Root, Race, Place

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PUBLIC

EDUCATION
REPORT

roots,
race,
place
A History of Racially Exclusionary
Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area
What roles and responsibilities
should local jurisdictions and
Bay Area residents have in
righting past wrongs?
How can we transform our
institutions of local governance,
zoning ordinances, housing
markets, systems of property
rights, connection to land, and
relationships to our neighbors
in order to fully realize racial
equity and belonging?
What systems must be established
to prevent the tactics of racial
exclusion and dispossession of
the region’s past from being
implemented again?
roots,
race,
place A History of Racially
Exclusionary Housing in the
San Francisco Bay Area

by Eli Moore, Nicole Montojo, and Nicole Mauri


This report is published by the Haas Institute for
a Fa i r a n d I n c l u s i v e S o c i e t y a t U C B e r k e l e y .

A B O U T T H E AU T H O R S ACKNOWLEDGEMEN TS
Eli Moore is Director of the California We thank the following historians and
Community Partnerships Program at researchers for their work that helped
the Haas Institute. His research focuses inform this report: Marilynn Johnson,
on urban planning, political economy, Paul Miller, Benjamin Madley, Marc
race, and human geography. Eli holds Weiss, Richard Rothstein, Robert Self,
master’s degrees in Geography and In- and Jessica Trounstine.
ternational Relations from the Syracuse
University Maxwell School of Citizen- Insightful feedback from the following
ship and Public Affairs. reviewers was instrumental in revis-
ing an early draft of this report: Amee
Nicole Montojo is a Housing Re- Chew and Chris Schildt, of PolicyLink;
search Analyst for the California Com- Catherine Engberg, of Shute, Mihaly &
munity Partnerships Program at the Weinberger; Caroline Peattie, of Fair
Haas Institute. Her research focuses on Housing Advocates of Northern Cali-
housing policy, displacement and gen- fornia; and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, of
trification, and equitable planning and Princeton University.
governance. She holds a master’s de-
gree in City Planning from UC Berkeley. REPORT CITATION
Moore, Eli, Nicole Montojo, and Nicole
Nicole Mauri holds a JD from Berkeley Mauri. "Roots, Race, and Place: A His-
Law and was a Coblentz Civil Rights tory of Racially Exclusionary Housing
Research Fellow at the Haas Institute. in the San Francisco Bay Area." Haas
Her legal practice will focus on advanc- Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society,
ing civil rights, housing, and economic University of California, Berkeley. Oc-
justice. tober 2019. haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/
Additional research assistance provided rootsraceplace
by Anetra Brown and Yvette Chen.
CON TACT
D E S I G N & L AYO U T 460 Stephens Hall
Rachelle Galloway-Popotas Berkeley, CA 94720
Tel 510-642-3326
IMAGE RESEARCH haasinstitute.berkeley.edu
Nicole Montojo

ON TH E COVE R “The View from Ohlone/Mission Bay: 1776-2016,” by Fernando Martí (see
justseeds.org/artist/fernandomarti/). Originally created for the publication Frames, Life,
and Liberation (see otheringandbelonging.org), this image was also used as a fundraiser
for the Sogorea Te' Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led organization that facil-
itates the return of Chochenyo and Karkin Ohlone lands in the Bay Area to Indigenous
stewardship (see sogoreate-landtrust.com/).
CONTENTS
Introduction 7
Local Expressions of Broader Systems 9
Local Actors and Tactics 10
Timeline of Racially Exclusionary Policies and Practices in the Bay Area 12
Key Findings 14

The Origins of Exclusion:


State Violence and Dispossession 16
Legislating the Right to Property 16
Enforcing Exclusion 20

Extrajudicial and Militia Violence 23

Exclusionary Zoning 29
Explicitly Racial Exclusionary Zoning 29
Early Cases of Implicitly Racial Exclusionary Zoning 29
Comprehensive and Euclidean Zoning 29

Racially Restrictive Covenants and


Homeowner Association Bylaws 35

Racialized Public Housing Policies 38


Homeowner Opposition to Public Housing 38
Segregated Public Housing 39
Real Estate Industry Influence over Public Housing 41
Creating New Barriers to Affordable Housing: Article 34’s Bay Area Roots 43

The Beginnings of Urban Renewal and Suburban Revolt 45


CONTENTS CONTINUED

Exclusionary Real Estate Industry Practices 49


Racial Steering 49
Blockbusting 50
Discriminatory Lending 52
Proposition 14 and Local Connection to State Politics 53

Municipal Fragmentation and White Flight 56

Discussion: Traces of the Past Today 59


Concentrated Wealth and Poverty 59
Gentrification and Displacement 60
Lasting Effects on Public Health 60
Echoes of Past Racial Narratives 61
Discrimination Continues 61
“Colorblind” Exclusionary Policies 62

Conclusion 64

Endnotes 66

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7

INTRODUCTION

In 1952, Sing and Grace Sheng , a Chinese American couple


living in San Francisco’s Chinatown district, decided to move out of
the crowded apartment they shared with their extended family and find
a place of their own. Since Mr. Sheng worked as a mechanic for Pan
American Airways at the San Francisco airport, they looked for a home
near his work in San Mateo County. They found a house in South-
wood, a subdivision of South San Francisco, and signed a purchase
agreement for $12,300. When white neighbors learned that a Chinese
American family planned to move to Southwood, they protested the
purchase. The South San Francisco city manager, Emmons McClung,
also a Southwood homeowner, orchestrated a community meeting in
which Mr. Sheng was confronted by 75 white homeowners opposed to
his family moving into their neighborhood. They conveyed to Mr. Sheng
that they had “no personal animosity toward him,” but feared that their
property values would decrease if the neighborhood lost its status as
“restricted”—or, for whites only.
The Southwood subdivision’s builder, American Homes Development
Company, had stoked their fear, sending a letter to homeowners that
urged them to protect their private property rights and the original re-
strictive covenants, despite the 1948 US Supreme Court decision that
ruled them legally unenforceable. The company also reportedly attempted
to intimidate the prior owner of the residence, J. H. Denson, who made
the sale to the Shengs. Denson stated in an interview that the company
called him and explained that “the whole neighborhood could bring suit”
against him and that his business could be “blackballed.” Mr. Sheng
responded by proposing a neighborhood vote on his purchase and
promised he would not move in if the community voted against it. The city
paid for and printed ballots to vote on the Shengs’ purchase. Southwood
voted to exclude the Shengs, 174-28.1

The gentrification and displacement happening in the San


Francisco Bay Area today may seem far removed from the blatant racial
discrimination that the Shengs faced in the 1950s, but these stories are
deeply connected. While the booming tech sector, globalized finance,
and other forces shaping housing in the region are new, racial exclusion
in housing is not. The region’s past and present are both stories of a sys-
tem of racial capitalism, in which race and racism are fundamental to the
creation of profit and accumulation of wealth.

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8

Sing Sheng (left) addresses the crowd of Southwood


residents after City Manager Emmons McClung (right)
records the results of the vote. The board displays the
final tally; 174 out of 202 residents objected to the
Sheng family moving into Southwood. Courtesy of San
Mateo County Historical Association Collection (SMCHA
2017.54).

