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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Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in late May gave the 22-year-old complex a failing physical inspection score of 40 out of 100 as part of its regular oversight process to ensure safe conditions in subsidized housing.   

Andrew Ten, a HUD public affairs officer whose jurisdiction includes San Francisco, wrote in an email that issues related to building exteriors, systems and other health and safety concerns contributed to Plaza East’s failing score.  

Failing scores “are not a common experience, but it does happen,” Ten wrote.  

Neither McCormack Baron Salazar, which owns the complex, nor the San Francisco Housing Authority have responded to requests for details regarding the failing score. Pedro Abril, who works for the John Stewart Company, which provides management services for Plaza East, said at the meeting that the complex is filing an appeal with HUD regarding certain line items noted in the inspection, but that reversing those may not give the property a passing score of 60.  

HUD expects the San Francisco Housing Authority to immediately correct and document the correction of the most pressing health and safety issues at the 193-unit complex, and the federal agency will conduct a follow-up inspection in a year, Ten wrote.  

Of all public housing sites in the country, 13% failed their most recent inspections, according to data posted on HUD’s website, which includes inspection data through October 2022. Prior to the May inspection, HUD last inspected Plaza East in January 2017 and gave it a passing score of 82. HUD paused on-site visits during the pandemic.  

Additional Plaza East units had been repaired since the May report, and repairs had been completed on 154 units, according an email sent Tuesday by the Housing Authority. Because every single unit needed emergency fixes, 39 still await repairs.  

San Francisco gave McCormack Baron Salazar a $2.7 million loan to fix habitability issues at Plaza East in April 2021. A schedule outlined in the loan indicated that the work would be completed by May 30, 2022. As of this week, the company had used about 66% percent of the available loan, according to Audrey Abadilla, a communications and outreach associate at the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. 

At the meeting, Joaquín Torres, president of the Housing Authority Commission, expressed frustration at the slow pace of repairs and poor oversight by McCormack Baron Salazar.   

“I just want to say again, as I did last month and the month before that, that these gaps in repair service are quite simply not helping any of us achieve the goal of building confidence and trust with the residents,” Torres said. “The rate at which these issues are being quote resolved or quote addressed is something that is tremendously disappointing right now. And I want to be sure that this is something that is taken seriously, because the manner in which we’re getting this information — or rather not getting information — continues to be extremely dispiriting.” 

The city hands out loan money through reimbursement, which the recipient can request once a month. The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development aims to process requests within 30 days. The contractor making repairs at Plaza East typically does about $50,000 worth of work and then stops until the reimbursements come through, which can result in interruptions of two to four weeks, Jerry Johnson, an associate project manager at McCormack Baron Salazar, said at the recent Housing Authority Commission meeting.  

Other factors contributed to slow repairs, including staffing shortages and supply chain delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, a transition to new property management, severe winter weather, and resident concerns regarding repairs and relocation efforts, Abadilla wrote. McCormack Baron Salazar managed Plaza East until it hired the John Stewart Company, which has managed the property since June 2021.  

On top of the approved loan, the city has provided an additional $160,000 loan to McCormack Baron Salazar because the company “didn’t have the operating funds to support their portion of the services contract” for the 2022-23 fiscal year, Abadilla wrote in an email. 

Operating funds will continue to be a challenge for Plaza East in its current configuration, according to a written statement from the Housing Authority. 

“The existing funding model is not able to consistently and substantially address all necessary repairs,” according to the statement. “In the short term, all repairs are prioritized by health and safety. In the long term, Plaza East must be rebuilt, which will provide brand new units that our residents deserve and higher operating subsidies to keep those units in good condition.”

In a March 2021 interview, Adhi Nagraj — who at the time was McCormack Baron Salazar’s senior vice president and director of development, and is now the company’s chief development officer — blamed a lack of federal funding for ongoing maintenance issues, saying that dwindling federal subsidies have led to a situation where there is not enough funding for repairs. The company cited the decline of federal funding for public housing as part of the rationale for the company’s plan to tear down the complex and replace it with a mix of market-rate and subsidized units. 

Redevelopment plan and next steps 

In August 2022, McCormack Baron Salazar and the Housing Authority submitted a preliminary proposal to the San Francisco Planning Department that included replacing Plaza East’s existing 193 public housing units and adding 270 market rate and 292 affordable units that would be rented below market rate to tenants who qualify by income. This proposal almost quadruples the existing number of units, and could add 200 to 300 more units than a plan to redevelop the site from two years ago. 

