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.”

The post New Reparations Ideas Include Senior Housing, Legal Assistance and a ‘Black Card’ for Local Discounts appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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

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

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

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

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

Books: 

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

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

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

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

Documentaries: 

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

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

Podcasts and Oral Histories: 

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

Publications:

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

Reports: 

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

City-Sponsored Presentations and Panels: 

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

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

Public Press reporting on reparations:  

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

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

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

The post Reporter’s Notebook: Where to Learn More About Black History and Reparations in San Francisco   appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Office of Reparations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Second Oldest Idea in Black Politics’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Urban Renewal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

Read the draft reparations plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing action items

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

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

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

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

Regional and national context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical wrongs

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

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

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

Renewed efforts and key changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reparations connection

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

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

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

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

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

Remaining questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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