The rampant displacement seen today in the San Francisco Bay Area is
built upon a history of exclusion and dispossession, centered on race,
and driven by the logic of capitalism. This history established massive
inequities in who owned land, who had access to financing, and who held
political power, all of which determined—and still remain at the root of
deciding—who can call the Bay Area home. While systems of exclusion
have evolved between eras, research indicates that “it was in the early
part of the twentieth century that the foundation for continuing inequality
in the twenty-first century was laid. By building inequality into the phys-
ical landscape, cities added ‘unprecedented durability and rigidity to
previously fragile and fluid [social] arrangements’.”2
The lasting impact of these historic processes is clearly evident in the
Bay Area, where racial residential segregation levels have persisted and,
by some measures, even worsened since the 1970s.3 People of color in
the region today still have far less wealth, less access to resources like
high-quality schools and job centers, and lower rates of homeownership
than white residents.4
Individuals and communities have resisted racial exclusion in housing
through organizing, legal challenges, individual acts, and other means.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
9

Organizations with deep roots in Bay Area communities led efforts to shift
public opinion, call out injustices, and fight for fair and affordable hous-
ing, locally and nationally, while also defending individual families facing
racial violence in their own neighborhoods. As part of the national civil
rights movement, many Bay Area racial justice advocates contributed to
the legal victories that overturned some exclusionary tactics. Yet despite
the progress won by these movements, and the formation of many civic
action and social justice groups pushing for racial inclusion and equity in
the years since, the region has failed to undo racial inequities entrenched
in earlier eras and is now perpetuating new ones.
Where do we go from here? To begin
to answer this, and to grasp what it will
take to undo racial inequality in housing,
To grasp what it
we must first understand how it was will take to undo
established and perpetuated. While
our efforts to build a more equitable racial inequality in
future naturally orient us toward the housing, we must
“new”—new policy solutions, technolog-
ical innovations, new development—we first understand how
cannot move forward without confront-
ing the past. In tracing the roots of the
it was established
region’s racial exclusion in housing, we and perpetuated.
find that racism reinvents itself, proving
to be dynamic, generative, and fluid,
yet also remarkably durable and entrenched. This report documents the
multifaceted tactics for racial exclusion and dispossession in housing that
changed over time and were carried out by various public institutions,
business interests, and networks. Understanding the history of how these
tactics functioned is essential to dismantling their legacies in the future.

Local Expressions of Broader Systems


Housing inequality and race before 1968 are often talked about in terms
of racial residential segregation, with segregation understood as simply
a separation of people of different racial groups. But this definition falls
short of describing the actual effects of segregation or the actors, inter-
ests, and systems behind it. Segregation extracts wealth and creates
barriers that exclude people of color from various resources. It functions
to hoard these resources among the groups that are included and re-
strict the access of the excluded groups. Segregation meant that African
Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx people, Native Americans, and other
people of color were excluded from access to economic and educational
opportunities, public investment, and other resources essential for build-

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10

ing wealth, owning land, and attaining equitable economic power. Com-
bined with forces such as overpolicing and fiscal austerity more broadly,
it meant that historically segregated neighborhoods that confined people
of color were undervalued, and their residents, who tended to be either
low-income renters or highly indebted homeowners, were more likely to
face unstable housing conditions.
Segregation is simultaneously a cause of racial inequity and an effect of
broader racialized systems of dispossession, including predatory invest-
ment (such as urban renewal) and disinvestment (such as white flight)
that allowed for capital accumulation for some through the extraction of
wealth from others. Financial benefits of racial residential segregation
accrued not only to white residents with concentrated resources in their
neighborhoods, but to the local real estate developers, agents, and in-
vestors who employed lucrative strategies such as blockbusting, racially
restrictive subdivisions, demolition and redevelopment, and expropriation
of land. Historian Destin Jenkins describes segregation as “the domestic
expression of the racial capitalism of the 20th century,” with “government
as the vehicle and capitalism in the driver’s seat.”5 The exclusion of the
Sheng family from South San Francisco is just one example of how this
dynamic played out over the course of the region’s history. Along with the
other cases detailed in this report, it illustrates how a multitude of actors
successfully merged public and private capacities using a racial logic of
difference not only to justify, but to actually drive the accumulation of cap-
ital through real estate by those in power. Within the system that these
tactics upheld, boundaries between “public” and “private” must therefore
be reconsidered. The “private” is more than individual choice, belief, and
action, as Jenkins points out,6 while the “public,” often acts in the private
interest of select property owners.

Local Actors and Tactics


Much has been written about the federal government’s role in the New
Deal Era of identifying majority-white areas as sound and profitable real
estate investments and heavily subsidizing them through the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) while simultaneously depriving majori-
ty-Black neighborhoods of similar assistance through a practice known
as redlining.7 The mortgage industry writ large has been responsible for
perpetuating that discrimination in underwriting loans on a disparate
basis favoring white people.8 While racialized housing inequality in the
Bay Area is part of this national dialectic, it is not solely a function of fac-
tors outside of local control. In fact, many of the tactics of exclusion and
dispossession were deeply localized in practice, driven by local actors
such as homeowners’ associations and neighborhood groups, real estate

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
11

agents and developers operating within the regional housing market,


and institutions, such as local governments and public agencies, which
collectively shape local policies and markets. This report examines the
history of how these local tactics of exclusion and dispossession worked
to establish and uphold a racial hierarchy in Bay Area housing prior to
the establishment of the California Fair Housing Act in 1966 and the
federal Fair Housing Act in 1968.9 By
prohibiting discrimination in the sale,
rental, and financing of housing, these
Segregation extracts
acts changed the legal terrain within wealth and creates
which exclusionary tactics operated,
thus requiring them to take new forms. barriers that exclude
But by this point, racially inequitable
systems had already rooted exclusion
people of color from
in place. various resources. It
In this report, we do not aim to ex- functions to hoard
pose a definite causal relationship
between the tactics we describe these resources
and socioeconomic outcomes,
nor indict certain jurisdictions over
among the groups
others. Racial residential exclusion that are included
operated systemically and regionally,
even while local actors have made and restrict access to
land use and housing decisions the excluded groups.
independently. We also recognize
that this research does not cover the
region’s more recent history or all the significant tactics or events relat-
ed to the topic. For instance, we did not find local evidence of contract
selling,10 an exploitative housing arrangement common in some African
American communities in other regions. With these limits, the purpose
of this report is to highlight policies and actions that historically perpetu-
ated racial inequality in housing in order to further a conversation about
how to achieve more inclusive and equitable communities.

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TIMELINE OF RACIALLY
EXCLUSIONARY POLICIES AND
PRACTICES IN THE BAY AREA
1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910

pre–1850 to post-1970
State Violence and Dispossession
Statutes enacted by Spanish, Mexican, and US (local, state and federal) governments
resulting in dispossession of land and exclusion from the right to property, and enforcement
of these laws through police violence.

pre–1850 to post-1970
Extrajudicial and Militia Violence
Acts of violence against individuals (e.g. assault, murder) and/or their homes (e.g. arson,
vandalism) to force or keep specific racial groups out.

1880–1966
Racially Restrictive Covenants and
Homeowner Association Bylaws
Deed restrictions prohibiting the sale or lease
of homes to specific racial groups; bylaws
restricting HOA membership by race.

1870 to post-1970
Implicitly Racial Zoning
Local land use regulations that are race-neutral on paper but
have a racially exclusionary effect.

1890–1917
Explicitly Racial Zoning
Land use regulations that explicitly
exclude certain racial groups.

late 1800s–post 1970


Racial Steering & Blockbusting
A realtor practice of steering homebuyers away or
toward certain neighborhoods depending on the
race of the buyer

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13

1966 1968
Reenstatement Passage of
of California Fair Federal Fair
Housing Act Housing Act

1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

1937–post-1970
Racialized Public Housing Policies
Local housing authority segregation policies & racial quotas,
barriers (e.g. voter referenda) to building new public housing,
demolition of public housing without replacement.

1950–post-1970
Urban Renewal
State acquisition of private land through eminent
domain & forced displacement of residents to
allow for redevelopment.

1945 to post-1970
White Flight and Municipal Fragmentation
Movement of white households away from urban centers
to suburbs, incorporation of new suburban municipalities.

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14

KEY FINDINGS

Racial residential segregation in the Bay Area is not natural or


simply a matter of individual preferences and actions. Today’s pat-
terns are partially the result of a wide range of coordinated tactics used to per-
petuate racial exclusion prior to the enactment of state and federal fair housing
legislation. These exclusionary tactics can be distilled into the following types:
state violence and dispossession, extrajudicial violence, exclusionary zoning,
racially restrictive covenants and homeowner association bylaws, racialized
public housing, urban renewal, racial steering and blockbusting, and municipal
fragmentation and white flight.