The future of Plaza East Apartments has been up in the air since January 2021, when McCormack Baron Salazar requested permission from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish the then 20-year-old public housing complex and rebuild it as a mixed-income site with 450 to 550 units. This proposal was supported by Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Housing Authority. 

HUD denied that request in March 2021, determining that the costs of rehabilitating the complex did not meet a high enough threshold to merit demolition and redevelopment according to the program under which the developer originally applied.  

The developer is working on next steps to seek approval from the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors for the current proposal. Housing Authority representatives hope the application will be submitted this year, according to a statement sent in response to questions about the proposal.

“We are hopeful that pending additional discussions with the community, an application will be submitted this year,” according an early May statement from the Housing Authority. Once that happens, the project approval process is expected to take about two years before construction can begin.  

Supervisor Dean Preston, whose district includes Plaza East, called living conditions there “unacceptable.” 

“My office has stood with tenants demanding repairs and a tenant-led process for planning the future of Plaza East,” Preston said in an emailed statement. “We successfully pushed for $2.7 million that was released for repairs at Plaza East, and won $20 million in last year’s budget for life-safety repairs in public housing which the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development continues to delay. It’s time for the city to listen to residents, finish the emergency short term repairs, and create a real tenant-supported plan for the future of Plaza East.” 

McCormack Baron Salazar did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the ongoing repairs or future plans for redevelopment of the site.  

Following HUD’s rejection of its 2021 demolition plans, McCormack Baron Salazar has shifted gears to focus on a different HUD program. This would involve tearing down the existing property and converting it to a new operating model, which “offers the best financial resources to rebuild the existing public housing units at Plaza East and secure ongoing subsidies that are stable, predictable, and greater than those provided through the Public Housing program,” according to a statement from the Housing Authority.  

Many tenants oppose rebuilding the site as mixed-income housing, and at least 100 of them signed a petition last June asking the developer to consider alternatives, such as rebuilding the site as 100% affordable housing. They said the developer should not move forward without tenant input and transparency.  

“We want to make sure that we’re not played,” resident Yolanda Marshall told Mission Local last June.  

Poor conditions and ongoing vacancies 

Department of Building Inspection records document a history of problems at the site, including leaks, mold and pest infestations. In November 2021, several tenants whose units received emergency repairs said the fixes were inadequate. As of June 6, Department of Building Inspections records showed 11 unresolved complaints and 28 outstanding code violations at Plaza East, bringing the total number of violations at the site to 136 since 2004. 

A group of 18 tenants at Plaza East sued for damages in May 2021, alleging that their units posed “severe health and safety hazards,” citing habitability issues such as mold growth, leaks and vermin. The plaintiffs also alleged that the building’s management, which was McCormack Baron Salazar at the time, harassed them and refused to carry out necessary repairs. The group settled in January, though the terms of the agreement were not divulged by the plaintiff attorneys or accessible online.  

Since the owner initiated emergency repair work, vacancies at the site have gone up.  

As of June 1, there were 25 vacancies at Plaza East, according to an email from the Housing Authority. At the start of the repairs process, there were 20, nine of which were supposed to be immediately repaired and leased out to new tenants, according to the loan agreement.

Vacant units at a public housing site reduce the operating subsidy provided by HUD, wrote Ten, the regional public affairs officer at HUD, adding that it is in the Housing Authority’s best interest to maximize occupancy.  

Both the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the Housing Authority are concerned about long term vacancies, but Plaza East is not filling vacant units unless they are being used to house existing Plaza East residents. Such practices are common at large public housing properties slated for redevelopment, Abadilla wrote.

The Housing Authority and the site property manager, the John Stewart Company, are responsible for filling vacancies, according to a statement from the Housing Authority. However, “even if all units on site were occupied, Plaza East would still not receive enough subsidy to pay for all necessary operating costs.”

UPDATED 06/07/23: This article was changed to indicate that emailed statements sent by Linda Mason, general counsel for the Housing Authority, should be attributed to the San Francisco Housing Authority, not to her individually.

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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.

“People are fed up with it,” said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott at a news conference on Friday. “We are fed up with it. And our attention needs to be on the people who are causing the problems, not on each other.”

But the emphasis on law enforcement for addressing the city’s drug crisis has distressed public defense attorneys and harm reduction advocates who fear the move may worsen the rate of fatal overdoses.

“Right now, we’re losing four people a day to overdose deaths on the street, and that’s up from two a day from last year,” said Sujung Kim, an attorney at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office. “Driving everything underground is part of what makes it so unsafe.”

