento, the state’s Reparation Task Force. The poll found that 59% of California voters opposed cash reparations and 28% supported them.

Eric McDonnell, the San Francisco reparations committee chair, said many people who might benefit from cash payments were skeptical that they would receive them. Citing a Pew Research study, he said that while 77% of Black Americans said they were owed reparations, only 7% of those surveyed thought they would get reparations in their lifetime. “The question to you is, do you believe?” he said. “We want to close that hope gap.”

In a public comment period that ran several hours, dozens of people waited in a line that stretched from the speaker stand around the back of the chamber to the entrance. 

In an interview beforehand, James Lance Taylor, a member of the Reparations Advisory Committee, said the hearing was an important step toward rectifying harms. “The fact that Black people can come to City Hall and start talking,” he said, “that itself is a healing process.”

At a rally of hundreds of people on the steps of City Hall before the supervisors’ meeting, a diverse group spoke on behalf of Jewish, Japanese, Latinx and LGBTQ+ community organizations, along with tenants’ rights groups and a multicultural working-class coalition. Attendees held signs saying “Asian Americans for Reparations” and “Jews for SF African American Reparations.”

Yet research shows a lack of public awareness about the issue beyond the Black community. The Berkeley survey found that Latino and Asian voters were less likely than Black and white voters to have heard of the state task force. Both San Francisco and California leaders are pushing for educational campaigns about reparations.

Taylor said reparations would benefit San Francisco as a whole: “There’s no Black-only policy in America that only benefited Black people.”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin said Tuesday that the proposed policies to support Black-owned businesses and expand opportunities to access capital were “low-hanging fruit.” He endorsed opportunities for leases with favorable terms on property managed by the Port of San Francisco, and possibly San Francisco International Airport and the Municipal Transportation Agency.

Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the Fillmore District, one of the city’s historic Black neighborhoods, criticized some colleagues for their support of War on Drugs-style policing policies that disproportionately incarcerate Black residents. 

“The task of reparations is not just to direct resources and policies to reverse past harms,” he said. “It’s also to learn the lessons from the past and make sure that we do not pursue policies and engage in conduct today that exacerbates anti-Blackness and racial disparities.” 

Opportunity for Leadership

The city created the African American Reparations Advisory Committee in 2020. This July, the committee released its final recommendations. If San Francisco moves forward with its plan, it will likely be the first local jurisdiction in California to do so. Other cities are also considering reparations, including Sacramento, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Oakland.

“San Francisco stands at the precipice of being a leader,” McDonnell said at the hearing.

The California task force is the first such statewide effort in the country. It submitted its findings to the Legislature on June 29, and state Sen. Steven Bradford introduced the first substantive reparations legislation in August. His amendment to Senate Bill 490 would establish a new agency to manage reparations to the descendants of slaves or free African Americans living in the country before 1900. The amendment has been referred to the Judiciary Committee and will be eligible for a vote in the next legislative cycle in 2024. 

In the meantime, the state’s members of the Congressional Black Caucus are preparing to launch a statewide educational campaign focused on the significance of reparations for Black communities. San Francisco’s state Assembly members, Phil Ting and Matt Haney, did not respond to questions about their positions on reparations.

The joyous gathering outside of City Hall on Tuesday included chants, musical interludes, a crowd rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and an original rap about reparations and the history of Black San Francisco. Activists said they remained optimistic.

“We must have the power to declare what we want,” said April Silas, director of the Homeless Children’s Network. “You see we are the authors. We’re not the subjects. Let me be clear: The word reparations does not have a question mark after it.”

The post With Reparations Office in Limbo, Advocates Urge Action to Help Black Residents appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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After dozens of meetings over two years, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee  released its final recommendations to the Board of Supervisors and Mayor London Breed on Friday.

Beyond policy ideas in a December 2022 draft report such as $5 million cash payments to qualifying Black San Franciscans, the committee added dozens of new recommendations such as the creation of a “Black card” program offering free access to city services and discounts at businesses. The proposal would also further shake up politics, adding two Board of Supervisors appointees to the Police Commission, including someone who has been incarcerated.

The final plan altered qualifications for reparations programs. For example, now participants have only to prove one “harm” to be eligible.

But the “what” of the recommendations did not change as much as the “why.” The authors added much detail to their analysis, expanding discussion of injustices committed by government and private actors against Black San Franciscans, growing the report from a 60-page draft to almost 400 pages.

It takes pains to point out a precedent for local reparations: compensation by federal and San Francisco governments for Japanese Americans imprisoned during World War II. The movement for Black reparations gained momentum in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police in May 2020, and was accelerated by racial disparities in the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. In San Francisco, reparations advocates, such as the local NAACP branch, had long denounced discrimination in housing, economic opportunity, disparities in health outcomes for Black residents. They also pointed to disparities in education outcomes — a greater challenge now than before the Supreme Court signaled a further curtailment of affirmative action nationwide.

“The court’s ruling,” observed James Lance Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco who sits on the Reparations Advisory Committee, “said ‘No, we want to go back to old America.’ And reparations is saying, ‘We don’t want to be broken anymore as a people, we want to go into the rest of the 21st century somewhat whole.”

The committee’s draft plan drew national attention by advocating for the $5 million payments, as well as other policies such as selling public housing units for $1 each, establishing a historically Black college or university campus in the city, building neighborhood health clinics in African American neighborhoods and supporting Black cultural institutions. These provisions remain in the final version.

The Board of Supervisors plans to hold a public meeting on Sept. 19 to discuss the final plan’s ideas, including presentations from several reparations committee members.

Though critics question the need for reparations in a city where slavery was not formally adopted, the report notes: “The tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes, and judicial enforcement. The legacies of these actions bear true to this day.”

The local report comes on the heels of a parallel effort in Sacramento. The California State Reparations Task Force on June 29 submitted its findings for consideration by the Legislature. Recommendations include a formal apology for “gross” human rights violations against enslaved African people and their descendants, cash payments, restoring voting rights to formerly incarcerated people, tax relief for Black families in neighborhoods where the government participated in discriminatory lending, a K-12 Black curriculum, and eliminating toxic waste near federally assisted housing and other areas with high concentrations of African Americans.

Committing Resources

On June 29, several San Francisco supervisors reached an agreement with Breed to include $4 million in the city’s two-year budget for an Office of Reparations. That sum was a far cry from the $50 million that Supervisor Shamann Walton, who proposed the reparations committee, advocated in March.

Walton told the San Francisco Examiner he was “definitely disappointed we didn’t get $50 million, definitely disappointed we didn’t get $10 million, but most certainly positive and optimistic that we’re moving forward and there will be a positive outcome.”

Taylor said $4 million was “not a small amount of money” and expressed guarded optimism that reparations would move forward with an office. “I’m encouraged because of recent developments, but we’re still up against the tide and have a long way to go and a lot of people to, you know, to meet and persuade,” he said.

A June 5 San Francisco Budget and Legislative Analyst report estimated that the office would require $1.6 million over two years for administration. The office could use remaining funds to search for eligible applicants, develop policy proposals, create pilot programs and set investment criteria. But more funds would be needed for bigger goals, such as cash payments.

Though the funds have been secured, Breed “has not agreed” to allow her administration to spend the money, mayoral spokesperson Jeff Cretan told the San Francisco Chronicle.

In an email to the Public Press, the mayor’s office wrote that Breed believes reparations, including cash payments, is an issue best handled on the national level. However, “we are always interested in reforming local policies to address systemic issues that impact our communities, including the African-American community,” her office wrote. “We will be reviewing the report to understand what is included, and will work to implement policies and programs that deliver on that commitment.”

The full board must vote twice to finalize the budget before Breed signs it by August. The board unanimously endorsed the draft reparations plan in March in a nonbinding vote, but its recommendations can still be amended or set aside.

Question of Eligibility

To qualify for reparations, applicants must meet criteria the board recently amended in part to align with language in the California State Reparations Task Force’s report. Participants must be either African American descendants of an enslaved person, descendants of a free Black person prior to the 20th century, or have identified as Black or African American on public documents for 10 years. They must also be over 18 and have been born in or migrated to San Francisco before 2006, with 10 years of residency.