Exclusionary practices have persisted and evolved as the legal


terrain has shifted, finding new approaches when court chal-
lenges have invalidated previous tactics. The historical trajectory has
been that as overtly racial measures became illegal, ones that have an implicit
exclusionary effect have become more common. Yet there are early examples
of “colorblind” policies that had racialized effects, such as San Francisco’s
ordinance to prohibit laundries in white neighborhoods in the 1880s. Over 150
Chinese owners were prosecuted for violating the ordinance, while the city did
not enforce the law against non-Chinese owners.11 We find that across eras,
multiple tactics overlapped to simultaneously advance racial exclusion. Rather
than a chronological succession of one tactic after another, some endured over
multiple eras, and the overlap of multiple tactics contributed to their effective-
ness. The timeline in this section shows when different tactics were employed
and how they operated concurrently within time periods.

Violence and threats of violence are the longest-standing tac-


tic used to enforce racial boundaries and dispossess people of
housing and land. The initial colonization of the Bay Area was carried out
through Spanish military expeditions and Catholic missions that used violence
to coerce thousands of Native Americans to leave their homes and land. Later
waves of violence against Native Americans were carried out by militias during
the gold rush era and sanctioned by the State of California.12 Mob violence and
arson were used to remove Chinese Americans from their Bay Area neighbor-
hoods in the late 1880s.13 Anti-Black violence and threats were carried out by
homeowners,14 the police,15 and the Ku Klux Klan16 with impunity as courts and
prosecutors looked the other way.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
15 15

Other exclusionary tactics were more subtle and not expressed


in overtly racial terms. A set of social values and expectations, not always
consciously tied to race in the minds of most residents, were instrumental in
rationalizing practices bent on creating racialized spaces.17 These included
low-density development patterns, consumer preferences for suburban neigh-
borhoods and low tax rates, and a belief that neighborhoods without apart-
ments, low-income residents, or people of color would successfully maintain
high property values and/or appreciate the most over time.

Local laws that perpetuated racial exclusion were often the re-
sult of coordinated mobilization by actors within both the public
and private sectors, which blurred the lines between public and
private action. Throughout the region’s history, the interests of white proper-
ty owners, government officials, and developers aligned over the protection of
property values and accumulation of wealth based on racial exclusion. In many
cases, their interests were one and the same. The South San Francisco city
manager who facilitated the public vote against the Shengs was a Southwood
homeowner himself. Founding board members of the public housing authorities
in Richmond and Oakland previously held leadership positions in state and
local apartment owner associations.18 The chair of the Berkeley Civic Art Com-
mission who spearheaded the creation of the city’s original zoning ordinance
in 1916 was also the president of northern California’s largest real estate bro-
kerage and development corporation, which built numerous racially restricted
subdivisions in Berkeley and San Francisco.19

Many exclusionary housing policies now common across the


United States originated in the Bay Area. San Francisco was among
the first to use zoning to exclude specific racial groups with policies that were
used to both explicitly (the 1890 Bingham Ordinance20) and implicitly (the
1870 Cubic Air Ordinance21 and 1880 Laundry Ordinance22) criminalize the
city’s Chinese population. Berkeley’s 1916 comprehensive zoning ordinance
that established exclusive single-family residential zones, celebrated by Cali-
fornia Real Estate magazine for its “protection against invasion of Negroes and
Asiatics,”23 pushed the limits of local zoning authority and became a standard
in cities throughout the United States.24 In Oakland, after local developers,
real estate agents, and landlords defeated a major public housing plan, their
organization spearheaded the statewide ballot proposition that would establish
Article 34 in the California Constitution, creating a major barrier to public and
affordable housing across the state for decades thereafter.25

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16

THE ORIGINS OF EXCLUSION:


STATE VIOLENCE AND
DISPOSSESSION

Racial exclusion in housing is a systemic process fundamen-


tally tied to the control of land and the power to decide who is able to call
a place home. The earliest forms of racial exclusion in the Bay Area were
the violent dispossession of Native Americans’ land and concentration of
ownership of land by Spanish, Mexican, and early US settlers and gov-
ernments. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish soldiers and missionaries in
1769, an estimated 15,000 Native people lived in the Bay Area, compris-
ing several tribes and dozens of communities.26 People had been living in
the Bay Area up to or exceeding 10,000 years.27 Historian Benjamin Mad-
ley describes early California as “a thriving, staggeringly diverse place,”
with “dense webs of local and regional cultural exchange.”28 Indigenous
groups including the Ohlone (Costanoan), Coast Miwok, Wappo, Patwin,
and Pomo inhabited the land that is now the nine-county Bay Area.29
Under the Spanish, Mexican, and US governments, the forced dispos-
session of land from Native peoples followed a logic of economic profit
and racial hierarchy that became institutionalized through law, estab-
lishing a thread of racial capitalism, which carries through to the more
contemporary forms of racial exclusion in housing detailed later in this
report. For Spain, the establishment of 21 missions across California,
including five in the Bay Area,30 was not just a “spiritual conquest” of
Native Americans misunderstood as “gente sin razon” (people without
reason). It was a strategic maneuver to preempt expansion by other
colonizers and establish a protective buffer zone for its valuable silver
mines in northern Mexico.31 The missions held Native people in forced
labor and operated in concert with the Spanish military, which carried
out violent attacks on Native communities.32

Legislating the Right to Property


This early history marks the creation of legal structures to uphold racial
exclusion in California. Native Americans were forced into becoming legal
wards of Spanish missionaries, under the physical control of the Span-
ish and unable to leave the mission without permission.33 This system,
which was enforced by physical violence, made California Indians into
second-class legal subjects and became the precedent for the two-tiered
legal system later created by Mexican and US authorities.34 It also ex-

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
17

pelled inhabitants from the land, which was later sold or given to soldiers
or other chosen beneficiaries.
The California Constitutional Convention laid the foundation for exclusion
and dispossession under US law when delegates denied California In-
dians the right to vote.35 Following this decision and through a series of
new laws, Madley explains, “legislators slowly denied California Indians
membership in the body politic until they became landless noncitizens,
with few legal rights and almost no legal control over their own bodies.”36
In the 1850s, under
threat of violence, at
least 119 California
tribes signed treaties
with US Special Com-
missioners in which
they surrendered
the vast majority of
their land.37 In return,
the Commissioners
promised to provide
for basic needs, pro-
tection and education, Louis Choris ’s “Vue du Presidio” (ca. 1815)
as well as designate depicts the early San Francisco coast with
land for 19 reserva- Spanish soldiers dominating the Ohlone people.
tions. However, the US Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of
Senate rejected the California, Berkeley. 42
treaties, and instead
later authorized just
five military reservations that comprised less than one-sixtieth of the acre-
age negotiated in the treaties, and provided no protection or any of the
other promises made, leaving California’s Native populations extremely
vulnerable to acts of violence by vigilantes and militias.38 Madley states,
“Indians became, for many Anglo-Americans, nonhumans. This legal ex-
clusion of California Indians from California society was a crucial enabler
of mass murder.”39 Under US rule, California’s Native American population
fell by nearly 90 percent, from 150,000 in 1846 to 16,277 in 1880.40 In
the Bay Area, the Ohlone population plummeted to 2,000 by 1830, just
13 percent of the population 60 years prior. Today, people identifying as
Native American or American Indian alone in the US Census living in the
Bay Area number around 40,500.41
After the US annexation of California through the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo in 1848, the US government adopted the California Land Act
of 1851, which governed the transition in property rights and created a
commission that would investigate and determine the validity of all land