Kim said she would love to see fewer people addicted to drugs, but cracking down on street level dealing will only worsen fatalities because people will be less likely to call 911 for fear of arrest, and it will drive drug users to buy from unfamiliar sources, heightening the risk of overdose.

Research has shown that incarceration increases risk of overdose. According to a study by the Oregon Health & Science University, Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Corrections that was published last month in the Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment, people recently released from incarceration face a risk of opioid overdose 10 times greater than the general public.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on April 21 that he was sending the National Guard and Highway Patrol to San Francisco stated that the new law enforcement partnership would not target drug users, only drug dealers and traffickers.

Scott reiterated that the operation would target drug dealers. But he suggested that police would also focus on open drug use, saying, “It’s not OK — not only to deal drugs on the streets, but to use drugs on the streets.”

Matthew Beevers, deputy adjutant general of the California National Guard, said at Friday’s news conference that he wanted to “dispel rumors” that the military’s involvement would include “boots on the ground in San Francisco.” Instead, he said, the soldiers and airmen would synthesize information gathered by all enforcement agencies into “actionable information that we can map.”

They would track “cartel networks both operating in the city and outside the city — understand those networks, build a common operating picture of it, and then work to dismantle those networks,” Beevers said.

Gary McCoy, vice president of policy and public affairs for HealthRight 360, which is contracted to run numerous harm reduction programs in the city, said he understood the pressure facing city officials and law enforcement, but believed it to be the wrong approach.

“I think that folks are just very frustrated with where we’re at right now, with what they’re seeing that’s more visible in the streets,” McCoy said. “But really, the challenges that we’re seeing on the streets right now are largely due to the war on drugs, and it’s been the punitive approaches to people who use drugs and the high rates of incarceration.”

McCoy advocates reducing drug demand by stepping up access to long-term treatment, and by taking a more forgiving approach to recovery, in which individuals are not kicked out of residential treatment facilities for briefly returning to drug use. He added that 90-day residential treatment programs were not enough to get people with substance use disorder stabilized. Although a new two-year “step-down” facility just opened on Treasure Island offering 70 spots, a lot more is needed, he said.

“The ideal number of step-down beds would be three to four times the amount of residential treatment beds, because you’re cycling more people out of residential treatment,” he said. “We’re getting there. The city’s made fast improvements to that stock.”

There are currently a total of 245 residential treatment beds in San Francisco and 193 step-down beds.

Studying Divergent Approaches

Alex Kral is an epidemiologist with independent research institute RTI International who has been studying harm reduction programs for more than 30 years. Kral said he was baffled by the law enforcement approach because no research has shown that expending resources and efforts on reducing drug supply has led to either reduced demand or reduced health complications related to drug use. Since the adoption of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, he said, resources dedicated to drug supply law enforcement have “far outspent” measures to prevent drug addiction, provide treatment and reduce harm. Meanwhile, “We’ve just seen things get worse and worse and worse.”

“I get it,” Kral said. “If you don’t understand much about drug use or drug markets or any of that, it makes sense to me that people are like ‘Well, if we just prevent there being drugs in the community, it will stop.’ But this is not how it’s ever worked in any society in the world. And definitely the U.S. is a prime example of a place where this has turned out miserably for 50 years.”

In 2008, the Brookings Institution analyzed three approaches to global counternarcotics policies: “the punishment model” of the U.S., which uses incarceration to deter use; “the depenalization model” used in Italy and Spain, which keeps illicit drugs illegal but does not punish personal use below certain amounts; and “the decriminalization model” used in the Netherlands. Findings were most critical of the punishment model of the U.S., where incarceration rates have soared — to more than 350,000 in 2023 from fewer than 50,000 people in 1980 — costing billions in taxes while few prisoners have access to any form of drug treatment.

Drug courts, which were meant to divert defendants into treatment, largely failed at providing treatment to those who truly needed it, and filled up limited spaces with court-mandated patients who did not always need the care, according to research by Physicians for Human Rights.

Mayor London Breed said at Friday’s news conference that the operation in San Francisco differs from the war on drugs of the 1980s, because back then, “everything was about arrest, lock people up.” Now, she said, the city provides “extremely generous” social services.

Nevertheless, the Public Defender’s Office has seen increased prosecutions for low-level drug sales, which are “filling up our jails,” Kim said. And defendants are often subsistence drug dealers, meaning they sell drugs to fund their own addictions.

