Every San Francisco neighborhood has a group or two, sometimes more, to organize community events, badger city officials when something’s not right, and fundraise for local causes.
But in the Haight-Ashbury — the geographic and, in many ways, psychological center of the city — there are now at least half a dozen. The fractures, exacerbated by the city’s housing and homelessness crisis and pandemic street conditions, also tell a very San Francisco story that stretches back half a century or more.
Less than a half square mile, the neighborhood is a mirror of how a large swath of San Francisco sees itself: full of ornamental Victorians representing a creative, live-and-let-live ethos, a political identity that’s proudly liberal, and a history of activism against the powers that be.
The twin crises of housing and homelessness are citywide issues, of course. But of all residential neighborhoods other than the Tenderloin, the Haight has grappled with homelessness the most: from the 1960s, as hippies dropped out and swarmed in, to the ’80s when then-Mayor Art Agnos shifted city policy, to the 2010 ballot revolt that aimed to ban sitting or lying on sidewalks during certain hours.
Same for housing: A legacy of fighting development 50 years ago has carried through to this day, even as the city struggles to house people not lucky enough to have bought in decades ago or to have the wealth needed for our recent gilded age.
“It’s the locus of left progressive politics, but it’s also affluent homeowners and renters fighting development against UC San Francisco and other density,” says Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University who supports more development to address SF’s housing crisis.
As a new generation of groups organize in the Haight to fight over housing and homelessness, the neighborhood’s history is deeply relevant to understand San Francisco’s complicated, precarious situation right now. It’s a mix of stunning wealth and gross inequality, housing scarcity, and jarring disconnects between intentions and reality, and it’s all in play within a few square blocks.
From HANC to Hendrix
In 1948, the California Division of Highways had plans to lay freeways all across the city. Many neighborhoods organized against these plans. Some, like Potrero Hill, lost. But folks in the Haight stopped the freeway slated for the Panhandle and Golden Gate Park.
Out of these freeway revolts, the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) emerged as a neighborhood powerbroker. Soon the group would be putting the brakes on other major changes.
Up through the 1960s, the Haight was a working-class neighborhood. Median income, as of the 1970 census, was $10,500. It was one of the few in SF that didn’t institute racist redlining, and 40 percent of the population was Black, according to a 2016 Planning Department publication.
As the neighborhood changed, Mayor Joseph Alioto railed against the hippies and others, often sending in police. There were riots. Alioto also created the Committee to Restore the Haight-Ashbury in 1970.
The Haight had been marked for dense redevelopment, as had already happened in neighborhoods like the Fillmore (which writer James Baldwin famously described as “Negro removal”). Pushback forced a series of meetings and eventually resulted in the rezoning of the Haight in 1972, which capped density and development and presaged residential reforms across the city later in the decade.
Fifty years later, HANC still touts among its achievements the rezoning as well as the blockade of a proposed expansion of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center the same year.
Restorations soon followed, as well as a push to preserve “neighborhood character.” It didn’t just preserve character; it boosted home values. Recently retired SF Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik and her husband bought a house near the Panhandle in 1972, drawn by “a kind of magic of the Haight that was left over from the Summer of Love,” she says. Her house was worth 10 times as much by 1982.
While the pandemic has knocked back rental prices from historic highs, home prices in the city keep going up.
Preservation also created a cottage industry for nostalgia retail. Through the years, local merchants have run heavily on the fumes from the ’60s — from the Jimi Hendrix Red Victorian Smoke Shop and Ben and Jerry’s Haight-themed store, to self-guided tour maps that help you find Janis Joplin’s apartment and the Grateful Dead’s pad. If you don’t want to walk, there’s a shag-carpeted, psychedelic-painted Volkswagen bus that putt-putts around for “Hippie History” excursions.
The scene also still includes young people hanging out on corners, according to Mendel’s owner Naomi Silverman, whose grandparents purchased the building on Haight between Ashbury and Clayton Streets in 1968 for the now-iconic craft and paint store. “The Haight has been a place that has always kind of invited that,” she says.
“Kind of” is right. In the 1980s, some residents began to organize and push back against the street scene.
New kid on the block
In 1987, when Mayor Agnos loosened the city’s homelessness policy, a group of residents, tired of HANC’s dominance, formed the Cole Valley Improvement Association, or CVIA.
“People felt it was unhealthy and unsafe to go on,” CVIA founder Carole Glosenger tells The Frisc. “We got together and developed our own group that worked to get Agnos to rescind that order.”
It’s a schism that persists today. “I’ve always looked on the CVIA as the right wing of the neighborhood: less progressive people who are more concerned about property values,” says Garchik, who says her own sympathies lie with HANC.
A generation later, the Haight’s street scene again ballooned into a citywide fight. Pushed by Haight Street merchants, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom put Proposition L, or “Sit-Lie,” on the ballot in 2010, to prevent people from blocking sidewalks during certain hours.
“The measure comes at the urging of residents and merchants of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood who first pushed it as a way to deal with violent thugs camping in front of businesses and homes, harassing or attacking passersby,” wrote John Coté in a May 2010 Chronicle story. The measure passed 54 percent to 46 percent.