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18

The Indigenous Bay Area, 1769. Map taken from Infinite


City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit. Cartography:
Ben Pease. Used with permission from University of California
Press. © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
19

titles from the Spanish and Mexican eras.43


Although the US pledged to protect the prop-
erty rights of existing Mexican and indigenous
landowners, incomplete records of ownership
and imprecise surveys prevented many from
successfully defending their property rights. As
white Americans migrated to California during
the gold rush era and began squatting on con-
tested land, many former landowners were
dispossessed.44 Historians Robert Heizer and
Alan Almquist recount that by 1856, “most of
the great Mexican estates in the northern half of
California had been preempted by squatters or
sold off by their owners to pay for the legal fees
incurred in trying to have the titles validated.”45
Also starting in this era, state and federal laws
targeted Asian populations through the re-
striction of immigration (including the federal
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Immigration
Act of 1924) and immigrants’ rights to proper-
ty. California adopted alien land laws in 1913
and 1920 with the purpose of driving Japanese
farmers out of California agriculture and under-
mining the economic foundation of Japanese
immigrant society.46 The 1913 law prohibited
“aliens ineligible to citizenship,” which included
all Asian immigrants, from purchasing agricul-
tural land, restricted their leases to three years,
and prohibited the sale or inheritance of land
by one alien ineligible for citizenship to anoth-
er.47 Japanese immigrant farmers were initially
able to circumvent the law by purchasing land
in the names of their US-born children or land
companies until 1920, when California voters
approved a more stringent law proposed by
the legislature that prohibited aliens ineligible for
citizenship from leasing agricultural land altogether, buying and selling
stock in land companies that owned or leased agricultural land, and
appointing themselves as guardians of minors who held land in their
names.48 The 1920 Alien Land Law was later amended to also fully pro-
hibit the usage, cultivation, and occupancy of agricultural land for bene-
ficial purposes to restrict Japanese American farmers from engaging in
contract cropping agreements with landowners.49

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20

Before the alien land laws were struck down, forced internment of
people of Japanese descent during World War II resulted in a massive
loss of property and community in the Bay Area. Over the span of a
few months, Japanese Americans were rounded up by US soldiers and
local police, assisted by local officials and business leaders.50 In May
1942, the San Francisco Chronicle reported:

For the first time in 81 years, not a single Japanese is walking


the streets of San Francisco. The last group, 274 of them, were
moved yesterday to the Tanforan assembly center. Only a scant
half dozen are left, all seriously ill in San Francisco hospitals.
Last night Japanese town was empty. Its stores were vacant, its
windows plastered with “To Lease” signs.51

All were required to sell or give away their belongings, and just weeks of
notice provided insufficient time to get a fair price for farms, businesses,
and homes. The economic loss has been estimated at $1–$3 billion na-
tionally (not adjusted for inflation).52
During World War II, Californians aggressively sought to enforce the alien
land laws to prevent interned Japanese Americans from returning.53 The
laws remained in place until 1952, when they were overturned by a se-
ries of court cases (Oyama v. California, Fujii v. California, and Masaoka
v. California) and furthermore made obsolete by the Immigration Act of
1952, which declared Japanese immigrants eligible for citizenship.54 They
were officially repealed by a ballot proposition in 1956.55

Enforcing Exclusion
Local law enforcement officials played a key role in maintaining racial
exclusion, as exemplified by police participation in rounding up Japanese
Americans to be sent to internment camps in 1942. Racial exclusion
occurred not only through the enforcement of exclusionary policies, but
also through disparate enforcement that targeted people of color while
maintaining impunity for white individuals, refusal to protect people of
color from violence, and the direct use of violence to enforce the spatial
boundaries of racial residential segregation. During and after World War
II, local officials attributed rising crime and disorder, and particularly vio-
lent crime, to the growing population of migrant Black southerners.57 A
1943 Oakland Observer article captured the popular sentiment:

It is very possible that the trouble comes from immigrant Ne-


groes from the South, who are held well under control in the
South but, coming North, have found themselves thrilled with a
new “freedom.”58

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21

Japanese Americans who were forced to evacuate their homes in San


Francisco wait outside the Wartime Civil Control Administration Station
on Bush Street, taking only what they can carry to the internment camps.
By Dorothea Lange, April 29, 1942. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. 56

Richmond officials took this explanation further, stating that in discovering


the limits of this new freedom, the Black migrant “encounters many dis-
appointments and frustrations, to which he may have an aggressive reac-
tion.”59 This racialized rhetoric around crime waves and migrant immorality
fueled local law-and-order campaigns throughout the 1940s.
Campaigns of discriminatory policing served as a systematic form of ra-
cial control, according to historian Marilynn Johnson. Police regularly ha-
rassed Black men congregating in public spaces, threatening their arrest
if they refused to disperse, and also arrested hundreds of people of color
each year for mere “suspicion,” commonly when they were found in white
neighborhoods.60 These arrests functioned to enforce the “unwritten rules
and unmarked boundaries” of racial segregation.61
In response to mass arrests and police violence, the Oakland branch of
the Civil Rights Congress sued the City of Oakland on behalf of several
West Oakland residents. Advocates from the Bay Area Conference on
Negro Rights stated that “legal lynchings in the form of frame-ups are
multiplying,” and that “abuses of the civil rights of Negroes have reached
a new level.”62 In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party called for an end to

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22

police violence and led a movement of “defending our black community


from racist police oppression and brutality.”63 Historian Robert Self ex-
plains that the Oakland police department “responded to the Panthers
with nothing short of guerrilla warfare—no less than three Black men were
killed by Oakland police in the spring of 1968 alone.”64
While the extent of discriminatory law enforcement and police brutality
throughout the Bay Area’s history is not fully documented, Black resi-
dents in other parts of the region reported patterns of discriminatory po-
licing similar to that of Oakland. For example, in 1943 the Citizen news-
paper reported improper conduct and police brutality by the Marin City
Police Department and specifically four county deputy sheriffs paid by the
Marin Housing Authority65 for using “gestapo-like tactics against Black
workers and youth.”66
Beyond exerting control on public spaces, local law enforcement officials
also policed segregation of private spaces. Historian Richard Rothstein
describes one such instance in 1958, when Alfred Simmons, an Afri-
can Amercian teacher, rented a house in the Elmwood neighborhood
of Berkeley from a white man, Gerald Cohn. Cohn had purchased the
house with a mortgage insured by the FHA. Berkeley’s chief of police
called upon the FBI to find out how Simmons managed to move into the
all-white neighborhood. The FBI failed to prove that Cohn had always
intended to rent the house to an African American instead of occupying it
himself, but this still prompted the FHA to blacklist Cohn from ever ob-
taining another FHA-insured mortgage.67
Local police also perpetuated segregation by failing to protect people of
color from violence, which had the effect of sanctioning it. Sociologist Chris
Rhomberg notes that Piedmont police refused to provide protection for
Sidney Dearing, the only Black homeowner in the city in 1926, and “when
Dearing chose not to move, the city began condemnation proceedings
against his property in order to force him out.”68 E. A. Daly, a Black newspa-
per publisher and real estate agent in Oakland recalled another case:

In 1923 Mr. Burt Powell . . . bought a house on Manila Avenue.