District Attorney’s Aggressive Tactics

Andi Gernaey is harm reduction director of the St. James Infirmary. Gernaey leads a team that travels by van to the Mission District to distribute hygiene kits, harm reduction supplies, food and other necessities.

Gernaey said the crackdown is in keeping with “draconian” measures from law enforcement that have been seen since Brooke Jenkins took over as San Francisco’s district attorney, including installing barriers along certain streets in the Mission to disrupt sex work.

“A lot of time they just use it as an excuse to harass people and search people and detain people, and then they end up not filing formal charges because they’re more like nuisance charges than what holds up in court,” Gernaey said.

Not knowing what’s planned for the stepped-up enforcement is causing anxiety among the team members, who worry that officers will not understand what they are doing there. Gernaey said they advised the team to be wary.

“If we are approached by police or military,” Gernaey told the workers, “just like, don’t say anything, say you’ll get your supervisor, and then I’ll talk with them because we’re allowed to do what we’re doing.”

Sean Duryee, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol, said at Friday’s conference that his officers would be patrolling and executing arrests. He did not disclose the number of officers involved in the operation but said that 75 officers are currently assigned to San Francisco with nine more arriving in June.

Jenkins said the operation would help combat the “human trafficking defense.” She said suspects often speciously claim to have been forced into selling drugs under threats to them or their families.

“I am very excited at the prospect of having additional resources to be able to dispel the notion that people are not here dealing drugs of their own accord, because that is clearly what is happening,” Jenkins said.

Kim said that as an attorney at the Public Defender’s Office, she had heard “horrific” firsthand accounts from people arrested for dealing drugs, some as young as 17, who had witnessed gang violence in Central America and knew what MS-13 was capable of.

“Brooke Jenkins could deny all she wants, but two of her attorneys lost cases last year where the juries heard their stories,” Kim said. “One of them, they had to pay coyotes to come over here to escape violence, and they were under threat of death, forced to sell drugs. And the juries believed the defense. I’m not saying it’s every single case, but it happens more often than people might know.”

This article is part of a series on San Francisco’s overdose crisis and prevention efforts, underwritten by a California Health Equity Fellowship grant from the Annenberg Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California.

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Rains this winter and early spring ended the drought in the Bay Area and brought a kind of weather whiplash that put San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management to the test. 
 
Early in the storm cycle, the department faced challenges communicating with the public, especially with people experiencing homelessness. Internal confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of its Emergency Operations Center until a major storm was under way. In at least one instance, flood barriers were deployed too late to prevent homes and businesses from being inundated. 
 
Despite those missteps, the city rallied a coordinated response from its Emergency Operations Center, where multiple city agencies, along with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. representatives, gathered to discuss and act on emerging issues in real time. 
 
It has been years since California faced this kind of barrage. The National Weather Service said that at least 14 powerful atmospheric rivers have slammed into California since October, triggering flooding and downing trees that have killed at least 22 people statewide, including two who were struck by falling trees in San Francisco.
 
And there could be more trouble to come: The Sierra snowpack is at a staggering 225% of normal, and while it will fill reservoirs, a fast spring melt could cause even more flooding. 
 
In a new “Civic” episode, we examine how the city responded to the first big deluge of the season and what it learned from that harried experience to improve response to subsequent storms. 

The biggest rainstorm hit San Francisco with 5.5 inches of rain on New Year’s Eve, when many city employees were away on vacation. Adrienne Bechelli, deputy director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, said city departments were able to mount a full response despite being short staffed. 
 
“The city tasks that were the most urgent priority were, of course, flood mitigation and clearing catch basins ensuring that all of our storm drains were clear,” she said. 

Emergency response teams also helped drivers whose vehicles were stranded in floodwaters and worked to get people living on the streets into emergency shelters, she said.  
 
Despite those efforts, some residents and businesses in the Mission District said the city was slow in providing information and failed to put up additional flood gates as it has done before previous storms. 

Blame game

On Jan. 3, Mayor London Breed began a news conference saying the city didn’t expect so much rain. 
 
“We were under the impression and notified by our National Weather Service that we could anticipate not even an inch of rain,” she said. Less than one inch of rain is not considered a threat according to the city’s winter storm and flood plan. 
 
Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, echoed the mayor’s claims and said the city scrambled to increase its response on New Year’s Eve: “Our city employees rallied and we activated our Emergency Operations Center late morning when we realized what was actually happening was a little different than the actual forecast.”
 
Brian Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in the Bay Area, disputed those claims. He said the forecast showed a strong system hitting San Francisco days before it arrived. 
 