Mendel’s Silverman says residents who’ve paid dearly to live in the neighborhood, or merchants paying high rent, might feel different about the street scene than those like her who don’t have as much financial pressure. But alliances are tangled. There are merchants practically next door to each other with very different attitudes.
And residents don’t split neatly into camps either — unless you consider the neighborhood a camp basically for rich white people. A 2018 SF Planning Department report put the Black population of the Haight-Ashbury at 3 percent and the White population at 80 percent. The neighborhood has gotten wealthier and whiter as it’s grown more “progressive.”
The fight 50 years ago saved the neighborhood from freeways and Fillmore-like redevelopment, but over the long term, not from gentrification and displacement.
‘The most San Francisco area’
Reviewing the 2020 election results last month, HANC founder Calvin Welch proudly declared that the Haight was “the most San Francisco area of San Francisco.”
The Haight has leaned more progressive across recent elections, most notably in voting for district supervisor. In 2016, when tenants-rights attorney and Democratic Socialist Dean Preston challenged London Breed, he lost 52 percent to 48 percent. Preston won the flats, the area around Haight Street, but lost the hills of Cole Valley and Buena Vista.
In 2019, Preston took on Vallie Brown, appointed by now-Mayor Breed to finish out her own term, and won by a sliver. Preston held the Haight but again lost Cole Valley and Buena Vista to Brown. In 2020’s rematch with Brown, the incumbent Preston won more decisively, 55 percent to 45 percent.
Preston epitomizes the district’s mix of very liberal and property-rich homeowners. He rails against market-rate housing and owns a house in Alamo Square, where prices can range into the many millions of dollars. But in a May 2019 interview with Preston, a Salon.com writer touted him as a potential antidote to “the Bay Area’s brand of liberalism [as] historically more concerned with social issues than wealth redistribution.”
In his first year in office, he turned his promise for thousands of units of city-owned, permanently affordable “social housing” into the successful Prop I: an extra tax on high-end property transfers that could start paying for those promised units. (Before the pandemic, SF had the highest construction costs in the world. Affordable housing was no exception. Preston acknowledged this summer that the tax would provide only a fraction of the housing needed, but could spur more ambitious proposals.)
Preston continues to make no bones about his opposition to market-rate housing, like the project known as the Hub, at the edge of his district at Market and Van Ness. He’s also trying to delay an expansion of the UCSF Parnassus campus, about a 15-minute walk from the heart of the Haight-Ashbury.
His opposition is based on the notion, pervasive among progressives and NIMBYs in the city, that, contrary to supply and demand, building more housing raises prices and displaces existing residents.
It’s a view that draws a through line to HANC’s fight in the 1970s. Welch is still very much involved as HANC’s housing and land use chair, a position that doesn’t exist in most neighborhood groups. “Calvin Welch has been one of the leading lights on slow to no growth,” says SF State’s McDaniel. “He’s one of the architects of fusing homeowner activism with anti-development.”
The UCSF plan calls for a new hospital and research facility and more than 1,200 units of housing to ease pressure on neighborhood supply. (By 2050, 40 percent of the housing is slated to be below market-rate.) As a state entity, the UC Regents don’t have to follow the usual city process for development projects.
Critics of the expansion cite impacts on traffic, open space, and neighborhood density, using language about skyscrapers that Welch himself used when opposing the 1972 expansion.
Even though the expansion is just over the border from Preston’s district, he called for a hearing ahead of the Jan. 20 meeting when the UC Board of Regents could approve the project. Preston tweeted on Dec. 22 his concerns over transparency and accountability on the development.
When he voted to delay the Hub project earlier this year, Preston cited equity concerns. Critics call it self-interest. “You have a class of wealthy homeowners like Preston who do what they can to stop construction of duplexes and apartment buildings, because those will help meet demand and perhaps lower property values,” UC Berkeley political scientist David Broockman, a district resident and constituent of Preston’s, told The Frisc. (In a recent Twitter exchange, Preston bristled at Broockman’s criticism: “Are you seriously a professor of something?” The supervisor and his staff did not answer The Frisc’s questions about housing issues.)
Another critic is Theo Gordon, whose exasperation with HANC-style antigrowth advocacy led him to found the Haight Ashbury Neighbors for Density, or HAND. HANC treasurer and Preston supporter Christin Evans, a high-profile Haight business owner, told The Frisc that Gordon never shows up for neighborhood meetings, a statement Gordon dismisses.
It’s the first time a pro-growth faction has taken root in the Haight, part of a larger movement (sometimes called YIMBY, or “yes in my backyard”) to counter the usual refusal to allow anything more than a duplex to be built across wide swaths of San Francisco and California, which effectively keeps lower-income people out of low-rise neighborhoods. (So far, the movement’s stalwarts have had limited success at the ballot box. In Sacramento, former SF supervisor and state Sen. Scott Wiener, along with others, continue to roll out pro-housing legislation.)