We had to protect him for three or four weeks because the white
people wanted to kill him because he moved in a white district.
So we worked for him to watch over him for a period of twen-
ty-four hours for about three months. After then things kind of
quieted down. . . . There was another one on Genoa Street in the
5700 block. They put up a new house there and a Negro moved
in. The white people tried to run this colored man out and we
had to watch over him for about a month, day and night, to keep
the white people from molesting him.69

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23

EXTRAJUDICIAL AND
MILITIA VIOLENCE

Extrajudicial violence including arson, assault, and lynching


was a longstanding strategy through which racial exclusion, disposses-
sion, and control were exerted. Police, prosecutors, courts, media outlets,
and other parties looked the other way as individuals and groups carried
out attacks on people of color who attempted to access housing (or in
the case of Native Americans, maintain access to their homelands) and
other resources. During the California gold rush in the 1850s, private
militias organized violent campaigns against Native Americans across the
state, resulting in over 100,000 killed, an estimated loss of two-thirds of
the Native population.70
At times, this type of violence was formally endorsed by government of-
ficials, blurring the line between state violence and extrajudicial violence.
As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recounts, “Although the U.S. Con-
stitution formally instituted ‘militias’ as state-controlled bodies that were
subsequently deployed to wage wars against Native Americans, the vol-
untary militias described in the Second Amendment entitled settlers, as
individuals and families, to the right to combat Native Americans on their
own.”71 Madley recounts the massacres of Native Americans in Napa and
Sonoma counties in the 1850s, which resulted in zero convictions of the
perpetrators. “As Indian killing spread and became increasingly common,
California law enforcement officers took little action to protect Indians.
This is unsurprising. State legislators had banned Indians from serving
as jurors or testifying against whites in criminal cases…and leaders like
Governor Burnett supported Indian-hunting ranger militias.”72
In the late-1800s, a wave of anti-Chinese violence occurred across the
region, with several Chinese American communities forcibly removed and
burned. San Pablo, San Jose, Antioch, and other towns in the Bay Area
expelled Chinese American residents in 1886. Around the same time,
arsonists set fire to the Chinatown neighborhoods in San Jose and other
towns.73 Anti-Chinese violence and movements led by the Workingmen’s
Party and Anti-Coolie Association,74 which was first established in San
Francisco, gave rise to racialized zoning ordinances in the 1870s and
1880s, the California Anti-Coolie Act in 1862, and the federal Chinese
Exclusion Act in 1882.75
“Sundown towns” were a formal expression of the threat of violence to
people of color existing in a town after dusk. From the 1890s to 1960s,
thousands of towns across the country had designated themselves

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24

An anti-Chinese riot takes place front of San Francisco City Hall in


1877, where the Main Library now stands. Line drawing by H.A. Rodgers.
Courtesy of the California Historical Society. 76

“white only,” and often had signs announcing that these areas were sun-
down towns, meaning African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese
Americans, or other people of color were not allowed in town after the
sun went down.77 Historian James Loewen keeps records of sundown
towns, and lists Antioch, San Jose, and San Leandro as “surely” sundown
towns, and considers it “probable” that Burlingame, Lafayette, Palo Alto,
Mill Valley, Napa, Piedmont, and Ross were too.78 Loewen notes that in
the 1940s, some realtors proposed designating the entire San Mateo
peninsula a sundown area. An Atherton real estate agent “urged exclusive
‘white occupancy in the region,’” stating that the peninsula was “not a
proper place” for “Negroes, Chinese, and other racial minorities.”79 The
Pacific Citizen reported that other members of the realty board “felt the
only way to handle the minority problem was to set aside acreage and
subdivide it for minority groups with schools, business districts, etc.”80
Though the proposal for a sundown area was shelved, threats and vio-
lence largely kept people of color from moving in.
Several lynchings in the Bay Area were documented, although infor-
mation on the full extent is incomplete. Historian Monroe Nathan Work

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25

(1866–1945), who meticulously recorded lynchings across the country


as part of his work at the Tuskegee Institute, documented three acts of
white supremacist lynching in the Bay Area between 1880 and 1920.
These murders were carried out against a Black man in San Jose in
1892, a Mexican man in Los Gatos in 1883, and another Mexican man
in Santa Rosa in 1920.81 Since the publishing of the Tuskegee Institute’s
archives, multiple scholars have uncovered at least 10 other acts of lynch-
ing or white supremacist mob violence in the Bay Area between 1850
and 1920, which were carried out against five Mexican males, one Italian
male, three Chilean males, and one Native American male.82 Lynching was
far more common in the American South, a campaign of racial terror that
contributed to the “Great Migration” of African Americans.83 Thousands
of African American families migrated to the Bay Area in the 1940s and
1950s, coming from histories and experiences of racial violence in the
southern communities they left behind.
For example, in 1943 after federal authorities ordered a shipbuilding
corporation in Mobile, Alabama, to integrate and promote Black ship-
yard workers, a violent white riot against Black workers occurred, last-
ing several days. This spurred a group of workers to move to the Bay
Area shipbuilding city of Richmond.84 In addition, as historian Marilynn
Johnson explains, many Black migrants left because racial discrimina-
tion in the South barred them from economic opportunity. Despite labor
shortages, many defense contractors refused to hire Black workers,
while others refused to promote them or allow them to enroll in voca-
tional training. “Growing frustration with local conditions, combined with
promising reports from West Coast cities, encouraged many southern
blacks to emigrate.”85
In the 1940s, high demand for workers in shipbuilding and other war-re-
lated industries drew the largest westward migration of African Ameri-
cans, with nearly 125,000 settling in the Bay Area.86 The vast majority of
Black migrants came from the South, with 65 percent from Louisiana,
Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.87 The Kaiser Shipbuilding Corpora-
tion, for instance, had an out-of-state recruitment program that aimed to
secure 150 new workers per week for its yards in Richmond.88 Military
supply centers, railroads, and docks also became major employment cen-
ters.89 The population growth of Richmond is telling of the growth of the
African American population in the region during the time: in 1940 the
US Census counted 270 African American residents and by 1950 there
were 13,374.90 In the Bay Area as a whole, the Black population grew
from 20,751 in 1940 to 149,809 in 1950.91 After the war, approximately
85 percent of Black migrants settled on the West Coast.92
But the newcomers found that they had not fully escaped racial violence
by moving to the Bay Area, where white supremacist movements had

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26

taken root long before. The Ku Klux Klan had established a presence in
the Bay Area during the 1920s, staging rallies, participating in public
parades in their full regalia by the thousands, and carrying out cross
burnings in places such as the hills of Richmond. Their freedom to do
so was publicly endorsed in 1922 by that city’s main newspaper, the
Richmond Independent.93
During and after World War II, widespread resistance to racial integration
was expressed through intimidation and violence against Black families.
Johnson explains the rise of anti-Black racism during this period:

By transforming the racial makeup of the Bay Area, the wartime


influx of black workers also transformed the racial biases of local
white residents. During the war years, blacks replaced Asians as
the area’s largest racial minority. This shift was due not only to
the growth of the black population but also to the removal and
subsequent dispersion of Japanese-Americans. With the latter
group confined in distant relocation centers and Chinese-Amer-
icans now allied in the anti-Japanese campaign, black migrants
became the prime target of local bigotry. The antiblack racism
that flourished during World War II would intensify in the post-
war years, overshadowing the anti-Chinese sentiments that had
historically dominated West Coast cities (Johnson, The Second
Gold Rush, 55).

In the 1920s, the Oakland Klan chapter had thousands of followers, and
in 1925, 8,500 people participated in a Ku Klux Klan cross-burning
ceremony inside the Oakland Auditorium (now known as the Kaiser
Convention Center). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley. 94

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27

In 1952, Wilbur and Borece Gary and their seven children purchased
a house in the Rollingwood subdivision in unincorporated San Pablo.95
Rollingwood was built during the war with federal loans, which required
racial covenants that prohibited all 700 houses from being sold to African
Americans like the Garys.96 These covenants were officially invalidated by
the 1948 US Supreme Court decision, Shelley v. Kraemer, but segrega-
tion remained in place until the Gary family moved in. News of the Gary
family’s purchase prompted the Rollingwood Improvement Association
to attempt to negotiate a buyout of the home, which the Garys refused.97
Upon moving, they became the target of death threats, violence, and
intimidation by white residents. The office of their realtor Neitha Williams,
who was also African American, was vandalized. In his open letter to the
community, Wilbur Gary documented the placing of a Ku Klux Klan cross
on their lawn and the gathering of a 400-person mob that stoned their
home and shouted threats:

Sheriff’s deputies stood by and observed the rock throwing, they


did not make a single arrest, nor did they order the rock throw-
ers to stop. Since that night more rocks have been thrown and
threats have been made, but still no arrests have been made and
there has been no action by the authorities to put an end to this
lawlessness.98