“We started messaging that on the 26th and 27th, when we started putting out information for the New Year’s Eve system,” he said. “We issued a flood watch on December 28. So, we definitely saw something coming in.” 

The weather service issues flood watches when the risk of a hazardous weather or flood event increases significantly.
 
San Francisco’s own response protocol lays out an elaborate system to prepare for major storms. The city activated its emergency response on Dec. 28, after the National Weather Service issued its flood watch 96 hours ahead of the storm. 

Garcia said city leaders’ forecast concerns seemed to center on whether the New Year’s Eve fireworks show — which had been cancelled during the first two years of the pandemic — could proceed as planned over the bay near the Embarcadero. 
 
“There was a focus for all of us to see if the rain was going to clear out by then, on the briefing that we provided on December 28,” Garcia said. “We were talking about the wind and the rain across our entire area, including the city, and how nasty it was going to be. The fireworks were definitely a bit of a focus.” 
 
The city seemed to have moved past the “one inch of rain” forecast claim in late February, when Bechelli said the forecast didn’t hamper the city’s efforts. 
 
“We were full out in terms of our operational response,” she said, shifting the focus to the city’s storm water capacity. “The built infrastructure of San Francisco is not built to handle five and a half inches of rain in a 24-hour period — we’re going to see inevitable flooding.” 
 
Garcia is ready to move on. “You’re always learning how to communicate better,” he said. “We continue to look forward to many years of a strong partnership with the great city of San Francisco.”
 
A representative from the Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email that the city hopes to bring National Weather Service representatives into the Emergency Operations Center during future storms. 

Seeking shelter

Following the New Year’s Eve storm, San Francisco Public Press reporters Yesica Prado and Madison Alvarado visited eight San Francisco neighborhoods over three days to talk to homeless people out in the rain. 
 
Prado said that access to shelters varies a lot by neighborhood.
 
“Some places, like in the Bayview, people are able to be more settled down versus being in the Civic Center or being in Japantown, where people are constantly on the move, and they will have to seek shelter if they want accommodations for the night,” she said.

Alvarado said nonprofits were scrambling to find spots for people and, in some cases, sent them across the city where there were beds available.  
 
“We were visiting a shelter and dining room down in the Bayview. We actually heard that at the end of the day the St. Anthony Foundation bused people down to Mother Brown’s in the Bayview, because they knew that there were shelter options down there,” she said. 

San Francisco added more beds to all its shelters in anticipation of a demand surge and worked with nonprofits and churches to add more, but Alvarado said finding information about where beds are available can be difficult for people without access to the internet. 
 
“If you don’t have a phone, you don’t know where you can go because you don’t know where they are,” she said. “Maybe you know of another shelter, but you don’t know how to get there.” 
 
During their reporting, they came across a man shivering on the sidewalk. 
 
“We noticed that nobody had actually approached him,” Prado said. “We didn’t ask for an interview. We went to ask ‘do you need any help?’ And then all he could muster is that, yeah, like he was cold. So we went back to our car, and we got some supplies for him, some dry clothes. But once we came back, he wasn’t really responsive. And that’s when we thought, he really needs some other kind of help.”
 
Prado and Alvarado said they looked online to see whom they should call. The Healthy Streets Operation Center website indicated that calls from concerned citizens would not be returned. Prado and Alvarado were reluctant to call 911, which they said they thought might bring a police response to a medical issue. So, they ended up calling 311, and a team designated to help homeless people showed up a few minutes later. 
 
Confusion over whom to call was understandable. During the Jan. 3 news conference, San Francisco Fire Chief Janine Nicholson discouraged people from using 911 for anything less than an emergency. 
 
“I can’t stress it enough,” she said. “Call 911 for life threatening emergencies only. We still have to run all of our critical 911 calls, whether it’s a cardiac arrest or a car accident or a fire.” 
 
But Bechelli said that calling 911 is the right choice: “Our 911 dispatchers are trained to send the right resource for that particular problem. If there is a medical emergency, they will send a medical response in order to help that person.”

Encampment sweeps continued 

Representatives from the Department of Emergency Management said that they reached out to people in encampments to offer them shelter ahead of and during the rain storms, and in some cases, to warn them that the place they were in was prone to flooding or other dangers. Meanwhile, the Department of Public Works continued to dismantle tent encampments during the inclement weather, as witnessed by our reporters. 
 
Alvarado spoke with a man named Duane who said he had been camping on 19th Street near Harrison Street for about a month, and that city workers kept asking him and other people nearby to move. 
 