The plan requires participants to have suffered harm, and several examples were added to the list and others clarified. Additions include documented injury by law enforcement, lending discrimination and substandard living conditions in public or subsidized housing. Instead of proving two harms as in the draft plan, participants now need prove only one.

Additional Policies and Findings

Four subcommittees of the Reparations Advisory Committee added dozens of new recommendations in the past six months, as well as historical discussion and contemporary study findings.

Policy additions include a Black legal defense fund to help city workers facing discrimination, a genealogy testing fund and housing opportunities for Black seniors and LGBTQ+ people. Another suggestion: using money from cannabis taxes and restitution from drug-related class action lawsuits to fund Black businesses, education and homeownership.

The final report cites findings by several academic and governmental groups. A Law and Policy Lab report from Stanford Law School details disinvestment in San Francisco’s African American community between 1970 and 2022. An independent reviewer from Stanford University documented barriers in the city’s recruiting, hiring and advancement of Black workers.

Also included are a community-led oral history guide from students at Stanford Law School, findings from interviews and focus groups by students at the University of San Francisco and a socio-spatial analysis of Black San Francisco and a survey analysis by Kerby Lynch, senior program manager for Ceres Policy Research, a policy-oriented research group focused on alternatives to the current justice system.

The report acknowledges that the movement will need backing from the community and elected officials. State residents “express significant support for reparations measures for eligible Black Californians,” though it varies by characteristics like race and age, according to a study from the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The survey shows that 87% Black Californians support cash payments, while only 47% of white people and 46% of Asian Americans do. Overall, cash payments attracted the least support — 63% — of any of the provisions surveyed.

But advocates note that many ideas once considered radical have come to fruition. “Momentum is in our favor,” Taylor said. “I’m most proud that we have inspired people to believe that this is theirs, that they deserve it. It is not welfare, it is not affirmative action, it is not Black begging. It is the result of actual harm that the state did to them as a population.”

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In recent months, I’ve had the chance to delve into the history of movements for racial equity and reparations in the United States, as well as the rich stories of San Francisco’s two historically African American neighborhoods — the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point.

When I set out to do this reporting, I spoke with Shawna Sherman, who manages the African American Center at the San Francisco Public Library, for some reading recommendations. In addition to books, periodicals and documentaries, the library’s collection includes a trove of primary sources. Sherman’s guidance was extremely helpful.

“The purpose of the African American Center is just to support African Americans in the city with resources to help them better their lives and just learn more about their history and things like that,” she said.

Given the upcoming holiday and impending release of the city’s reparations plan, I want to share Sherman’s book recommendations along with other resources I relied on as I reported on the history of San Francisco’s historically Black neighborhoods and the local movement for reparations.

There are many other resources to explore beyond what what we’ve included in this list. We welcome your recommendations in the comments section.

Books: 

• “Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco,” by Douglas Henry Daniels 
• “Our Roots Run Deep: The Black Experience in California, Volumes One and Two,” edited by John William Templeton* 

• “Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900-1954,” by Albert S. Broussard 
• “City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco,” by Chester Hartman 
• “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century,” by William A. Darity 
• “Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History,” by Ana Lucia Araujo 
• “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era,” by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts* 

• “Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcom X to Barack Obama,” by James Lance Taylor* 
• “Fillmore Revisited — How Redevelopment Tore Through the Western Addition,” a chapter by Rachel Brahinsky from the anthology ​​“Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-1978,” edited by Chris Carlsson and Lisa Ruth Elliott*

*Books marked with an asterisk were recommended by people I interviewed or brought to my attention during reporting.

Documentaries: 

• “Take This Hammer (Director’s Cut),” directed by Richard O. Moore

• “Point of Pride: The People’s View of Bayview/Hunters Point,” produced by the Bay Area Video Coalition 
• “They Can’t Take That Away: The Legacy of the Fillmore,” produced by Lubna Takruri and the Bay Area Video Coalition 
• “The Fillmore – Neighborhoods: The Hidden Cities of San Francisco,” produced by KQED  
• “Bay View Hunters Point – San Francisco’s Last Black Neighborhood,” produced by Andante Higgins 

Podcasts and Oral Histories: 

• “Planet Fillmore Orbit” by Lance Burton, (listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Tune In) 
• “Why San Francisco’s Fillmore District Is No Longer the ‘Harlem of the West’” by Bianca Taylor and Olivia Allen Price on KQED’s “Bay Curious”
• “Afro-Americans in San Francisco prior to World War II : Oral history Project,” co-sponsored by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society 

Publications:

• San Francisco Bay View
• The Sun Reporter
• The Root
• Prism Media

Reports: 

• An interim report by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans 
• A draft reparations plan by the San Francisco African American Reparations Committee 

City-Sponsored Presentations and Panels: 

• “State of Black San Francisco: Economic Dignity in Booms and Busts,” parts 1, 2 and 3, by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission 
• “Panel: Reparations Now!” by the San Francisco Public Library 
• “Harlem of the West – The Fillmore Jazz Era,” by the San Francisco Public Library  

You can learn more about the history of Black San Franciscans and access other materials by visiting the African American Center on the third floor of the Main Library Branch at 100 Larkin St. or by reviewing the center’s recommended reading lists online.

Public Press reporting on reparations:  

• “SF Reparations Plan Nears Submission, but Funding Not Yet Secure” 
• “Without Dropping Cash Reparations Idea, SF Investigates New Housing Reforms” 

• “Housing Program to Redress Urban Renewal Could Get Boost From SF Reparations Plan” 

Update: Additional items were added a few hours after this page was published.

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After 2½ years of meetings, community discussions, historical deep dives and policy generation, a panel tasked with proposing how San Francisco might atone for decades of discrimination against Black residents is ready to ask the city to step up and support equity rhetoric with action.

San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee is aiming to submit its final recommendations to the city on June 30, according to Brittni Chicuata, director of economic rights at the city’s Human Rights Commission. In the meantime, the city’s annual budget process is in full swing, which may affect funding and the timeline for whatever reparations policies the board decides to pursue.

The recommendations are nonbinding, meaning the Board of Supervisors may choose to support any number of the policies, or none at all. It can also amend them.

“Where the rubber hits the road is what that Board of Supervisors does,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco NAACP branch and health subcommittee lead for the reparations committee. “The ball is in their court.”

The recommendations, released only in draft form, number more than 100 and tackle disparities in educational achievement for Black students, differences in the median life expectancy for Black San Franciscans and the overrepresentation of Black people experiencing homelessness and incarceration.

In a March meeting, supervisors voiced support for reparations, unanimously voting to accept the draft in a nonbinding resolution. Of the proposed policies, some could be enacted quickly, while others would require more time. In some cases, advocacy at the state and federal level is required.

Breed must propose a city budget in June. Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the reparations committee, said the group has been discussing how to secure funding in this year’s budget.

“We’ve been actively having conversations as a committee, looking at the recommendations that are what’s been called low-hanging fruit, that the city could potentially move forward on in this budget cycle,” Hollins said in an April interview. She noted that the majority of city departments have equity plans that could offer starting points for improving accountability and addressing the needs of Black residents.

“Since you have an equity plan, you can then reallocate or reconfigure your budget so that this becomes a priority for what you need to do,” she said.

An Office of Reparations

After its plan is submitted, the committee — which is authorized to operate until January 2024 — will continue meeting to discuss how the city can follow through on reparations.

Some community leaders are eager to ensure this work continues. Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Visitacion Valley, introduced legislation in March requesting $50 million to establish an Office of Reparations that would help implement policies and find people eligible for programs.

Walton is trying to get the proposal on the agenda at the board’s Budget and Appropriations Committee, which is the first step before a budget request would go to the full board for a vote.

“If we get the supplemental heard and passed, obviously that will go into this budget cycle,” he said. “And then my hope is, of course, to be able to extend and get resources into the next budget.”

However, Breed indicated in late April that she had “no plans at this time” to back the proposal.