Similar cases of violence and intimidation, given impunity from local


officials, have been documented in counties throughout the region. In
Redwood City, the newly built home of John J. Walker, a Black war vet-
eran, was burned down in 1946 after he received threats and demands
to move out.99 African Americans who managed to purchase property in
Sonoma County had to contend with the real possibility of racially mo-
tivated violence and vandalism. In the 1950s, the Santa Rosa weekend
home of San Franciscan NAACP leader Jack Beavers was burned. Black
and white neighbors alike agreed that the fire was likely a deliberate act
“done to the family because of discrimination.”100
Intimidation also affected white individuals who were seen as facilitating
integration. When the baseball player Willie Mays moved to San Francis-
co to play with the Giants in 1957, his family struggled to find an owner
willing to sell to them. Mays and his wife Marghuerite placed a cash offer
on a house in the city, prompting many neighbors to vehemently pressure
the owner, Walter Gnesdiloff, to refuse the offer. Gnesdiloff’s employer
stated that Gnesdiloff was “destroying himself and the neighborhood.”
This opposition led Gnesdiloff to initially reject the offer: “I’m just a union
working man…I [would] never get another job if I sold this house to that
baseball player. I feel sorry for him, and if the neighbors say it would be
okay, I’d do it.”101

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28

The Gary family stands


on their front yard
at 2821 Brook Way
with a white cross, a
symbol the Ku Klux
Klan used to terrorize
them from moving
into the Rollingwood
subdivision in San
Pablo, which historically
prohibited the selling
of houses to African
Americans. Published
in the Richmond
Independent, 1952.

With intervention from the San Francisco Council for Civic Unity and
much public attention due to Mays’ fame, Gnesdiloff decided to sell. His
realtor refused to take part in the transaction, claiming that his business
would suffer as a result. Then one week after the Mays family moved into
the house, the front window was smashed with a rock. Marghuerite Mays
spoke out against the racism they encountered: “Down in Alabama where
we come from, you know your place, and that’s something, at least. But
up here it’s all a lot of camouflage. They grin in your face and then de-
ceive you.” In response, the San Francisco Chronicle called out the hy-
pocrisy of San Franciscans that “blunt the sharp edge of local indignation
against citizens of the South who have been exciting little sympathy with
their complaints that integration is a vexing problem.”102
As the region’s history of violence shows, extrajudicial violence often
drove the adoption of new exclusionary policies, and it even furthered
exclusionary tactics like racial covenants after courts ruled them unen-
forceable, solidifying this strategy as a dominant and enduring means of
control and exclusion.

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29

EXCLUSIONARY ZONING

Zoning encompasses the set of land use regulations local govern-


ments use to separate land into different sections, or zones, with specific
rules governing the activities on the land within each zone.103 Today’s
municipal zoning codes often include regulations related to building den-
sity and height, property lot sizes, placement of buildings on lots, and
the uses of land allowable in particular areas of the jurisdiction.104 In the
United States, they also typically regulate land by separating residential,
commercial, and industrial uses from each other, and give residential
zones the greatest protections from land uses that may cause nuisances
or hazards to residents.105 Formally, zoning policies are typically justified
by public health rationales, but in their design and effect they have often
perpetuated racial exclusion. In some respects, Bay Area cities lead the
country in creating zoning regulations motivated by racial exclusion.

Explicitly Racial Exclusionary Zoning


Many municipalities in the United States enacted outright racial zoning
provisions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in order to
separate white and nonwhite residents by law,106 and San Francisco was
among the earliest. It became the first city to attempt to segregate ex-
plicitly on the basis of race by passing an ordinance in 1890 that sought
to completely exclude Chinese residents from certain areas of the city.
Known as the Bingham Ordinance, it would have given those residents
60 days to relocate to areas designated in the law or face a misdemeanor
charge and up to six months in jail.107 However, a federal court quickly
invalidated that ordinance.108
Over the following 27 years, numerous cities across the country adopt-
ed racial zoning and mapped and designated racial categories for each
residential block. The US Supreme Court ruled explicit racial zoning un-
constitutional in 1917,109 although some localities throughout the United
States continued to enforce racial zoning after the court’s decision.110
Many segregationists abandoned racial zoning and began advocating
for “comprehensive zoning,” while others turned to private deed restric-
tions to ensure continued segregation.111

Early Cases of Implicitly Racial Exclusionary Zoning


While establishing zoning districts that explicitly assign certain areas
for one particular race or another was outlawed in 1917, other forms of
zoning that do not mention race explicitly were widely used to achieve

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30

exclusionary effects based on race. Implicit exclusionary zoning in the Bay


Area dates even further back than San Francisco’s explicitly racial Bing-
ham Ordinance. In 1870, San Francisco established the Cubic Air Ordi-
nance, which required 500 cubic feet of space for every person residing
in a lodging house. Amid an era of anti-Chinese sentiment, the leadership
of the Anti-Coolie Association brought forward the proposal, which was
framed as a public health and safety
measure. The ordinance led to the
arrest and jailing of thousands of
Chinese individuals in San Francis-
co, whose violations were consid-
ered misdemeanors punishable by a
fine of up to $500 and/or up to three
months in prison. A Chinese hotel
owner successfully challenged the
ordinance in the county court, but
targeted arrests later continued in
1876 after the state enacted its own
cubic air statute.112
San Francisco also attempted to
ban the establishment of laundries in
all-white neighborhoods in 1880 by
declaring it unlawful “for any person
or persons to establish, maintain,
or carry on a laundry, within the The March 2, 1878 cover
corporate limits of the city and county of The San Francisco
of San Francisco, without having first Illustrated Wasp depicts
obtained the consent of the board of the jailing of Chinese lodging
supervisors, except the same be locat-
house residents following the
ed in a building constructed either of
adoption of the Cubic Air
brick or stone.”114 While the ordinance
Ordinance. Courtesy of the
did not explicitly mention race, its in-
Bancroft Library, University of
tent and impact were discriminatory
California, Berkeley. 113
because the large majority of laundries
were operated by Chinese people and
constructed of wood, and it gave city officials broad discretion to restrict
where such laundries could be located. Environmental sociologist Dorce-
ta Taylor notes while over 150 Chinese owners were prosecuted for vio-
lating the ordinance, the city did not enforce the law against non-Chinese
owners. The US Supreme Court declared the ordinance unconstitutional
in 1886 in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, ruling that the discriminatory administra-
tion of the statute was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment.115

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31

Comprehensive and Euclidean Zoning


Modern zoning has its roots in Berkeley, and racial exclusion and real
estate profits were among the primary reasons for its development.
Berkeley’s zoning district ordinance was passed in 1916 and created
eight types of land use districts, but did not apply them to areas of the
city until residents petitioned to have their neighborhood zoned. Some
of the issues that motivated residents to zone their neighborhood were
explicitly racial:

Early “zoning actions by the City Council in response to property


owner petitions included one which required two Japanese laun-
dries, one Chinese laundry, and a six-horse stable to vacate an
older apartment area in the center of town, and another that cre-
ated a restricted residence district in order to prevent a ‘negro
dance hall’ from locating ‘on a prominent corner.’”116

The push for local government to set up zoning regulations was largely
driven by real estate developers and was in part an effort to institu-
tionalize the restrictions that had been enforced through private deed
restrictions.117 The city council appointed Duncan McDuffie, a prominent
Berkeley developer and leading proponent of zoning at the time, as
chair of the Civic Art Commission, which spearheaded the passage of a
zoning ordinance. According to McDuffie, “In Berkeley the value of pro-
tective restrictions has been amply demonstrated by their use in private
residence tracts. The adoption of a district or zone system by Berkeley
will give property outside of restricted sections that protection now en-
joyed by a few districts alone and will prevent deterioration and assist in
stabilizing values.”118 Several neighborhoods had been developed with
five-year private deed restrictions that had expired, so the zoning would
allow these restrictions to be renewed and institutionalized. As president
of Mason-McDuffie, northern California’s largest real estate brokerage
and development corporation at the time, which built numerous racial-
ly restricted subdivisions in Berkeley and San Francisco, McDuffie’s
influence reached beyond the City of Berkeley. California realtors cele-
brated Berkeley’s racial exclusion, praising in the California Real Estate
magazine in 1926 the city’s ability “to organize a district of some twenty
blocks under the covenant plan as protection against invasion of Ne-
groes and Asiatics.”119
According to planning scholar Sonia Hirt, Berkeley’s 1916 ordinance
was also likely the first in the country to define a principal “Class I” zone
exclusively for single-family houses, thus establishing the national trend
that has come to distinguish US zoning.120 Leading advocates of zoning
in Berkeley stated that “apartment houses are the bane of the owner of