“They were making us move every week, every week, back and forth, back and forth. No matter if it was raining,” he said. 
 
Our reporters said the city was offering temporary shelter stays to people in the two encampments they visited, but few of the people they spoke to said they were taking the offers. 
 
Duane said he thought congregate shelters and even navigation centers, which allow groups of friends to stay together, were too dangerous. “You got to deal with a bunch of crazy people. They pick fights with literally no reason,” he said. “It’s like, yeah, they offer you housing. But you gotta jump through hoops to get in.”

Mitigating floodwaters

The city has long known where flooding is most likely to happen and has some plans to mitigate it. After the December and January storms, residents and businesses affected by flooding were asked to fill out questionnaires to help the city track damage and potentially help San Franciscans get federal relief. 
 
Bechelli said 117 people submitted responses about flooding affecting their homes and 17 submitted responses about their businesses. Many responses came from people in the Marina, Mission, Bernal Heights, Glen Park, Castro, Potrero Hill and Dolores Heights neighborhoods, she said. 
 
Most had flood damage, but few had flood insurance. The Federal Emergency Management Agency declined to offer emergency grants to those affected, but will offer Small Business Administration Disaster Loan assistance. Applicants must apply in person at the War Memorial building on Van Ness Avenue. 
 
The city has plans to address some areas prone to flooding. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has allocated $632 million for three large drainage projects in low-lying areas. 

• The Wawona Street Stormwater Project in West Portal will be under construction until 2024.
• The Lower Alemany Area Rainwater Improvements Project in Bernal Heights will improve stormwater management near the Alemany Farmer’s Market, and the Interstate 280 and U.S. 101 interchange in Bernal Heights. Construction isn’t expected to begin before 2025 with completion in 2028.
• The Folsom Area Stormwater Improvement Project would cover multiple streets in the Mission to reduce flooding in one of the neighborhoods hardest hit in even moderate storms. The project is in the planning phase with no date set for construction to begin. 

In a more modest effort, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission has distributed $2.5 million in grants to schools and nonprofits to fund rain gardens, green roofs and other green infrastructure projects to help slow down and redirect floodwaters.

Weather response report card

So, how did the city respond to our wild and wet winter? 
 
There were communication problems. 
 
It’s unclear why city officials and the national weather service got into an argument over the New Year’s Eve forecast. Confusion over the forecast delayed the opening of the city’s Emergency Operations Center.
 
Given conflicting instructions, San Franciscans may have been confused about when to call 911, especially around helping homeless people. 
 
Finding information about shelter locations generally requires access to a smartphone or the internet. Direct outreach to the homeless is limited by staffing constraints and the fact that those needing the information move around a lot. 
 
Overall, the city’s response to protecting people in need was hampered by the same factors that have led to so many people living on the streets: a lack of long-term housing and a focus on temporary shelters, which are often considered by the homeless to be worse than staying outside. 
 
The city knows where the most problematic flood areas are and has plans to mitigate many of them, but those infrastructure projects are years from completion. 

The New Year’s Eve storm was the city’s second wettest on record, only surpassed by a Nov. 11, 1994, storm that brought 5.54 inches of rain to San Francisco. It is too early to know whether California will break its previous record set in 1952-53 for wettest season based on snowfall. The total snowpack results are usually measured and reported April 1. 

Inconsistent weather patterns

For the last few years California has been experiencing a series of La Niña weather patterns, which normally mean drier than usual conditions. An El Niño pattern usually means a wetter than average winter. But within those two major patterns are lesser intra-seasonal oscillations that can change from month to month. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains that variations in tropical rainfall can shift the wintertime jet stream and atmospheric circulation over the North Pacific and western North America, thereby overriding the dominant seasonal weather pattern.
 
The weather service’s Garcia explains that if the intra-seasonal oscillations “all come together in the right way, they can override a strong entrenched signal. We can have El Niño years that are extremely dry. And conversely, we can have La Niña years that are extremely wet. It’s not unheard of, it’s just not the norm.” 
 
The La Niña pattern officially ended March 9. It’s unclear whether we’ll see an El Niño pattern by next fall or a neutral pattern.
 
“In California, we typically end major droughts with major floods,” Garcia said. “This has happened multiple times throughout California’s history. So, is this related to climate change at all? The way that it’s related to climate change are the extremes at which we’re seeing those higher heights and lower lows. It’s not happening any more frequently than historically, it’s just getting deeper and higher at the same time.”

