Touting her budget plan earlier this month, Mayor London Breed sought to spruce up San Francisco’s can-do attitude about new development by recalling the past: “Where Moscone Center is, there used to be nothing but parking lots.”
Presumably without realizing it, she conjured up the specter of displacement, real and perceived, that looms over SF housing politics.
That’s because, once upon a time, the area where the downtown convention center now sprawls was a dense neighborhood of poor and working people, and its metamorphosis into today’s business and tourist-friendly district was the result of the mass demolition of thousands of homes in the 1970s.
The long and bitter showdown over SF’s so-called Skid Row shaped not only downtown and the city’s financial ambitions. Along with the “Negro removal” of the Fillmore and the freeway frenzy that led to a citizen revolt, it also fed a culture of suspicion and anger at large-scale projects and development that linger to this day.
It’ll take big ideas and ambitious commitments to drag San Francisco into the next boom cycle. But convincing the development-phobic that destructive urban renewal is a thing of the past requires an acknowledgement of that past.
It’s a story that started some 100 years ago, but still haunts City Hall any time housing and tenant activists invoke the image of a wrecking ball hovering over their neighborhoods.
It’s no surprise Breed tried to invoke the spirit behind the Moscone Center. The project, born out of the economic doldrums of the ’70s, brought new business interest, conventions, and injections of tourism cash into downtown for more than 40 years.
Scrambling for a plan
Now the doldrums are back. Pandemic hangover, work-from-home arrangements, and the longtime vulnerability of brick-and-mortar retail have produced soaring downtown vacancies, with owners of high-profile properties like the Westfield mall and the nearby Hilton Union Square hotel defaulting on loans.
City Hall is scrambling for a plan — or plans. Breed wants to extend tax breaks for certain businesses through 2028. New downtown zoning is supposed to lure tenants into vacant stores and offices. Permanent occupants like universities and laboratories would be ideal, but there’s also a plan to encourage pop-ups.
In the mayor’s vision, a “leading arts, culture, and nightlife destination” will move, hermit crab-like, into the shell of vacant office and retail space. Breed is also countering the “doom loop” narrative, putting tens of millions of dollars toward police overtime and vowing aggressive prosecution of drug dealing and use on SF streets.
Meanwhile, Sup. Aaron Peskin (with Breed’s support) is pushing a downtown renewal plan to convert disused office space to housing in what Peskin touts as a “comprehensive code change.”
There are broader, citywide reforms afoot as well. The Planning Department and Department of Building Inspection have a vision to chop years off of permit times. With state watchdogs threatening legal action, Planning has also midwifed a new Housing Element that aims to redo zoning and build taller, denser residential neighborhoods.
Indeed, “streamlining” is the order of the day — making it faster, easier, and cheaper to develop in SF. And some people really don’t like the idea of faster, easier San Francisco development. “Streamlining is already undermining equity tools,” says Larissa Pedroncelli, a member of the neighborhood group United to Save the Mission. “They can’t come in and level an entire neighborhood like they used to, so now they just do it in a different fashion, by zoning.”
Faster development, adds Pedroncelli, is a stealthy way to erode community input.
It’s an allegation that the city is constantly trying to dispel. “Upzoning only increases the legally allowable number of homes on subject land parcels,” Planning Commission president Rachael Tanner tells The Frisc via email.
“Zoning for additional housing capacity will not, on its own, lead to significant displacement” — an argument repeated so often in public meetings that some SF planners might well have it tattooed on their bodies, Memento-style.
Yet many people can’t get on board with that. And as they push back, they only need to cite local history to bolster their points.
The insult of ‘Skid Row’
In the early 1960s, infamous SF public administrator Justin Herman (whose name is now synonymous with the destruction of the Fillmore District) gave a speech to the U.S. Senate in which he referred to the area south of Market Street as “Skid Row,” full of “human blight,” “cheap rooming houses and third-rate hotels,” and residents who are “wandering, poor, mentally or physically sick” and “of very low skill.”