In response to recent questions about the mayor’s thoughts on the reparations plan broadly and how implementation of any policies would work without an Office of Reparations, her office wrote in an email: “The policies presented in the plan will be considered once they are final.” Instead of commenting on policy proposals, the email pointed to other programs that address racial inequity, such as the Dream Keeper Initiative and guaranteed income programs. The Dream Keeper Initiative provides down payment loans for first-time Black home buyers. The reparations plan suggests turning these loans into grants for those who qualify, among other housing-specific policy changes.

Walton is still trying to gain support from Breed and Board of Supervisors colleagues. If he fails to win over the mayor, he will need a veto-proof majority of eight supervisors on his side.

Breed’s lack of support for the office was disappointing to at least one committee member the day after it was announced.

“I haven’t talked to any other committee members, but I imagine they’re all discouraged right now,” said James Lance Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, who also sits on the reparations committee.

However, in the April interview, Hollins expressed what she called a “cautious optimism” that reparations work would move forward.

“If we do our work at helping to identify what’s immediate need, what the opportunity is, and then we collaborate with both the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors, we’ll be able to start moving things downstream, even before we have an Office of Reparations, or whatever entity is going to be in place,” she said.

‘The Second Oldest Idea in Black Politics’

The committee’s draft plan spurred a wave of headlines across the country when it was made public. A proposal to give each eligible African American in the city a one-time payment of $5 million led to criticisms regarding cost, especially as the city faces a $780 million budget deficit in the next two years.

Support for reparations is skewed heavily by race. A 2021 Pew Research Center study shows that 77% of Black Americans support reparations, compared with 18% of whites.

Much like the California State Reparations Task Force, which recently voted to approve policy proposals for the state Legislature’s consideration, the San Francisco committee is running into the question: Why are reparations being considered in a state where slavery was never legal?

For his part, Taylor said the concept of reparations “is the second oldest idea in Black politics, the first one being abolition.”

Hollins said California shared responsibility with the rest of the country for enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that compelled people in free states to capture those who had fled and send them back to enslavement out of state. California also at various times banned Black people from voting and failed to provide them with other legal rights and protections.

“California may have never had slavery as they put it, but the badges of slavery were here,” she said, adding that California “certainly supported all of the racist policies that excluded black people specifically, and that harm has had real consequences.”

Today, the lifespan of Black San Franciscans is 11 years shorter than the citywide average. Black households in San Francisco have a staggering low median income, $34,000 per year in 2019, compared with a citywide median of $112,000.

Urban Renewal

But slavery isn’t the only reason Black San Franciscans are pushing for reparations.

“Where people often think about slavery as the qualifying act that brings on the need for reparations, we know we have this very long history of deep housing discrimination and instability,” said Rachel Brahinsky, a professor of politics and urban studies at the University of San Francisco.

Starting in the 1930s, the federal government began denying Black borrowers loans based on a discriminatory housing practice known as redlining, in which certain areas — especially those with high concentrations of people of color — were deemed “high risk” for lending. Though redlining was a federal program, municipal officers as well as local bank officials, real estate agents and appraisers helped those creating the maps and designating risk. The maps informed local lending decisions in both the private and public sectors, which is how redlining contributed to racial disparities in homeownership, residential segregation and disinvestment from communities of color.

Brahinsky said racially restrictive covenants, which were rules written into property deeds that barred Black people from owning or renting these properties, as well as a practice in which real estate agents would encourage African Americans to move to certain parts of town when looking for homes, preserved segregation.

These policies contributed in part to the segregation of Black people into two main neighborhoods in San Francisco: the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point. Both neighborhoods were later subject to another discriminatory housing program known as urban renewal. Under this federal program, which purported to remove “blight” from cities, the government seized land using eminent domain, and cities razed buildings to make way for new construction.

“The way that blight was defined, it was about peeling paint, it was about infrastructural problems,” Brahinsky said. “But it was also about people and was also about race very much.” She said that up to 20,000 people were displaced by the program in San Francisco.

“It drastically changed the community,” said Ericka Scott, a Black businesswoman who was raised in the Western Addition and now owns Honey Art Studio. “What was once said, originally, to remodel, redevelop, fix up the community, was really code for demolish the community, get people out of here and get new people in.”

Today, San Francisco’s Black population is an estimated 5.7%, compared with 13.4% at its peak in 1970.

Before urban renewal, the Fillmore was a thriving cultural hub with numerous jazz clubs and Black-owned businesses, and was known as the Harlem of the West. Scott’s gallery gives visitors a taste of what that was like through a series of photos from “Harlem of the West,” a book of photos by Elizabeth Pepin Silva and Lewis Watts that chronicles the local jazz scene in its heyday.

Lily Robinson-Trezvant, 78, remembers hearing jazz music as she walked down the streets of the Fillmore during her childhood. Her family came to San Francisco in the wake of World War II. After living in military housing, her parents purchased a home.

“It was a beautiful two-story Victorian house. And it was perfect for our family,” she said. “They finally were living their dream. And just like they got it, they lost it.”

Robinson-Trezvant’s home was seized by the government, and her family moved to Plumas County near Reno, Nev. In compensation, they received “just nothing,” she said. “You couldn’t buy a house with what they gave us.” Her mother had a nervous breakdown. Eventually, the family returned to San Francisco, this time as renters, only to be displaced a second time when that home was torn down, she said.

In the years following demolitions, many plots of land remained vacant, said Lewis Watts, an archivist and co-author of “Harlem of the West.”

“For 20 or 30 years, the Fillmore almost looked like a ghost town. It would look like a war zone because there were a number of empty lots,” that remained undeveloped for years, he said.

Though it’s impossible to put a value on the trauma her family suffered, Robinson-Trezvant can point to the current value of her family’s first home. Unlike many buildings that were torn down, Robinson-Trezvant said her home was actually moved to the Mission District and she keeps tabs on it by checking real estate websites. The house is worth about $2.5 million today.

The Fillmore wasn’t the only African American community to be affected by redevelopment. Learning from what transpired further north, Black San Franciscans in Bayview-Hunters Point fought for redevelopment on their own terms, with some success. A group of Black women known as the Big Five secured $40 million in federal funding for new housing during redevelopment, but ultimately the neighborhood was hampered by a lack of investment in other areas, such as jobs, public transit and other factors like environmental racism.

[For a more in-depth exploration of how the Fillmore and Bayview-Hunters Point were affected by urban renewal, listen to the full “Civic” episode.]

Looking ahead

At the time of the interview, Robinson-Trezvant had not been following the reparations plan closely. However, she now has a copy of the draft plan, and said she wanted to read it through before forming an opinion on it. When asked if the city could repair past harms to the Black community, she said, “Anything is possible if you try and you care.”

Taylor, the political science professor, said he believed some kind of reparations would be approved, because these conversations are happening simultaneously across the country, and at the national level.

“We’ve mobilized hundreds of people in the city,” he said. “We’ve mobilized cities around America, where we’re inspiring people all over the planet.” Particularly children, who someday will be responsible for carrying on this work.

“We planted the seed for the next generation,” he added. “So even if we don’t win this battle, ultimately, if America can ever be right, we will win the war.”

Read the draft reparations plan.

The next African American Reparations Advisory Committee meeting is June 5 at 5:30 p.m.

The post SF Reparations Plan Nears Submission, but Funding Not Yet Secure appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

[Note: @MadisonAlvarad0 (that 0 is a zero) is planning to live tweet from Tuesday’s meeting]

The proposals are non-binding, with the committee noting in the plan that “it will be up to the community to create the momentum to ultimately get these recommendations officially codified into San Francisco law.”

The committee will submit a final version to the Board of Supervisors in June, but a flurry of headlines, including ones from CNN, Fox News and the Weekend Update segment on “Saturday Night Live,” latched onto the $5 million figure when the committee released a draft of its reparations plan in January.

Several supervisors have already weighed in on the possibility of such payments. Supervisor Dean Preston, who represents the Western Addition, Tenderloin, Haight Ashbury and Japantown, and Supervisor Shamann Walton, who represents Bayview-Hunters Point, Potrero Hill and Vistacion Valley, said cash payments were possible. Two others — Supervisor Joel Engardio, who represents the Outer Sunset, and Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who represents the Mission, Portola and Bernal Heights — said they were likely infeasible.