CLARIFICATION 4/10/23: The Department of Emergency Management responded to this story to characterize the changing activation status of its Emergency Operations Center. Though only described as “open” during specified times, it is otherwise continuously in standby mode and monitoring events.

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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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Not hitting the Jan. 31 deadline to pass the city’s plan, called the Housing Element, would have resulted in an immediate loss of hundreds of millions of dollars from the state for affordable housing and transportation.

It would also have made approvals for some new buildings automatic. Many city permitting and construction regulations would have gone out the window, and the state could have levied monthly fines up to $100,000.

Still, not everyone is happy with the plan.

One advocate for affordable housing, Sarah “Fred” Sherburn-Zimmer, executive director of the Housing Rights Committee, called these threats “state blackmail.” Community groups that want more homes for the working class worry that even in the current plan, displacement of low-income residents of color is possible because it focuses too much on building market-rate apartments.

Though the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed the Housing Element, several supervisors have questioned whether under the new plan affordable housing would get built. “The devil is going to be not in the Housing Element itself, but actual implementation along the way,” said Aaron Peskin, who this month once again took the job of board president. Executing on the plan, he said, is “going to be a lot of work, and is easier said than done.”

Others have expressed less concern about affordable housing than what they call the overemphasis on high-density infill development in their neighborhoods. Over all, the pro-housing construction lobby has expressed satisfaction with the city’s new plan.

Of the 82,000 units the plan envisions, 46,000 must be affordable. That would be a tall order, as that goal is more than six times the affordable housing erected in the last eight-year cycle ending in 2021.

The Planning Department said the plan centers on community needs and racial equity. As the Public Press previously reported, some advocates said it falls short on those goals.

For San Francisco, retaining control means Planning will continue to have significant leverage over what gets built, and the Board of Supervisors will still enjoy discretionary approval powers.

But there’s still one more danger on the horizon: If the city does not make significant progress toward its targets, the state can impose streamlined approval for projects that meet state requirements and disregard city rules.

The plan will become law after it goes to Mayor London Breed for her signature.

Other local newsrooms have covered angles on the Housing Element that deserve a closer look:

• How the affordable units will be funded is still a looming question. As Miriam Chion, director of community equity at the Planning Department, said in a Land Use and Transportation Committee hearing Jan. 23, “We don’t have the money for 46,000 affordable units.” (48 Hills) In the same meeting, she did clarify that the city needed to “get organized in a slightly different way to produce the housing or to retain the housing that we need.”
• Supervisor Dean Preston has introduced legislation allowing nonprofit organizations to sue the city if affordable housing goals are not met. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• As we noted in our previous coverage, affordable housing advocates pushed hard for land banking — purchasing land for future development without a specific project in mind.  The Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development indicated this is not a strategy it is actively pursuing, and it has also not spent any of the $250 million raised by Proposition I of 2020 for affordable housing. (San Francisco Standard) The office on Friday issued a call for grant applications to nonprofit organizations totaling $40 million. (Mayor’s Office)
• One of the main ways to build more housing is to change zoning in areas that have seen little change in decades — especially in the western side of the city. The Housing Element includes a self-imposed deadline of October 2026 to make these changes. (San Francisco Chronicle)

What are your thoughts on the supply of affordable and market-rate housing? Let us know!

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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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In a recent Public Press poll to gauge residents’ opinion of the city’s thorniest issues, San Franciscans made their top concerns crystal clear: housing affordability, homelessness and the cleanliness of city streets.  

More than 200 people shared opinions with the Public Press when asked to identify the most pressing concerns in their supervisorial districts. Most participants completed the brief survey online early this fall, with about 15% replying in person to surveyors seeking diverse respondents in supervisorial districts with competitive races. A small number of respondents said they worked in the city but lived elsewhere. 

While concerns varied by district, housing, homelessness and street hygiene emerged as key issues. Aggregated concerns about different kinds of crime came in as a close fourth. City residents were also able to weigh in on these thorny matters in the Nov. 8 general election. 