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32

the single family dwelling,” and would “condemn the whole tract…of fine
residences.”121 The same advocates also publicly voiced their explicitly
racist motivations: “We [Californians] are ahead of most states [in adopt-
ing zoning]…thanks to the persistent proclivity of the heathen Chinese to
clean our garments in our midst.”122
In the 1926 case Euclid v. Ambler, the Supreme Court ruled that zoning
ordinances were generally valid so long as they were not arbitrary and
unreasonable and had a “relation to the public health, safety, morals, or
general welfare.”123 Furthermore, the ruling upheld and endorsed the con-
cept of the exclusive single-family zone that Berkeley pioneered a decade
earlier.124 Now constitutional, this type of zoning became the model for
the rest of the country. Named after the court case involving the village of
Euclid, Ohio, “Euclidean zoning” involves the separation of uses, special
zones for single-family homes, setbacks, and height restrictions.
The widespread adoption of zoning coincided with an increase in immi-
gration and, for the North and Midwest, migration of African Americans
from the southern United States.125 Similarly, the Bay Area city of Mil-
pitas, a largely white jurisdiction, used zoning to prevent Black workers
from moving to the area after the Ford Motor Company moved its plant
there from Richmond after World War II. Charles Abrams reported that
when “the labor union attempted to construct housing for Black workers,
the city rezoned the site for industrial use…Thereafter came a sudden
strengthening of building regulations, followed by a hike of sewer con-
nection costs to a ransom figure.”126 As demographic shifts occurred,
the rhetoric used by planners in the early-twentieth century to justify the
creation of separate residential zones for single-family homes and apart-
ments tells a story of class and racial bias. Intermixing between these
residences would “condemn” the single-family homes according to the
architects of the Berkeley zoning plan. In this way, “zoning rules, like many
of the other moral reforms of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth cen-
turies, were designed to significantly reduce the likelihood that middle-
and upper-class children would come into contact with poor, immigrant,
or black culture.”127
Berkeley’s zoning scheme and much of the Euclidean zoning that swept
the country were early examples of implicitly racist policy design, evi-
denced in the publicly stated reasons for the policies, and their impact. In
her national study of zoning and segregation, Trounstine finds that “cities
that were early adopters of zoning ordinances grew to be 10 percent
more segregated over the following fifty years than did cities that were
not early adopters. The results also illustrate that zoning ordinances dou-
bled the amount of renter segregation. In early adoption cities, property
values would also become more unequal by 1970.”128

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33

A postcard from ca. 1915 depicts a residence in the Elmwood district of


Berkeley. Elmwood Park was the first Berkeley subdivision to be assigned the
exclusive single-family residential zoning designation. Duncan McDuffie of
the Mason McDuffie Company, which created the neighboring Claremont
subdivision, advocated for exclusive single-family zoning in Elmwood out
of concern that a lack of public zoning could lead to Claremont becoming
surrounded by "incompatible" uses that would affect his subdivision's property
values. Courtesy of Berkeley Public Library.

The real estate industry’s advocacy for zoning was driven by tightly in-
tertwined interests in generating profit and maintaining racially exclusive
areas. Real estate developers, who had often developed large tracts of
dozens or hundreds of homes, feared that the allowance of people of
color would lower the sale prices of the homes, a concern that white
homeowners also voiced. Historian David Freund illuminates the racial
underpinnings of zoning:

Zoning’s original intent must be understood in the context of


early twentieth-century racial politics, when enthusiasm for the
new science of land-use economics converged with assump-
tions about racial, specifically eugenic, science. Most early
zoning advocates believed in racial hierarchy, openly embraced
racial exclusion, and saw zoning as a way to achieve it. But they
formulated strategies and sketched out a language for justifying
segregation that focused on practical, supposedly nonideologi-
cal considerations.129

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34

Trounstine states that “as zoning practices spread through the 1920s,
emphasis on the enhancement of property values became the dominant
argument.”130 The real estate industry’s involvement in the emerging field
of urban planning nationally resulted in a “decisive (and quite rapid)
shift in zoning’s focus, away from the broad concern with ensuring ‘best
use.’”131 Then “almost universally, it was believed that the wrong sorts of
people residing, or even working, in an area could negatively impact prop-
erty values.”132 Furthermore, “African American residential mobility was
always understood in negative terms, because it forced ever wider read-
justments of property values in white neighborhoods.”133 As Robert Self
aptly remarks, “Containment is not too strong a word for the industry’s
desire to minimize these readjustments.”134 This enshrined a “theory of
land-use economics [that] treated racial and class differentials, like other
supposedly objective land use variables, as calculable.”135 The circular
logic of this argument would prove self-fulfilling: white people feared the
presence of people of color would lower their property values, so when
people of color did move in, white people quickly sold, earning a lower
price than they would otherwise. This logic also devalued homes owned
by people of color, driving down overall neighborhood prices.
Incorporated municipalities also turned to exclusionary land use policies
like large minimum lot sizes, growth boundaries, and caps on new units.
For example, immediately after Atherton was incorporated in 1923, the
town adopted a zoning ordinance imposing a one-acre minimum lot for
housing.136 In the mid-1950s, more suburbs, typically seeking to prevent
annexation, followed suit in adopting stringent land use regulations. Los
Altos Hills, incorporating in 1956, enacted a one-acre minimum lot size
and precluded multifamily housing in their zoning ordinance.137 The 1959
General Plan states the citizens’ intentions were to preserve the town’s
“rural-residential” character and avoid “undue burdens” upon the town’s
resources with population concentration.138

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35

RACIALLY RESTRICTIVE
COVENANTS AND HOMEOWNER
ASSOCIATION BYLAWS

Throughout the late -nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries,


white property owners and subdivision developers wrote clauses into
their property deeds forbidding the resale and sometimes rental of such
property to non-whites, particularly African Americans.139 This approach
was endorsed by the federal government and the real estate industry at
least through the 1940s, and in many cases was required by banks and
other lending institutions.140
Racially restrictive covenants were common across the Bay Area. The first
homes in the subdivision of Westlake in Daly City were sold in 1949 and
included a racial covenant that
covered all properties in the de-
velopment. The FHA insured the
development even though it had
stated publicly that the agency
would not insure developers who
excluded African Americans from
their subdivisions.143 Similarly,
when developers broke ground
on the unincorporated commu-
nity of San Lorenzo in 1944, a
covenant excluding all but white
residents covered the entirety of
the development. The San Lo- An aerial view of San Lorenzo Village
renzo Village Homes Association in 1950, which included nearly 1,500
enforced these restrictions.144 single-family homes. Construction of the
Discrimination by agreement con- white-only subdivision began in 1944,
tinued even after the Supreme in anticipation of the postwar increase in
Court ruled that racially restrictive housing demand. Courtesy of the Hayward
covenants were unenforceable in Area Historical Society Archives.
1948. Civil rights attorney Loren
Miller lamented in 1960 that “three decades of unconstitutional judicial
enforcement of covenants had frozen them into business practices, public
thinking, and public morality.”145 Furthermore, as historian George Lipsitz
details, “people denied the opportunity to buy a home (and thus accu-
mulate assets) because of an illegal restrictive covenant…had to bear
the brunt of challenging it themselves. They had to initiate legal action