The plan outlines a range of possible action under four umbrellas: economic empowerment, education, health and policy. It also delves into the lengthy historical record of harms committed against Black people in San Francisco.

Beyond seeking compensation for the atrocities of slavery, segregation and racial terror, the plan calls for corrective action for harm caused by housing policies, particularly the displacement of thousands of African Americans from the mid- to late-20th century under a program known as urban renewal. The plan identifies other policies that divested Black communities of their rights, homes and ability to build generational wealth, including racist lending practices known as redlining (which de facto prohibited African Americans from obtaining loans to purchase homes), racially restrictive covenants that prevented Black people from renting or owning certain housing, race-based zoning laws that stopped them from living in certain neighborhoods, and segregated public housing.

The plan includes solutions addressing homelessness and housing affordability. Today, Black San Franciscans represent 38% of the unhoused population even though they represent only 5.3% of residents. They also have the lowest rate of homeownership citywide.

“A hope of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee is that this document would serve as an actionable tool for communities for advocacy, and really a road map for lawmakers,” said San Francisco Human Rights Commission Economic Rights Director Brittni Chicuata, who also manages the reparations advisory committee.

“Most of the folks I’ve talked to have only focused on the $5 million recommendation,” Walton told The San Francisco Standard. “I’m trying to get everyone to focus on the fact that the task force is taking this work seriously and came together with recommendations that we need to look at.”

Housing action items

The plan’s current objective regarding housing reads: “Ensure that all members of the affected community have access to affordable, quality housing options at all income levels,” and focuses on living situations that include home ownership, rentals on the private market, subsidized rentals and public housing. To help tackle ongoing disparities and rectify past harms, the plan offers these housing-related suggestions for those qualifying for reparations:

• Removing qualification barriers for subsidized rental units, and offering first choice to those who qualify for reparations. The plan also recommends that the city subsidize those who cannot afford a unit’s full cost.
• Guaranteeing funding for the Dream Keeper Down Payment Assistance Loan Program, which provides down payment loans for first-time home buyers in San Francisco.
• Changing Dream Keeper program loans into forgivable grants for those owed reparations, regardless of their income.
• Amending the below-market-rate ownership program to help participants build wealth. Currently, participants cannot pass along units to descendants or rent out properties.
• Creating pathways for public housing residents to own units by converting public housing into condominiums with a $1 buy-in for current qualifying tenants.
• Establishing and funding a Black-led community land trust, a type of nonprofit that owns and stewards land on behalf of a community, providing long-term affordable housing and assets like gardens or small businesses.
• Requiring building owners to make residential units that are vacant for three months or longer available for rent or purchase by people who qualify for reparations, and by Black holders of Section 8 vouchers or certificates of preference.
• Offering grants for home maintenance and repair costs for those who qualify for reparations.
• Paying extra housing-related monthly costs in new buildings that might otherwise act as affordability barriers for people who qualify for reparations, such as parking fees.
• Fast-tracking permit approval and providing other support for developers building below-market-rate housing.
• Creating new benefits for housing choice voucher holders under Section 8, a federal program for low-income people who pay 30% of their income for a private unit, with the government subsidizing remaining rent. Suggestions include giving voucher holders first right of refusal to any housing opportunities in the city and offering financial assistance to help with moving costs.
• Changing regulations regarding certificates of preference to offer further benefits to certificate holders, outlined in our previous coverage.
• Underwriting expenses that come with refinancing mortgage loans.

Some suggestions in the reparations plan may be difficult to implement given legal prohibition of racial discrimination in housing opportunities.

“I think we need to be more bold and take more risks and really be intentional in how we address inequities around race,” Walton said in a December interview about the city’s eight-year housing plan. Citing ongoing displacement of people of color and disparities in access to affordable housing, Walton said, “there are going to have to be some law changes that allow us to spell out and call out race, that allow us to call out ethnicity, and allow us to carve out for populations that have suffered the most injustice here.”

Regional and national context

Domestic reparations are not a new idea: The first recorded reparations in the United States were paid in 1783 to a woman named Belinda Sutton, who was formerly enslaved. In the past decade, the concept of reparations has garnered more mainstream attention, most recently bolstered in the wake of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd by police.

For a recent pilot reparations program in Evanston, Ill., the city gave 16 residents $25,000 each for home repairs and other property costs. The program is part of a broader resolution to give $10 million in reparations to Black people.

California approved the creation of a statewide Reparations Task Force in September 2020 and is considering cash payments among other policies. Meanwhile, representatives have introduced legislation to probe similar questions at the national level without success.

“We’re in a kind of sweet spot, and it’s in a moment of truth and reconciliation,” Chicuata said of the current mood regarding reparations.

The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, which meets monthly, formed in December 2020 under legislation introduced earlier in the year by Supervisor Walton. The committee’s 15 members come with a broad range of experiences. If you live in public housing, you can apply to fill a vacant seat with instructions here. The group plans to submit its final reparations plan to the Board of Supervisors in June.

To tune into the March 14 Board of Supervisors meeting, click here. You can dial (415) 655-0001 and enter the meeting ID 2487 791 7160 ## to comment remotely. You may also attend in person at the Board of Supervisors Legislative Chamber in City Hall, which is Room 250 at San Francisco City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place.

CORRECTION 04/24/23: An earlier version of this story included photos of two buildings, one incorrectly identified as having been torn down. The incorrectly identified structure still stands, and the building in the second photo replaced a different historic building that was torn down on a neighboring block.

The post Without Dropping Cash Reparations Idea, SF Investigates New Housing Reforms appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Urban renewal was a publicly and privately funded effort across the U.S. wherein local governments acquired land in areas deemed “blighted” — often using a racially biased lens — through eminent domain, forcibly displacing residents and demolishing existing buildings with promises to rebuild. In San Francisco, urban renewal targeted Black cultural centers and neighborhoods, uprooting thousands of families and destroying lively, well-established communities.

Seeking the “relative acceptance” of Black musicians in France, Leslie Crawford left San Francisco to pursue his musical career in Europe. The move did not go well.

“My dad died of an overdose in France and never returned home alive,” Majeid Crawford wrote in an email. “I blame urban renewal in part for my dad’s death and many others who died from broken spirits and hearts.”

Crawford’s story is one of thousands illustrating the far-reaching effects of urban renewal on San Francisco’s Black communities. Today, he is executive director of the New Community Leadership Foundation, a nonprofit partnering with the city of San Francisco to find people displaced by urban renewal — and their descendants — who might qualify for residences here through the Certificate of Preference Program. Certificate holders move to the head of the line to get into city-funded housing.

Though the program has existed for decades, the city is giving it renewed attention as the Board of Supervisors prepares to review a draft Reparations Plan to address historic harms against Black San Franciscans at a meeting March 14.

Because of high demand, San Francisco runs a lottery for city-funded affordable rental housing and units available for purchase. When individuals apply for units in a particular building, those with certificates of preference are placed in a separate category giving them priority over all other applicants. Then, their applications are reviewed for eligibility. If an applicant is eligible for an available unit, it will be offered to them. The process starts from scratch in each new housing project that is built.

Recent California legislation requires that San Francisco’s certificates of preference — and similar programs in other municipalities — be extended to descendants of people displaced due to urban renewal.

“If you get it, it’s the golden ticket,” said Cathy Davis, executive director of Bayview Senior Services, a nonprofit that provides housing and other services to seniors. The agency asks everyone who walks through its doors, mostly African Americans over the age of 50, for a childhood home address to see if they may be eligible for a certificate.

The Certificate of Preference Program is not new; the first certificates were issued in the 1960s as homes were razed and families were displaced from neighborhoods like the Western Addition and SoMa, though many of those certificates were never honored. The New Community Leadership Foundation hopes to change that and reach newly qualified descendants.

Historical wrongs

A federally and city-funded program, urban renewal led to the displacement of as many as 20,000 San Francisco residents — most were Black, though some were Japanese and Filipino. Writer James Baldwin famously stated after visiting San Francisco in 1963 that urban renewal “means Negro removal.”

