San Francisco lawmakers heard a range of options on Tuesday to provide reparations to Black people for decades of racist treatment by the city government.
The more than 100 recommendations included payments of $5m to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.
The San Francisco board of supervisors hearing the report for the first time on Tuesday voiced enthusiastic support for the ideas listed, with some saying money should not stop the city from doing the right thing.
Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans apparently unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education and economic prosperity and overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.
“Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future for everybody’s collective future,” said Rafael Mandelman, a supervisor, whose district includes the heavily LGBTQ+ Castro neighborhood.
Black residents once made up more than 13% of San Francisco’s population, but more than 50 years later, they account for less than 6% of the city’s residents – and 38% of the city’s homeless population. The reparations attempt to rectify historic injustices by focusing not on slavery but rather the city’s discriminatory treatment of Black residents during the period of “urban renewal” in the 1950s through 1970s, which included the razing of a thriving Black neighborhood and the displacement of nearly 20,000 people in the name of “economic development”.
Adopting any of the recommendations would make San Francisco the first major US city to fund reparations, though the effort faces steep financial headwinds and criticism from conservatives.
The draft reparations plan, released in December, is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth. The committee hasn’t done an analysis of the cost of the proposals, but critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, has said it would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.
Tuesday’s unanimous expressions of support for reparations by the board do not mean all the recommendations will ultimately be adopted, as the body can vote to approve, reject or change any or all of them. A final committee report is due in June.
San Francisco’s reckoning with the city’s historic treatment of Black people is being considered at a time of current economic instability, as the region’s tech industry reels from the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank and local businesses are seeing waves of layoffs.
Tinisch Hollins, vice-chair of the African American reparations advisory committee, alluded to those comments and several people who lined up to speak reminded the board they would be watching closely what the supervisors do next.
“I don’t need to impress upon you the fact that we are setting a national precedent here in San Francisco,” Hollins said. “What we are asking for and what we’re demanding for is a real commitment to what we need to move things forward.”
An estimated 50,000 Black people currently live in San Francisco, but it is not clear how many of them would be eligible for financial reparations. The recommendations lay out a number of possible criteria, such as living in San Francisco during a certain time period and descending from someone.
Eric McDonnell, chair of San Francisco’s African American reparations advisory committee, said he was disappointed by people who do not understand the legacy of US slavery and how structural racism reverberates through institutions today.
“There’s still a veiled perspective that, candidly, Black folks don’t deserve this,” he said. “The number itself, $5m, is actually low when you consider the harm.”
The idea of paying compensation for historic wrongs has taken off across the country, with California in 2020 becoming the first state in the US to form a reparations taskforce. The idea has not been taken up at the federal level.
The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first US city to fund reparations in 2021, using tax money from the sale of recreational marijuana. The city gave money to qualifying people for home repairs, property down payments and interest or late penalties due on property in the city. In December, the Boston city council approved a reparations study taskforce.
Critics of reparations for Black Americans often ignore the movement’s focus on government discrimination against Black people in the 20th century and say the payouts make no sense in a state and city that never enslaved Black people. California joined the United States in 1850 as a “free state”, but the state’s reparations committee has documented numerous accounts of land confiscation and housing discrimination, among other forms of institutionalized racism. Generally, reparations opponents say taxpayers who were never slave owners should not have to pay money to people who were not enslaved.
Reparations advocates say that view ignores a wealth of data and documentation showing how even after US slavery officially ended in 1865, government policies and practices worked to imprison Black people at higher rates, deny access to home and business loans and restrict where they could work and live. San Francisco’s report examines the legacy of discrimination against Black people in public education, as well as the toll of racial violence. It notes that at least 25 San Francisco police officers were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and that, since its founding, the police department has “killed African Americans at disproportionate rates”.
Justin Hansford, professor at Howard University School of Law, says no municipal reparations plan will have enough money to right the wrongs of slavery, but he appreciates any attempts by city officials to “genuinely, legitimately, authentically” make things right. And that includes cash, he said.
“If you’re going to try to say you’re sorry, you have to speak in the language that people understand, and money is that language,” he said.
John Dennis, chair of the San Francisco Republican party, said he did not support reparations, and called the city’s current conversation “completely unserious”.
The $5m lump sum payment “seems ridiculous, and it also seems that this is the one city where it could possibly pass”, Dennis said.
