After a lengthy hearing Tuesday, the Board of Supervisors unanimously accepted the wide-ranging draft reparations plan crafted by a committee tasked with proposing steps the city can take to remedy harms that Black residents endured over generations because of systemic racism and the legacy of slavery.
Yet supervisors did not not decide whether or when to act on any of the individual actions recommended in the plan. The board won’t decide on any specific reparations proposals, including potential cash payments, until after the committee submits its final report in June. Another hearing is planned for Sept. 19.
San Francisco isn’t alone in its efforts: A first-in-the-nation state task force is also studying how to implement reparations in all of California. The Chicago suburb of Evanston in 2021 became the first U.S. city to make reparations available to Black residents.
While the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s draft proposal includes dozens of recommendations, the potential $5 million one-time payments stand out as a particularly costly and politically difficult idea to implement. Multiple supervisors, including Board President Aaron Peskin, have said the payments are likely not financially feasible for now. Conservatives have panned the idea to local and national media outlets.
The 60-page draft reparations plan recommends far more than cash payments alone in its many proposals. In all, the plan includes more than 100 recommended actions related to economic empowerment, education, health and public policy.
“If you look at the (draft) report, you’ll see so many examples of how Black folks were done wrong here in San Francisco, and all of that can really be traced back to the negative effects of slavery, which traced back to negative policies across the country, San Francisco being no different,” said Supervisor Shamann Walton, who has been leading the board’s efforts to develop the reparations plan since 2020.
In an interview with The Chronicle on Monday, Walton declined to discuss the specific cash payment proposal included in the draft reparations plan, saying he was still evaluating all of the committee’s recommendations and would not weigh in on how the city should act until after the final report is submitted.
At Tuesday’s hearing, he issued a firm call for supervisors to implement reparations in some form.
“It is not a matter of whether or not there is a case for reparations for Black people here in San Francisco — it is a matter of what reparations will and should look like,” Walton said.
The full scope and cost of the potential lump-sum payments isn’t yet clear. To be eligible for reparations payments under the draft plan, recipients would have to be 18 or older and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least a decade. Recipients would also have to meet other criteria that may include proving that they were born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, migrated to the city during the same years, lived in the city for at least 13 years or were displaced from the city because of urban renewal between 1954 and 1973.
The committee has not said how many people might qualify for the payments, but it will likely include an estimate in its final report, said chair Eric McDonnell, a native San Franciscan who is the CEO and founder of the consulting firm Peacock Partnerships.
Committee members are not analyzing how the city would fund reparations payments.
“We were not charged with doing a feasibility study,” McDonnell told The Chronicle. “We were charged with chronicling the harm and assigning the value. Period. Think about it like an appraisal of your home. You don’t get a number that the market will bear — you get the value of the home. Does the market pay that? Maybe. Maybe not.”
The draft reparations plan details the history of discrimination and displacement Black people have faced in San Francisco, including racial covenants in housing deeds that specified that only white people could live in certain homes and neighborhoods. Black people were also denied bank loans for homes in areas where the government didn’t want them to live.
After World War II, when thousands of Black residents moved to San Francisco to work shipyard jobs, the city’s urban renewal plan led to the bulldozing of numerous buildings in the Fillmore district, displacing about 20,000 people, according to the draft plan. San Francisco’s Black population peaked at about 13% in 1970 and has since fallen to about 5%.
Despite their small share of the overall city population, Black people accounted for 38% of the city’s homeless population and 28% of its drug overdose deaths in 2022, according to city data. As of 2019, Black families in San Francisco had an average income of $31,000 compared to $116,000 for white households, the city has said.
“San Francisco has systematically prevented Black people from accumulating, sustaining or passing down wealth, and that has actively destroyed our ability to be able to build wealth within our communities,” Tinisch Hollins, vice chair of the reparations committee, told supervisors at their hearing Tuesday.
Beside the potential cash payments, the draft plan from the reparations committee recommends that the city consider supplementing African American income of low-income households to match the city’s area median income, which was $97,000 for one person in 2022.
Another recommendation is that the city offer first choice for subsidized below-market rate rental units to people who qualify for reparations. Other recommendations would have the city invest in scholarships and tuition assistance and even potentially eliminate student loan debt for Black San Franciscans that went through the city’s public school system.
To improve health disparities, the plan also proposes that the city build or boost funding to community health clinics in neighborhoods with a high concentration of African American residents. The draft plan further recommends that the city provide free mental health, prenatal care and rehab for all Black residents who have incomes below the poverty line, are victims of violent crime, were previously incarcerated, live in high-crime areas or have substance use disorder.