It was an era of false promises: “Residents and businesses were given worthless promissory notes that they could one day return, but historically certificates of preference have not been tracked and have rarely been honored,” according to a draft reparations plan prepared by San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

At the same time families were being forced from their homes, “a San Francisco Redevelopment Agency survey showed that 34 out of every 35 apartments in the city prohibited African Americans, and the housing that was available was typically segregated, substandard, and expensive,” according to a report from the University of California, Berkeley. Many families moved to new neighborhoods in SoMa, Mission Bay and Hunters Point, and were displaced a second time when parts of those neighborhoods were seized under eminent domain and razed for redevelopment.

Renewed efforts and key changes

In November 2022, the New Community Leadership Foundation partnered with Lynx Insights & Investigations, a private investigation firm, and began scouring records for the names of people who were displaced and their descendants and trying to track them down. They have reached hundreds and anticipate reaching “well over a thousand” in the next two months, Giles Miller, a principal investigator at Lynx, wrote in an email.

Many of the people who were displaced remain in the greater Bay Area, Sacramento and Southern California. People also moved to Texas, the Carolinas and Georgia, Miller wrote.

This renewed tracking effort is benefiting from two key changes: a 2021 law that makes descendants of people who were displaced eligible for certificates, and a stronger commitment by the city to search for and alert people who may qualify.

The search starts with a document called a “site occupancy record,” which families filled out when they were initially displaced. Investigators cross reference the names on that list (heads of households and dependents) with commercial databases to find potential certificate qualifiers and their descendants, relying on tools like social media when the databases fall short.

Though many initial attempts are unsuccessful, the group is persistent in leaving voicemails and speaking with relatives. Once potential qualifiers are reached, they are referred to the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, where they are instructed to fill out a certificate request form and may be asked for additional records such as birth certificates.

Since the Certificate of Preference Program was established in 1967, almost 7,000 certificates have been issued by city agencies. In ensuing decades, the program expanded at various stages to include not just displaced heads of households, but other adults who were household members, children who were displaced, and most recently descendants of those who were displaced. But until now, the program has been underused, in earlier decades due to city government not honoring certificates, and more recently due to lack of trust and a lack of information in the communities it is meant to serve.

Of the nearly 7,000 certificates of preference, only 1,483 have been exercised. In January 2022, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development began issuing the first certificates to descendants of people who lost their homes during urban renewal, and since then has issued more than 30 new certificates to children and grandchildren of displaced residents. As of December, 914 certificate holders were in contact with the office and about 100 were actively applying for housing opportunities.

Reparations connection

Reinvigoration of the Certificate of Preference Program comes at a time when the city has renewed efforts to right past injustices. San Francisco leaders are considering reparations and other potential responses to the historical wrongs of slavery, redlining, urban renewal, displacement and other ongoing disparities. The Board of Supervisors is slated to hold a hearing March 14 on the draft of the city’s Reparations Plan.

In it, certificates of preference serve as one of several mechanisms that could establish whether a person might be eligible for reparations. Suggestions related to certificates of preference include offering certificate holders automatic qualification for city-funded units and first right of refusal for any rental or home ownership opportunities rather than making them enter the citywide affordable housing lottery, giving them stipends to assist with relocation costs for moving into any housing in the city, creating a more transparent process for residents to determine whether they qualify for certificates, and allocating more money for promoting the program and toward displaced resident location efforts.

To Brittni Chicuata, economic rights director at the Human Rights Commission, whose role also includes management of the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, certificates of preference are one piece in a puzzle of housing policies outlined in the plan.

“The hope for the housing solutions and recommendations is that there would be kind of a coordinated action or just understanding there’s the ecosystem of housing,” she said, noting such programs as down payment assistance and access to federally subsidized housing. “It takes multiple levers to actually make any progress.”

Employing certificates of preferences in conjunction with the reparations plan “creates a huge opportunity to prioritize this group of people,” she said. “If the city made that political and policy decision to only give housing to people who are on this list until that list was exhausted, that would be reparations.”

Remaining questions

Given the history of racial terror, distrust and shortcomings of San Francisco’s past governmental response to urban renewal, some community leaders still have questions about the scope of the certificate program and the larger affordable housing system within which it exists.

The Rev. Amos Brown said he doesn’t want policy solutions to solely focus on those displaced and their descendants, but to have a broader scope that applies to Black people more generally. Urban renewal “was not done individually, it was done to a group,” he said.

Urban renewal did “indescribably psychological damage to black folks,” said Brown, pastor at the Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and leader of the San Francisco Reparation Task Force’s health subcommittee. Brown is also president of San Francisco’s NAACP chapter and serves as vice chair of California’s Reparations Task Force. In addition to bearing the trauma of these memories, Black San Franciscans today also carry the burden of lower median incomes, more housing instability, and worse health and education outcomes compared with their white counterparts. Black households in the city earn on average $30,000 — less than a quarter of the median white household income.

A lot of people affected by urban renewal who qualify for certificates are struggling to get housing in the lottery system, which Davis of Bayview Senior Services called unfair. Eliminating the lottery for certificate holders, as the reparations plan suggests, could remove this barrier. Davis also said she wants to see the program expanded for those who were displaced in public housing, who do not currently qualify.

Crawford acknowledged that some people who have certificates of preference simply cannot afford available units, even when they are designated “low income,” but said that the program creates an important opportunity for those who were harmed to return to San Francisco, and could act as a galvanizing effort to unite community nonprofits on myriad issues related to affordable housing.

“Billions of dollars of wealth have been stripped from the Black community in San Francisco as a result of urban renewal, redlining and other government policies,” he wrote. “The Black community pulled themselves out of the ravages of Jim Crow just to have everything stripped from them. Reparations is needed to give back what was stolen.”

If you or a family member were displaced during urban renewal and may qualify for a certificate of preference, click here to see a list of affected addresses and here to submit an online application. To find out if you may qualify to be a Certificate of Preference holder, you can visit www.findmysfcp.org, email certificate@findmysfcp.org, or call 415-275-0035. For more information about the Certificates of Preference program, visit this city website.

UPDATED 3/3/23: Additional details were added to the resource information section at the end of this article.

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San Francisco’s Planning Department says this year’s Housing Element is the first to center on race and equity, but housing advocates say the eight-year plan doesn’t include a comprehensive strategy to build enough affordable housing.

For the first time, San Francisco’s comprehensive housing strategy plan recognizes housing as a human right and explicitly names race and equity as focal points. But community advocates say the document prioritizes market-rate development over the needs of the communities the city says it wants to serve. 

Called the Housing Element, the eight-year plan that California cities and counties must submit to the state for approval is a blueprint for local governments to show how they will keep up with population growth. San Francisco has been charged with building 82,000 units between 2023 and 2031, of which almost 57% must be affordable.

The plan notes that, “San Francisco’s housing problem is a racial and social equity challenge and an economic problem,” and later acknowledges that “many communities of color, especially the city’s Black and American Indian communities, have experienced deep, multi-generational, dispossession, harm, and near erasure, experiences that have yet to be fully told, documented, recognized, and repaired by City actions.”

To address some of these harms and commitments it made in 2020, the Planning Department branded this Housing Element as the city’s first housing plan centered on racial and social equity.

However, many community activists said that, while recognizing and rectifying the harms of discriminatory housing policies is a worthy goal, the plan doesn’t create a roadmap to deliver on those aims.

“I don’t feel like we’ve created a plan yet that we’ve set up to succeed,” said Charlie Sciammas, policy director at the Council of Community Housing Organizations, a grassroots coalition of advocates and developers focused on affordable housing and low-income communities. “It’s great to have all the lofty goals, but if the city hasn’t committed to put in place all the pieces we need to make sure we can bring it to fruition — that means a strong start to our public investments, and transforming our public institutions to truly prioritize affordable housing — it’s hard to count this as a win.”

The department began by researching and drafting key policy ideas to share with the public, before asking communities to reflect on the draft ideas and share their own housing challenges. It then updated the first draft based upon these interactions, returning to communities once again to refine policies. In these periods, the Planning Department also carried out focus group discussions with vulnerable populations and collaborated with community-based organizations on informational meetings and listening sessions, including events in Cantonese and Spanish, holding hearings open to the public and conducting a survey of residents.

In recent weeks, the department has been moving to finalize the draft, participating in a meeting at the Board of Supervisors and holding several commission hearings open to the public.