Herman was talking about a neighborhood populated largely by elderly immigrants, laborers, and Black and Filipino families who relied on cheap rents in the large, old residential buildings on those blocks. A 1952 SF Redevelopment Agency study actually took time to tally the number of nonwhite residents across nine blocks, and tutted that “a substantial portion of the white population is Spanish-speaking,” in case there was any ambiguity about their motivations.
The report called the neighborhood “an area of blight producing a despressing [sic], unhealthful and unsafe living environment, retarding industrial development, and acting as a drain upon the city treasury.”
In the decades after World War II, fads for “slum clearance” and “urban renewal” swept major American cities, with government agencies condemning working-class neighborhoods en masse, bulldozing tracts of housing and opening up the areas for new development, all under the guise of public health and safety.
In SF, the story of the Fillmore, fueled by James Baldwin’s famous “Negro removal” line, has gotten the most attention. But the Market-adjacent redevelopment that the mayor referenced in her budget comments radically transformed SF’s housing politics too.
Certain historic wounds have never healed. City Hall built a development model on a foundation of mass eviction, and from that perspective, there’s no reason to trust any new big vision. ‘This time will be different’ is a tough sell.
Because to many people, Skid Row was not Skid Row; it was home. Thousands of older renters relied on the shabby but affordable buildings, including the Milner Hotel, Mars Hotel, and north of Market in what’s today the Financial District, the International Hotel, then the lodestone of SF’s Filipino community.
“I never called it Skid Row. I never knew San Francisco even had a Skid Row the way LA did,” says John Avalos, executive director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations. A former SF supervisor, Avalos contends that last century’s redevelopment was “modern-day settler colonialism,” and that the business forces that seized the reins of power while remaking SoMa have never let go.
Ghost of the past
“When I found out about the I-Hotel, it affirmed the idea that the Filipino and Filipino American presence in SF was long-standing, and had not received the attention I thought it should have,” says SF-based novelist Lysley Tenorio, who had never heard of it or surrounding community before doing research for his 2012 short story “Save the I-Hotel.”
“The story is mostly about the characters, but their fate was entwined with that hotel,” just like many real residents at the time. These days, “Manilatown is now mostly an idea,” as opposed to a neighborhood — a ghost of the past. (There is still a large Filipino community in and around San Francisco, including in SoMa, but the campaign against the I-Hotel left marks.)
Renters in the neighborhood organized to fight redevelopment. “A lot of those folks had come from a tradition of labor and radicalism, [but] the resistance took up what was premised on a neighborhood identity, on being community members together rather than workers,” says urban historian John Elrick.
While they lost the war when the old hotels were demolished, the battle lines remain in pretty much the same places today: On one side are City Hall, private enterprises, and union leadership; on the other are community groups, tenants, and homeowners.
“I’m very grateful that when I moved here I was able to talk to all the surviving tenant organizers who said ‘There was this place called the I-Hotel, and this is what happened to it,’” says Shanti Singh, president of the renter’s rights group Tenants Together. “If not for those stories, I could have developed in a very different direction. We’re having the same urban revitalization conversations today.”
Much of modern SF’s red tape that frustrates development hawks exists because of the backlash 50 years ago that led to ”collective decision-making over the built environment,” as Elrick puts it. In other words, making sure average citizens could stand up against fresh attempts at “slum clearance” — which now also lets anyone with a few hundred bucks and an ax to grind throw months of procedural delays at a project.
So certain wounds have never healed. City Hall built a development model on a foundation of mass eviction, and from that perspective, there’s no reason to trust any new big vision. “This time will be different” is a tough sell. But with a city already rendered unaffordable to most, it’s the one that SF has to make.
“Urban renewal was quite different from upzoning, it’s not the same ‘scheme,’” Tanner emphasizes. “Tenant protections and preserving existing affordable units are essential, [and] inclusionary housing is also key to expanding our supply of below market-rate housing units,” she adds, touting some of the protections designed to keep modern redevelopment from pushing people out of their homes.
But Tanner acknowledges that the reality of past displacement — ”direct or indirect” — still weighs on the city’s conscience. And people remember.
