Decades after the city displaced Black residents, organizers fight to bring them back home.

August 12, 2009

It’s been 33 years, but Ed Donaldson can still see the anxious look on his mother’s face when she was told she had to move. It was 1976, and Donaldson was only 10—the youngest of three children—when the family received word from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency that they were being kicked out of their Hunter’s Point apartment.

Donaldson’s mother decided to use the opportunity to purchase a home—no easy feat for a single Black woman in the 1970s. After months of racist- and sexist-tinged questioning by loan officials (was she having more children? where was her husband?), she secured a loan for a house she still lives in today.

“We landed on our feet, but so many other families didn’t,” remembered Donaldson, now 43 (pictured here) and the Housing Counseling Director at the San Francisco Housing Development Corporation, an organization focused on finding affordable homes in San Francisco for people of color, particularly Blacks.

As in other cities across the country, San Francisco’s Black communities became the focus of massive urban renewal programs spanning from the late 1940s through the 1970s. In the city’s predominantly Black Fillmore district, a total of 4,729 businesses, 2,500 households and 883 Victorian homes were demolished to make room for government-owned housing and commercial businesses.

Some displaced residents moved to other parts of San Francisco, while others relocated to more affordable cities like Oakland and East Palo Alto. In total, more than 5,000 families were displaced.

Ironically, since the end of the urban renewal programs in the ’70s, San Francisco city officials have commissioned several studies investigating why Black residents are leaving and how to get them back. Recommendations in the past have included training young Black entrepreneurs and establishing a Black tourist district like Chinatown.

Yet the hemorrhaging has continued.

Since the last report in 1990, San Francisco’s Black population has dropped by 40 percent, faster than any other major city in the country. According to the latest Census data, Black residents make up only 6.9 percent of the city’s current population and are projected to make up as little as 4.6 percent in 2050.

The latest government effort to reverse this loss is the African American Out-Migration Task force started by Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supervisor Sophie Maxwell in 2007.

The task force has 18 members—mostly clergy, researchers and city officials—and was supposed to investigate what was driving Black residents out of the city. They were also to come up with a set of comprehensive policy recommendations to bring them back.

Yet after nearly two years of work, the recommendations remain unpublished.

Aileen Hernandez, chair of the task force, is critical of what she described as a lack of institutional support from city officials, including not providing a paid staff. After months of debating policy recommendations and without any internal accountability, the taskforce produced a draft of the report that has languished on the desks of various city departments, according to Hernandez.

An informal committee of the mayor’s paid staff is revising the report to include the city’s existing efforts to retain Black residents, Hernandez said. She expected that the taskforce would review the latest draft and, if approved, would release the report by the end of this month.

“My hope is that we would get to the point where what we would be focusing on is doing and not just writing reports,” said Hernandez, who declined to disclose the recommendations.

But some task force members are concerned that mayor will want final recommendations closely aligned with his already controversial housing agenda.

Last year both Mayor Newsom and Supervisor Maxwell endorsed Proposition G, a controversial housing measure that allows Florida-based developer Lennar Corporation to develop 10,000 new homes in Bayview. The measure, which ultimately passed was hotly debated because Bayview is a historically Black San Francisco neighborhood. It grew from fewer than 20,000 residents in 1940 to almost 150,000 by 1950—the vast majority of whom were Black migrants from the South who came to work in the nearby U.S. Navy shipyard, along with many Blacks veterans returning from war. At the time, Black residents were prevented from living in other parts of the city by both legal and illegal policies and practices.

Still, some task force members are optimistic.