Housing development in San Francisco has not kept up with goals set by the state for the most recent housing cycle, with only 34% of the target for affordable housing units being produced. In contrast, developers built more market-rate units and achieved 150% of the city’s goal for that type of housing.

Data from the Planning Department shows that more market-rate housing is being produced in San Francisco than required under the 2014 Housing Element, but not enough affordable housing is being created to hit the 2014 targets.

Community-driven solutions

Dozens of San Francisco residents, many of them identifying as people of color or low-income, showed up in person and virtually to a Nov. 15 Board of Supervisors hearing to air their concerns about the city’s plan. Groups like the Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition, a coalition of 39 community-based organizations that came together during the pandemic, have also raised concerns.

“There’s a lot of interesting language in this housing element around centering on racial and social equity, and the three dozen or so organizations that are in the Race and Equity in All Planning Coalition from all over the city feel like it really doesn’t do that,” said Joseph Smooke, one of the group’s organizers. 

Smooke later credited the Planning Department for making some revisions based on the coalition’s feedback, but said, “what we’re looking at is a Housing Element that removes communities’ voices, and does not prioritize affordable housing.”

In a document critiquing the city’s plan and proposing their own strategies to build affordable housing, the coalition described the city’s proposed Housing Element as “largely a market-based housing production plan that assumes three insufficient strategies for affordable housing.” The coalition’s document, known as the Citywide People’s Plan for Equity in Land Use, draws on development ideas generated by local communities and neighborhoods as the basis for its equitable-strategy action plan regarding affordable housing production and displacement prevention.

Authors of the People’s Plan maintain that the proposed Housing Element relies on market-rate development to achieve race and equity goals. They criticized this framework, saying that developers prioritize profit over racial equity and that building more market rate housing will not lower prices due to the commodification of the housing market.

“Instead of trying to fix displacement with displacement, we’re trying to demand creative strategies for affordable housing, such as funding for small affordable housing projects, buying existing buildings, the small sights acquisition program,” said Amalia Macias-Laventure, a member of West Side Tenants Association, at a rally before the Board of Supervisors hearing on Nov. 15.

“In my lifetime alone, I’ve seen family after family, community member after community member, move out of San Francisco because they simply cannot afford to live here,” said Arianna Antone-Ramirez, a citizen of the Tohono O’odham Nation and a board member and adviser at the American Indian Cultural Center. “It’s insulting to our community when the Planning Department wants to come to us and ask us to think creatively about fitting in market rate housing with the affordable housing to be built.”

Another partial solution raised by the coalition and the Council of Community Housing Organizations was encouraging the city to increase land banking for affordable developments — i.e., purchasing land for later use without a specific development plan in mind.

Sciammas said that affordable developments have a hard time competing with market-rate developers and other private investors to acquire sites.

Sciammas commended the Planning Department for naming land banking as a “major strategy” in the most recent draft of the plan, but wrote in an email that “Our biggest concern is that the policy action will not go very far without a major commitment of public investments and a realignment of the city’s approach to affordable housing.”

Members of the coalition also pushed for community input in identifying possible sites and an increased role for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and housing-focused nonprofits in preparing for more affordable site purchases and eventual housing production.

No silver bullet

Speaking to the criticisms outlined in the Peoples’ Plan, the Planning Department cited economic barriers.

“Some of the community leaders within that organization want to elevate the affordable housing or housing that is produced by government and nonprofit organizations, and we are with them,” said Miriam Chion, the department’s community equity director. “At the same time, we have an economic paradigm within which we function, which requires private investment, and our job is to guide those private investments. We would be failing if we didn’t provide that.”

Chion emphasized the department’s efforts in reaching out to and listening to affected communities as it went about creating the Housing Element, which community advocates also recognized.

“We’ve made a concerted effort over the last two years to reach out to communities that haven’t typically been a part of these discussions, especially communities of color, lower income communities, to get their voices in,” Chion said. “It was going to them, to where they were, and having the conversations with them on their own terms.”

While the plan describes various communities’ desires to hear the city acknowledge and repair past harms, Planning Director Rich Hillis did not point to specific strategies when asked to explain how the city would do that.

“There’s not one silver bullet,” Hillis said. “There’s a host of actions, which is why this document is as long and dense as it is.”

New state requirements

San Francisco’s intention to address equity in housing align with California’s new requirements to “affirmatively further fair housing” in housing elements. This means adopting measures to combat discrimination, desegregate neighborhoods and transform racially concentrated areas of poverty into “areas of opportunity.”

Since 2005, only 10% of new affordable housing in San Francisco has been built in “higher opportunity areas” — defined by higher incomes, home ownership rates, and educational, employment and health outcomes. These areas also have higher concentrations of white households. The Planning Department points to zoning as one driving factor, noting that 65% of the land in these areas is limited to one or two-unit residential zoning.

In the new plan, the Planning Department recognizes the historical reasons for those differences, and proposes some policies in response. One of the biggest divergences the department sees between the current element, which covers 2015 through January 2023, and the proposed element is the fact that the new plan considers the differing needs and histories of neighborhoods across the city.

“We treat communities a little bit differently in this,” Hillis said. “We’re trying to build housing in those well-resourced neighborhoods that haven’t seen a lot of housing, and focusing efforts and actions around housing stability.”

San Francisco’s new Housing Element proposes rezoning to hit state mandates and developing more housing in well-resourced neighborhoods.

“We’ve got to engage with and build trust with communities,” Chion said. “Communities used to fight against the Planning Department and the Planning Commission — we welcome the challenges but it is also important to build collaboration. This Housing Element points us in that direction.”

However, some community advocates said the plan broadly focuses on development in these areas when it should be focuses on affordable development specifically.

“What we’re seeing is the planning is basically directing a density strategy instead of actually directing an affordability strategy,” Smooke later said in an interview.

Examining history and its ongoing impacts

The challenges communities of color face with housing instability are deeply rooted in the region’s history. The Bay Area was the birthplace of many exclusionary housing policies that are now common across the country.

In San Francisco, zoning was used to criminalize the Chinese community. The Cubic Air Ordinance and anti-laundry laws targeted Chinese communities in the 1870s, though both were found to be illegal in court. The former required 500 feet of cubic space for each person in a lodging house and was used to jail thousands of Chinese residents, while the latter gave the Board of Supervisors the ability to restrict where laundries could be located, the majority of which were operated by Chinese people. An outright attempt at segregation, the Bingham Ordinance, passed in 1890 and banned Chinese residents from certain areas of the city — giving them 60 days to move or be charged with a misdemeanor and face jail time.

Racial covenants were common between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, wherein white property owners and developers would write in clauses that barred people of color, especially African Americans, from buying or renting property.

Another policy, redlining, which began in the 1930s and was named for the colorful maps used to demarcate areas deemed “hazardous” for lending, denied borrowers access to credit based upon the racial or socioeconomic makeup of their neighborhoods. These maps contributed to divestment in Black communities and segregation across the country.

In the 1950s, San Francisco began planning the demolition of areas deemed “slums” or “blighted,” many of which were Black cultural hubs, in the name of urban renewal. The Western Addition was one such neighborhood. It encompassed most of Japantown and the Fillmore District — known then as the “Harlem of the West” — which itself was populated by Black communities in the wake of the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All in all, more than 20,000 families were estimated to have been displaced through the razing of these thriving neighborhoods.

Today, communities are still dealing with the fallout of these discriminatory policies regarding housing access and wealth building. The Urban Displacement Project found that 87% of San Francisco’s formerly redlined neighborhoods are currently undergoing displacement. San Francisco’s Black population declined by 41% between 1990 and 2020. American Indian and Alaskan Natives are also experiencing displacement, with their presence in the city dropping 16.7% between 2014 and 2019.

On Dec. 15, the Planning Department will hold a hearing to adopt the final draft Housing Element, which must be adopted by the city by Jan. 31 and found compliant by the state if it hopes to avoid fines, losing out on affordable housing funding sources and other penalties. Chion of the Planning Department said on Tuesday that the plan is close to being adopted in accordance with state guidelines, saying that only three minor changes still remain.