“Centuries of harm should be met with centuries of repair,” McDonnell, the committee chair, said at the hearing. “This is not a one and done. We have collective work to do to put folks back on the right path.”
Supervisor Myrna Melgar said she felt the reparations committee had done “exactly what we asked them to do.”
“This report is good. I am ready to accept it,” she said in an interview Monday. “That doesn’t mean that we’re approving the $5 million for every person … But I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that, as a city, we have not done right by some of our citizens.”
Supervisor Dean Preston said at the hearing that he believes “the horrors of slavery upon which this country was founded” warrant reparations and “the only question is how we quantify that.”
“If the numbers seem alarmingly large to some people nationally … I would ask you not to criticize the committee for proposing large numbers, but instead to ask what these numbers say about the society that we live in,” he said.
San Francisco has a recent history of steering public money toward helping Black residents. In 2020, after the police killing of George Floyd led to nationwide outcry, Mayor London Breed and Walton pledged to shift tens of millions of dollars away from law enforcement and toward programs that support the city’s African American community. That effort, known as the Dream Keeper Initiative, was also considered by supervisors at the same hearing on Tuesday.
During more than three hours of public comments at the hearing, dozens of speakers, many of them Black native San Franciscans or longtime residents of the city, spoke out strongly in favor of continued funding for the Dream Keeper Initiative and also voiced support for the reparations plan.
Rev. Amos Brown, a San Francisco civil rights leader and member of the committee, said the plan was necessary to address historic wrongs that had disadvantaged the city’s Black population. He urged supervisors to back the principles underlying the draft plan and “get into particularities later on.”
Attendees raise their fists while listening to Dr. April Y. Silas, executive director of Homeless Children’s Network, speak during a public comment period at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’s hearing on the city’s draft reparations plan on Tuesday. Over the course of the seven-hour meeting, residents called on city leaders to support the reparations plan, and city leaders condemned the racist responses they’ve received about the plan from their own constituents.
Salgu Wissmath/The Chronicle
“The house is on fire,” Brown said. “The patient is dying in the intensive care unit … We must bring life to this Black community.”
But in a statement released during the hearing, Brown, in his capacity as president of the San Francisco NAACP, said supervisors should not issue one-time $5 million payments. He said the city should instead focus on reparations-related investments in education, jobs, housing, health care and preserving the Fillmore Heritage Center as a Black cultural hub.
Any serious effort to set aside funds for reparation payments would likely run into resistance due to the city’s grim financial state: Officials are projecting a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years.
“San Francisco doesn’t have the financial wherewithal, even if we thought it was good policy, to get into the reparations payment business, but that should not truncate a conversation about ways that this society and its government should address past ills,” said Peskin, the board chairman, in an interview.
Peskin said he did not think lump-sum reparations payments were feasible for San Francisco right now and wanted to focus on the dozens of other long-term actions proposed in the draft plan.
“That is the bigger, harder conversation, and I think that we would be doing a disservice if we got lost in the politics of a one-and-done reparations payment,” he said.
At least two of Peskin colleagues, Supervisors Joel Engardio and Hillary Ronen, have previously expressed similar views, telling The Chronicle that they thought the city’s budget constraints may leave it unable to afford $5 million individual reparations payments. Still, both of them spoke favorably of the committee’s efforts at Tuesday’s hearing.
Engardio, who represents the Sunset, said west San Francisco neighborhoods used to be hostile to potential Black buyers — including the Giants’ legendary center fielder Willie Mays, who was at one point rejected when he sought to buy a west side home in 1957.
“Generations of Black families were denied the transfer of wealth that White families benefit from as their homes increase in value,” Engardio said. “Many people who inherit a west side home today could not afford it on their own, but they get to stay in San Francisco because their grandparents were allowed to buy homes when it was cheap.”
Yet vocal conservative opponents of San Francisco’s reparations plan remain. John Dennis, the chairman of San Francisco’s Republican Party, was blunt in his criticism of the potential reparations payments, telling ABC7 that the cash contribution idea was “ludicrous on its face” and nonsensical in the context of the city’s already massive budget.
McDonnell, the committee chair, said members understood that not all of the actions they were recommending could be implemented immediately. But he said some form of cash payments to the city’s Black residents should happen sooner rather than later.
“Whether it’s the full $5 million or not, financial repair should be included,” he said. “When you consider all of the ways in which the systems and practices have been managed to exclude and steal, if you will, the opportunities for financial mobility — families are hurting and have been for decades, if not longer. Financial repair is time sensitive. That is not one that can or should wait.”
Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @thejdmorris