Preston has accused YIMBYs — Gordon is the group’s SF chair — of being fronts for real-estate developers, as he did in the 2019 Salon interview: “I think in San Francisco, ‘YIMBY’ is just another word for developer. There is absolutely no difference between what the so-called YIMBYs advocate for and what the market-rate developers advocate for.”
That’s disputable, as evidenced by a debate over one small piece of property in the heart of the Haight. In fact, that property, at 730 Stanyan, is ground zero for much of the fracturing — and fractiousness — in the neighborhood.
The end of Haight Street
For decades, a McDonald’s sat at 730 Stanyan, where Haight Street meets Golden Gate Park. In 2018, the city bought it for $15.5 million, with long-term plans to build 100% affordable housing.
Before the deal closed, HANC’s Rupert Clayton wrote a letter to City Hall that questioned whether a seven-story building “would substantially change the character of the area.” Clayton later told Curbed “not everyone is going to get everything they want … HANC didn’t write the state or national environmental laws, and I think if we look back at some of the environmental horrors [in the past] we can see why those laws came into place.”
(The full letter is posted on HANC’s website.)
Gordon and YIMBY-esque allies pressed Preston to commit to maximum height for as much affordable housing as possible. Earlier this year, Preston finally voiced his support for the max: eight stories. (He also wrote that his office “has not heard from any community group in direct opposition” to eight stories, which is not the same as saying there hasn’t been any.)
But his influence only goes so far. The mayor’s housing office, in the most recent presentation on the project, said it would top out at six stories and 120 units, a lost opportunity to build dozens more units.
The housing won’t come for years. In the meantime, the neighborhood has roiled over the temporary use of 730 Stanyan. Before the pandemic struck, HANC was pushing for services for homeless youth, including a specialized shelter. (Known as Navigation Centers, these shelters are a key to the city’s strategy to transition people from the streets into permanent housing.)
In newsletters like this one, CVIA argued that homeless services at the site would make the neighborhood less safe. They preferred a mixed-use site, including a youth soccer pitch.
But that’s friendly arm wrestling compared to the neighborhood tension around the site right now.
Sidewalk scenes
When the pandemic struck and the city ordered residents to shelter in place in March, business owner and Preston ally Evans, who in addition to her HANC position is president of the Haight-Ashbury Merchant Association, led activists in handing out tents. “The mayor’s office hadn’t thought about plans for unhoused people,” she says.
Encampments popped up across the neighborhood. Like in the Tenderloin, some sidewalks became crowded and strewn with personal objects and debris, increasing tension between the neighborhood’s factions and adding pressure on city officials to do something.
In June, they did: The empty lot at 730 Stanyan became the city’s second sanctioned tent site, and officials promised it would remove people — and their tents — from sidewalks. That’s when Safe and Healthy Haight organized via social media.
When contacted by The Frisc via email, the Safe and Healthy Haight “team” replied via an unsigned email: “We do not believe it is the right strategy to bring more tent encampments to the Haight as they threaten public health, the survival of our surrounding small businesses, and can undo decades of work and tens of millions of dollars spent by the city to clean up the Stanyan Street entrance to Golden Gate Park.”
The group has led opposition to the city’s decision to extend the site until March 2021. At a November 2020 meeting to discuss the extension, Preston told angry constituents not to call his office to complain about sidewalk encampments. Instead, they should “contact us to get answers, elevate issues, share concerns, advocate on behalf of housed and unhoused neighbors.”
Blake Williamson, who lives down the block from 730 Stanyan, says he first supported the idea, but it deteriorated with expanding encampments. “We were told this area would be given extra care with the Park police station nearby and the 24/7 security,” Williamson adds. “But the police didn’t come up with a solution. Dean Preston wouldn’t meet with us and told us, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’”
There’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around. Preston aide Jen Snyder says the supervisor and staff have been in “constant contact” with the neighbors. She says the sidewalk campers along Waller Street were encouraged by Homeless Youth Alliance, the nonprofit running the tent site, to stay nearby. (HYA staff did not respond to a request for comment.)
Before the holidays, city workers cleared the unsanctioned camps. “I agreed with the neighbors, it was a tough situation, and I’m glad it’s all solved now,” Snyder says, speaking of the Waller Street campers.
Not all is fractiousness, though. One new neighborhood group emerged in May to heal fractures: Cole Valley Haight Allies, or CVHA, which formed to support the tent site and other unhoused neighbors, according to cofounder Sarah Wolfish. The people camping at 730 Stanyan missed home cooking, so CVHA organized people to prepare meals for them every other Tuesday.
The group is also reaching out to housed residents to help resolve conflicts and raise awareness of what happens, for instance, when someone calls 311 about sidewalk campers. Wolfish says people have lost walkers or medication when city workers confiscate their stuff. “We’re just trying to educate. People are really open-minded and don’t know the issues our unhoused neighbors face,” she adds.
Wolfish hopes the Allies continue their work after the pandemic. It’s the sort of silver lining that could help the Haight overcome its fractious past and present.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that HANC had removed the letter about the 730 Stanyan project from its website.