Results are still rolling in that could decide several close contests. Based on the latest vote tally from the Department of Elections: 

• Neither of two competing efforts to streamline San Francisco’s building permitting process with stated goals of building more affordable housing has secured 50% of the vote. After hanging on for several days by a razor thin margin, over the weekend Proposition D drifted further away from victory, while E has lost.  
• Proposition M, a progressive empty homes tax meant to give owners incentive to rent out vacant units, passed and stands with almost 54% “yes” votes.  
• Proposition C’s proposed increased oversight of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing was also voted into law.  
• Proposition B, which overturns a decision made by voters in 2020 to create a new Department of Sanitation and Streets, received strong support with about 75% “yes” votes, returning street-cleaning duties to the Department of Public Works.  
• Voters seem to have upheld Mayor London Breed’s choice for District Attorney in a closely-watched race after months of debates on the role of the DA in addressing crime. Brooke Jenkins declared victory in the race Nov. 9, though her closest challenger John Hamasaki has yet to concede.  

With the potential failure of both D and E, survey respondents’ concerns regarding the new construction of affordable housing may not see much progress as a result of this election. Many respondents noted the lack of affordable housing as a major concern, oftentimes linking the housing crisis with high costs of living and homelessness. 

In August, the California Department of Housing and Community Development announced an investigation into housing policies and practices in San Francisco to understand why the city’s permitting process is so lengthy. It is the first investigation of its kind in the state.  

Gov. Gavin Newsom also reported on Nov. 3 that he is pausing the distribution of $1 billion in funds meant to address the homelessness crisis. Money from the Homelessness Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant program was meant to go to jurisdictions across the state, but Newsom said he will hold onto funds until local leaders meet up in mid-November to identify more aggressive strategies to reduce homelessness. 

The confusion of having two similarly worded competing measures may have undermined the ability for either to pass.  

Jason McDaniel, associate professor in the department of political science at San Francisco State University, said he believes the dueling measures are a sign of polarization and dysfunction in the relationship between the Board of Supervisors and Breed. 

“There’s not a lot of trust, there’s not a lot of signs of working together,” he said. “And so, when you see these dueling kinds of ballot measures, what you’re seeing is they don’t feel like they can govern and legislate — board and mayor together — on important decisions on housing policy.” 

More broadly, McDaniel said he sees two competing ideologies in the city, noting their presence in mobilizing around the DA’s race as well as various housing measures. 

“We have two kind of highly organized and competitive political factions in the city,” he said. These two factions are often referred to as progressives and moderate-liberals, though McDaniel “doesn’t love these terms.” As he sees it, the progressive faction is further left and usually positions itself in opposition to policies of political leaders such as Breed and state Sen. Scott Wiener. The moderate-liberal faction “mostly descends from the Willie Brown coalition, inherited by Gavin Newsom and Ed Lee.” 

These two groups are also “really good at making connections with voters — they care about, they listen to voters, they want to represent them.” In this way, McDaniel said, voter concerns are an important driving factor in what issues are central to elections.  

For voters, filling out ballots can already be time consuming even without the complexity of competing ballot measures.  

Survey respondent James Aldrich, who listed bike and pedestrian safety as his main concern, said “I think of myself as politically progressive, and yet, it’s pretty confusing when you try to figure out what is the solution” to some of the city’s biggest issues, such as the housing crisis.  

Transportation Priorities

Another hot issue for survey respondents that appeared on the ballot was the question of closed streets and car access. Much like the contentious split on the two affordable housing measures, voters and survey respondents had strong opinions regarding the potential re-opening of streets such as John F. Kennedy Drive and the Great Highway.  

Proposition J, which affirms the Board of Supervisors’ decision to close a portion of JFK Drive permanently to cars, passed. Its counterpart, Proposition I, which would have overturned a previous Board of Supervisors’ decision and reversed the city’s eventual closure of a portion of the Great Highway, was trailing by close to 30%.  

Richard Rothman, a native San Francisco resident who lives in District 1 and has followed local issues for several years sees the outcome of Propositions I, J, and L as reflective of a division between the eastern and western parts of the city. “I’ve never seen the city so divided,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit down and compromise; it’s either my way or no way.”   

Transportation concerns weren’t limited to closed streets. For survey respondents, concerns around transportation revealed a vast array of perspectives regarding whose transit needs should be centered in city policy — pedestrians, bikers, drivers, seniors, people with disabilities and various combinations of those groups. 

Some respondents called for improved Muni service and better traffic control. After a $400 million Muni bond failed in June, elected officials were hoping a different ballot measure could help tackle some of the city’s public transit woes.  

Proposition L, a proposed extension to San Francisco’s existing 0.5% sales tax, is the only measure on the ballot requiring a two-thirds affirmative vote to pass and currently stands at 71% “yes.” If approved, L would fund programs ranging from basic transit maintenance to large-scale transportation projects, as well as increased paratransit services and pedestrian and bike safety measures.  

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