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The racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer inspired the reexamination of many historical figures, including John Muir, the man often called “the father of the national parks.” 

Even the Sierra Club, which Muir founded, issued a statement in June 2020 acknowledging some racist language in his early writings. It read, in part: “Muir was not immune to the racism peddled by many in the early conservation movement. He made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life.”  

Muir has been honored extensively, with his name on many sites and institutions, including 28 schools, a college, a number of mountains, several trails, a glacier, a forest, a beach, a medical center, a highway and Muir Woods National Monument, one of the most visited destinations in the Bay Area. But in the time since the Sierra Club issued its nuanced statement, some have come to believe that Muir’s legacy should be diminished because of his racist statements, despite his contributions to the preservation of wilderness and later writings praising native tribes. 

John Muir is such a touchstone and cultural icon for Californians that “Civic” decided to take a look again at his legacy by traveling to Yosemite National Park in Mariposa County. 

Choosing which stories to tell

Lee Stetson has studied John Muir and performed as Muir in six one-man shows he wrote about the 19th- and early 20th-century naturalist. Stetson has thought long and hard about Muir’s legacy and the disparaging statements he made about impoverished people he encountered in his early journeys. 

“Context is the question,” Stetson said. “We have to consider the comments from a young man who was first encountering the Black people in the South as he walked down to the Florida keys from Kentucky.” Muir’s comments on the Indian cultures that he met related to what Stetson called the “shattered cultures,” or tribes decimated by displacement. 

Muir called the handful of Miwuk living in Yosemite who had survived a racial genocide “dirty.” But his later writings show that his attitude shifted over time.

“When he arrived in Alaska” in 1899, Stetson said, “he was accompanied by and guided by Indians. He became incredibly fond of them. He was engaged with Indian cultures that were fully intact. His understanding of their loyalties, their families, their culture in general, was certainly very positive in every way.”

Regardless of whether one agrees with the argument for putting John Muir in historical context, when it comes to national parks, we often forget the people for the trees. But some of the Miwuk — people who still call Yosemite and the land surrounding it home — say the credit given to Muir for his stewardship and preservation efforts are overstated. 

“We were the first stewards of the land to be there,” said Sandra Roan Chapman, chairperson of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation. “They say John Muir found Eden. He didn’t find Eden. It was always there.” 

“Everything you read about in Yosemite is about John Muir,” she said, adding that members of other tribes have told her they feel the way she does, wondering why Muir’s name is on so many sites that are significant to Indigenous people. “Why do we always have to have John Muir on our sites? So, to me, it’s like, if it wasn’t him, it would have been somebody else.” 

She said that when Muir entered Yosemite, he knew nothing about the impoverished people in the region who survived by working for mostly white tourists. 

One might argue that debating John Muir’s legacy centers the focus on one man, rather than sharing the history of displacement, violence and inequity faced by native tribes.  

The members of the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation have more pressing things to contemplate than John Muir’s legacy. They are fighting for federal recognition, acquiring resources for their community and keeping their culture alive. They recently reached an agreement with the National Park Service giving them control of the site of a former native village in Yosemite Valley that was demolished by the park service in the 1960s. Construction on the site is under way to give the tribes a cultural and educational center in the heart of Yosemite. (The Public Press will share stories about those developments in future reporting.)

Rather than dwell on the negative things Muir said, Chapman said she prefers to focus on the possibilities for her tribe and others.

“They banished us out of Yosemite, but we’re still here,” she said. “And because we have our laughter, and we have our ceremonies, and we stay positive with everything that we’ve gone through, all the hardships and everything that we’ve had, we still stay positive. And that’s what you have to do.” 

Fighting for nature

San Francisco prides itself on being green, but much of those bragging rights come from the clean hydro power from the O’Shaughnessy Dam at the mouth of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Since the completion of the system carrying water from Yosemite in the early 1930s, it has given San Franciscans pristine water to drink and with which to flush their toilets. 

Muir spent the later years of his life fighting the construction of the dam, taking a major role in a national campaign to defeat the project. Despite his efforts, the trees in the valley were cut for lumber and the sacred sites of the Miwuk were drowned when dam construction began in 1916. 

In addition to his work as an actor and playwright, Stetson served on the Mariposa County Board of Supervisors from 2011 to 2015 and has strong feelings about the lost valley.  

“To drown it to a depth of 400 feet was to essentially obliterate a great national treasure,” he said. “They could very easily have stored that water downstream. We could do that today. There would be some loss of electrical power that is currently generated, but that can be replaced.”

Stetson is a supporter of the Restore Hetch Hetchy movement that wants to remove the dam and store the water downstream. 

“You could easily blow a hole in it — most of that sand would pour out that has built up at the bottom of it,” Stetson said. 

“In a few generations, we could have that valley back to us to a significant degree,” he said. “It would have a bathtub ring around it for a number of centuries. But hey, the planet can handle a couple of centuries.”

Echoing Muir

In our interview with Stetson, we had him take on the role of Muir, something he has done in his plays and at live events the world over, using his deep knowledge of the man’s writings and experiences. 

In the most important political moment of his life, John Muir convinced President Teddy Roosevelt to spend three days camping with him in Yosemite in May of 1903. Muir influenced the nature-loving president to expand Yosemite and create more national parks and monuments, setting a significant precedent for land conservation. 

I asked Stetson, speaking as Muir, where he would take political leaders today. 

“The Hetch Hetchy Reservoir,” he said. “I think one could find a great deal of instruction in it. And then, take them to Yosemite Valley and to show them what the Hetch Hetchy could look like. To preserve it is to preserve the loving process of creation. It is an enormously important thing to be doing.”

Stetson as Muir answered our final question: What would you tell the average person about why we still need wilderness?

“To go to it,” he said. “Go, because everybody needs to be kind, at least to themselves. And go because everybody needs beauty as well as bread, in places to pray and then play, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

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When we examine the massive wealth gap between the rich and poor in this country, what stands out most is how differently it affects the country’s white and Black populations. According to data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the typical Black family has $24,000 in wealth. That is less than 13% of the $190,000 in wealth held by the typical white family. 

This racial wealth gap is rooted in a long history of racist policies, including the progressive programs meant to mitigate inequality during the Great Depression. New Deal programs like the GI Bill helped millions of World War II veterans secure housing by promoting homeownership through federally backed loans and guaranteed mortgages. But it was real estate moguls who laid the groundwork for the subsequent National Housing Act of 1934.

From this act, a new federal agency was formed called the Homeowners Loan Corporation. The corporation decided who qualified for a loan with residential security maps that became the standard to determine the best places for housing investments. Black communities, regardless of their economic status, were given a grade D rating and branded as hazardous and high risk — no federally backed loans would be made there. And so, the vast majority of Black Americans did not qualify, according to Venise Wagner, a journalism professor at San Francisco State University who wrote the award-winning article, “Living Red: Black Steel Workers and The Wealth Gap.”

“They created maps,” Wagner said, describing the Homeowners Loan Corporation’s practices. “And then these maps, they designate the homes that would be viable for this mortgage program. And if the area was Black, then it was considered blighted.” 

Racist covenants on residential properties barred people of color from renting or owning a home in certain neighborhoods. 

“If a white person dared rent to a Black person, or if a white person dared to sell a home — then they basically were subject to a white mob violence,” Wagner said. “People would be so upset they would literally throw firebombs into the home. To scare them, they would write threatening notes saying, ‘You better get out of here, or we’re going to kill you.’”

These covenants were codified into law in a practice that’s now referred to as redlining. Redlining locked out millions of Black families from accessing mortgages and opportunities to build wealth to pass down to future generations. Although the practice was outlawed with the signing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, much damage was already done.

“There are areas here in the Bay Area, if you look at the old redlining maps, you can juxtapose them and see the areas of distress that remain today,” Wagner said.

Living in segregated communities has modern day consequences, including sharp disparities and family wealth, education and life expectancy. These maps were made more than 80 years ago, and yet they still impact families today, including Wagner’s family.

 “I’m probably the only person who owns a condo in my family — who has a mortgage,” Wagner said. “My mother and father don’t. My brother doesn’t. My other brother doesn’t. My sister doesn’t. My grandfather’s other daughter, she had a mortgage for a short while with the help of her brother. That ended up in smoke. But through predatory lending.” 

That predatory lending — in which people were approved for mortgages that by traditional lending standards would be considered large relative to their monthly incomes — led up to the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 to 2009. That’s when the bottom 90% of Americans saw one-third of their wealth wiped out. And there’s a direct correlation between the people who were targeted with predatory lending schemes and redlining practices.

“If you were to look at the redlining maps and look at the area where subprime loans were primarily targeted, you would see they were targeted at formerly redlined communities,” Wagner said. “So, all I can say is that history keeps repeating itself.”

Derrick Soo is among the vast number of Americans wiped out by the subprime mortgage crisis. He lives in a city-sanctioned homeless encampment in Oakland. His family also suffered from racist covenants that excluded nonwhites from certain neighborhoods. He vividly remembers what happened to his family in 1964 when his mother’s boss invited them to a Christmas party. He was just four years old. 

“That was an area that was still off limits to Chinese people, or people of color. It was a white only city,” Soo said. “Within four blocks, a Piedmont police officer had his lights on us and pulling us over. The officer was very rude, making a lot of racial comments about our race not being allowed in that city. And were we too stupid or didn’t read and understand English.

“I was terrified. I’m scared because you have a Caucasian cop with a gun, a badge, and the authority to do whatever he wanted, pretty much, and say we were trespassing in an all-white city.”

Today wealth inequality is most acute among people of color. Since 2005, African Americans and Latinos have made up about 60% of the lowest income families in each state, but they make up just 40% of the total population.

Research by New York University sociology professor Patrick Sharkey, who studies multigenerational disadvantage, shows that about half of African American families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods not just in a single generation, but over consecutive generations. Only about 7% of white families live in poor neighborhoods over multiple generations.

“Once we begin to think about inequality over generations, as opposed to snapshots of an individual’s life, we start to get a very different picture about the consequences of living in a poor neighborhood where we go to school, the quality of the air we breathe, the social networks that we form, types of economic opportunities available to us,” Sharkey said in an online lecture for the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. “All of these things come bundled in space and affect the life chances of everyone that lives within a particular neighborhood.”

Income gains were widely shared for about a quarter-century after World War II, thanks in large part to income taxes. By 1944, the top marginal tax rate was 94% on all income over $200,000 — $3.2 million today. Diane Frey, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University and co-editor of the textbook “Human Rights and Economic Inequalities,” said it was during that time that the labor class rose up.

“People had sacrificed for so long during the war, people hadn’t been able to buy things,” she said. “There was a lot of pent-up demand of people coming back and saying, ‘okay, we’ve worked this hard, we want a piece of the American dream, we want to have a nice house, we want to be able to buy a car.’ And so, there was kind of enhanced labor militancy following World War II. And part of that was massive strikes.”

From 1945 to 1946, the country experienced a series of massive strikes spanning numerous industries and public utilities. In the year after Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, more than five million workers were involved in labor actions. They were the largest strikes in American labor history. Then came the backlash.

“It became, began to be perceived, particularly by the right wing, all labor unions have too much power, we need to kind of clip their wings. They’re holding us hostage,” Frey said.

“We need to try to really carve take back some of the rights that were given in the original National Labor Relations Act. And that was the whole battle over Taft-Hartley, which basically kind of rolls back protections in the original National Labor Relations Act.” 

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 prohibited all kinds of strike actions, as well as secondary boycotts, closed shops and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. President Harry Truman called the bill “a shocking piece of legislation” that undermined democracy.

“Unions exist so that laboring men can bargain with their employers on the basis of equality. Because of unions, our living standards of our working people have increased steadily, until they are today the highest in the world. A bill which would weaken unions would undermine our national policy of collective bargaining. A Taft-Hartley bill would do just that. It would take us back in the direction of the old evils of individual bargaining.”

Truman vetoed the bill, but was overridden. 

“And so, we see the whole rise of union busting law firms and social psychology of union busting,” Frey said. 

Sponsors of the bill claimed that by weakening unions, they were giving rights back to individual working men. That ideology took hold in the 1970s during rampant inflation and an oil shock, Frey said. It continued into the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan gave numerous speeches extolling the “faith in the individual.” He also likened individual freedoms to a free market.

“We protect the freedom of expression of the author as we should,” he said. “But what about the freedom of expression of the entrepreneur whose pen and paper are capital and profits? Whose book may be a new invention or small business?”

This was from a 1984 speech that he gave before signing into law a bill that would give wealthy Americans the lowest tax rate in the industrialized world. 

Reagan cut income tax for millionaires and multimillionaires from 74% to 25%. There were no billionaires in America then, in large part because of previous tax policies. But after Reagan’s massive tax cuts, followed later by cuts by then-presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the country began seeing an explosion of billionaires. Meanwhile, median and minimum wages plunged faster than they had since the Great Depression. 

Reagan also took further measures to weaken labor unions. He started by famously firing 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, crushing that union in less than two weeks. Over the next decade, union membership went from about one-third of the American workforce to around 10% at the end of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush presidencies. 

Disempowering unions had a huge impact on widening the wealth gap.

“We found that de-unionization explains about a third of the growth in inequality for men and about a fifth of the growth in inequality for women,” said Bruce Western, professor of sociology and social justice at Columbia University, during an online lecture for the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. 

That’s because nonunion employers often looked to unionized firms to determine competitive wages. This also exerted influence in politics, keeping alive the conversation about equity among workers.

“So, there were norms in the labor market, in which people had beliefs about what a fair level of wages should be, and what a fair distribution of wages should look like,” Western said.

Reagan was so successful in shaping the narrative that we still use similar language today. Blaming poverty on the poor and claiming government was the problem, not the solution, became such a popular talking point by the 1990s that even Democrat Bill Clinton used similar words to overhaul the country’s welfare system.

“For so long, government has failed us, and one of its worst failures has been welfare,” Clinton said in a 1992 ad. “I have a plan to end welfare as we know it to break the cycle of welfare dependency. We’ll provide education, job training and childcare. But then those who are able must go to work, either in the private sector or in public service. It’s time to make welfare what it should be: a second chance, not a way of life.”

Opponents argued that punitive and unnecessary rules blocked beneficiaries from improving their circumstances. For example, adults without a high school diploma couldn’t get an advanced education because they had to spend much time working or volunteering to continue receiving benefits.

Top Democratic Party leaders continued to promote the notion of limited government for the next two decades. President Barack Obama evoked similar themes during his 2012 State of the Union Address.

“I’m a Democrat, but I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believes — that government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves and no more,” he said to thunderous applause.

This was an era when the pro-free-market drumbeat caught hold, thanks to right wing radio hosts. As Politico reported in 2014, conservatives backing the Tea Party spent nearly $22 million between 2008 and 2012 on influential talkers like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh. By 2016, Trump was emboldened to take on the labor unions. He marked Labor Day that year by attacking the head of America’s biggest labor union.

Policies have shifted with the election of President Joe Biden. He has endorsed a major tax increase on accumulated wealth that would target the top .01% of households. In March, he proposed a “Billionaire Minimum Income Tax” — a 20% minimum tax on households worth more than $100 million.

“When people see that we can’t really grow our way out of this,” Frey said, “the only thing that’s left is redistribution. That is the only solution that we can’t have everybody having nothing and a few folks having everything.”

But the ultra-wealthy always have a way to pass immense fortunes to their heirs without paying any estate tax. Currently, some are exploiting a loophole that lets them quickly churn assets in and out of trusts to make inheritances look smaller than they really are. As ProPublica revealed, the grantor retained annuity trust is estimated to have cost the U.S. Treasury about $100 billion over the prior 13 years.

This also serves to fuel inequality. 

“It goes back to power,” Frey said. “Because if you have all the wealth, you don’t want to give it up. And so, you’re going to use all of your resources. And if you’re Jeff Bezos, you have more resources than anybody, and your chances of winning are pretty good. So, I think that it’s really a battle.”

CORRECTION 5/12/22: The text in the section about strikes was modified to consolidate descriptions of events that were previously mentioned out of chronological order, to clarify their relation to each other.

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