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36

The Price List for the Berkeley Park subdivision in Kensington includes
a restriction against “Asiatics or Africans.” George Friend Company,
ca. 1914. Courtesy of Earth Sciences and Map Library, University of
California, Berkeley. 142

and bear the complete cost and burden of seeking to have the law en-
forced.”146
In 1960, the Marin County Committee on Racial Discrimination reported
that restrictive covenants were still in use, despite their illegality, in order
to place social pressure on white families who did not wish to discrimi-
nate.147 According to Alexander Saxton, a retired history professor and
a resident of Sausalito at that time, “Back then, Marin County was com-
pletely segregated. Housing segregation was strenuously enforced both
by local banks and real estate people. White people could find new hous-
ing around the county, but Marin City was the only place open to black
people. So that’s where they stayed.”148
After Shelley v. Kraemer, neighborhoods around the country, including in
California, continued to bar African Americans and other racial minorities
from purchasing property in their neighborhoods by creating community
associations in which potential buyers would have to become members
before purchasing property in the area. The white homeowners’ asso-
ciations were often created by real estate developers.149 Because the
bylaws of these associations restricted membership to whites only, they
functioned to prevent African Americans from buying in those neigh-
borhoods.150 Associations like these and remaining covenants, along

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Above: Newspaper ads promoting racial covenants and racially exclusionary


housing in Oakland and San Francisco. Left: A Laymance Real Estate
Company advertisement for Rock Ridge Park in Oakland advertises that
“no negroes, no Chinese, no Japanese” can build or lease in Rock Ridge
Park. Published in San Francisco Call, October 13, 1906, Courtesy of
California Digital Newspaper Collection, Center for Bibliographic Studies
and Research, University of California, Riverside. Right: The Baldwin &
Howell Real Estate Company markets Presidio Terrace as the “only one spot
in San Francisco where only Caucasians are permitted to buy or lease real
estate or where they may reside.” Published in The Argonaut, September
1, 1906. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California,

with federal and state governments’ refusal to enforce compliance with


Shelley v. Kraemer, kept many neighborhoods in the Bay Area entirely
white through much of the twentieth century. For example, the City of San
Leandro, whose population remained almost entirely white for decades
after the Supreme Court ruling, maintained its racial exclusivity through
homeowners’ associations that reportedly kept a “vigilante-like” watch on
local real estate agents to ensure that none would show homes to African
Americans and that the city government took no action to stop this intimi-
dation.151 While unenforced, racially restrictive regulations remained with-
in homeowner association bylaws in some instances as late as the 1990s
and 2000s, such as Lakeside in San Francisco152 and Cuesta La Honda
in San Mateo County.153

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RACIALIZED PUBLIC
HOUSING POLICIES

The history of public housing in the Bay Area demonstrates


how public and private sector interests, alongside white homeowners,
have operated in concert to perpetuate racial exclusion. The largest pub-
lic housing expansion in the Bay Area occurred during World War II, as
thousands migrated to the region for employment opportunities in war in-
dustries, resulting in a massive housing shortage and widespread home-
lessness. In response, the federal government created over 30,000 pub-
lic housing units in the East Bay, which housed approximately 90,000 war
workers and family members, in addition to thousands more units in other
defense industry centers including San Francisco, Marin City, and Valle-
jo.154 These developments were initially constructed near shipyards and
military installations in Richmond, Oakland, and Alameda, and later ex-
panded into adjoining areas connected by public transportation.155 Since
they were constructed as temporary homes exclusively for war workers,
public housing effectively segregated the new war worker population into
what historian Marilynn Johnson describes as a corridor of “migrant ghet-
tos” next to federal facilities along the East Bay waterfront.156

Homeowner Opposition to Public Housing


Public housing faced vehement opposition during the war years in cit-
ies like Albany and Berkeley, which attempted to block public housing
construction by refusing to create housing authorities. When the Federal
Public Housing Authority proposed the construction of Codornices Vil-
lage, a racially integrated 1,900 unit complex (which is now the location
of UC Berkeley’s University Village) at the border of Albany and Berkeley,
both city councils immediately opposed the project, as did the University
of California, which owned a portion of the land targeted for development.
Residents launched a petition drive against the proposal, expressing
clear, though often coded, racial and class bias. Berkeley residents stated
that the development was “not in keeping with a university city,” and the
Albany City Council feared it would introduce “an undesirable element,”
who would “force the integration of local schools and make Albany ‘like
South Berkeley’,” which was a historically Black neighborhood.157 Codor-
nices Village was ultimately built, but as a concession, the federal govern-
ment allowed the project to become segregated toward the end of the
war on an east-west basis, with Black residents forced to remain on the
noiser, more polluted west side that was adjacent to the railroad tracks.158

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Segregated Public Housing


With the exception of Marin City, wartime public housing in the Bay Area
was officially segregated.159 Local housing authorities resolved not to
“enforce the commingling of races,” and imposed “neighborhood pattern”
policies through the 1950s.160 These policies gave preference to “families
already residing in the area to conform with the social, economic and
religious characteristics of the area” and meant that African Americans
could only be placed in public housing where other African American
families already resided.161 In Richmond, the housing authority director
stated that the neighborhood pattern policy was necessary for “keeping
social harmony or balance in the whole community.”162 Segregation in San
Francisco’s public housing predated the war. During the early-1940s, the
housing authority imposed a whites-only rule for its first three develop-
ments, which was designed to keep Chinese American residents out of
public housing and confined to Chinatown.163
A 1952 federal investigation reported that San Francisco and Oakland
were “possibly the only two Pacific Coast cities which continue segrega-
tion in their housing projects.”164 Even after the San Francisco Superior
Court ruled in Banks v. the San Francisco Housing Authority that the
San Francisco Housing Authority’s neighborhood pattern policy was a
form of unlawful discrimination in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution as well as state and local laws, San Francisco Hous-
ing Authority officials refused to change the policy. An appeals court
judge ruled that “neighborhood pattern is an arbitrary method of exclu-
sion, a guarantee of inequality or treatment of eligible persons,” and the
US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, finally leading to the inte-
gration of public housing in San Francisco in 1954.165
From the point of construction, white and Black public housing was not
created equal. The vast majority of new public housing was intended to
be temporary, and thus poorly constructed without much concern for
design and safety.166 Many were built on landfill sites near railroads and
industrial facilities along the waterfront, exposing residents to environ-
mental and safety hazards.167 But in some all-white developments built
farther inland, the public housing was constructed with sturdier materials
and intended to be permanent.168
Additionally, due to “racial rationing” policies, fewer public housing units
were available to Black families, despite the fact that racial discrimination
in the private housing market afforded Black migrant families far fewer
choices outside of public housing. Private housing options were limited
to neighborhoods that were already home to Black residents before the
war, and nearly all of the private sector solutions supported by the federal
government, such as guaranteed loans for private housing construction

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and war guest programs that matched workers with homeowners that
had spare rooms or other vacant accommodations, largely excluded non-
white migrants.169
The local housing authorities, which controlled occupancy decisions and
managed the public housing properties, used informal quota systems
that limited access to Black applicants. The Federal Public Housing
Administration encouraged the use of quotas to fairly distribute hous-
ing based on need, but as Johnson explains, the quotas reflected the
white-Black ratio among war workers, rather than the ratio among public
housing applicants, thus not accounting for the disproportionate need
among Black migrants whose options outside of public housing were far
more constrained.170 For example, the Richmond Housing Authority set a
quota of four white households for every one Black household in 1943,
and the inadequate supply of housing for Black families required many to
double up or illegally sublet, which, if found by the housing authority, was
grounds for eviction.171
The extreme shortage of housing for Black families thus led to overcrowd-
ing, and given the poor quality of construction, subsequent deterioration
of the segregated public housing units. After the war ended, public
housing waiting lists reached record length.172 As more white families
were able to move out of public housing with the support of federal gov-
ernment programs, formerly race-restricted units were made available
to Black families. Thousands more migrants arrived in the postwar era,
and Black households became the majority of public housing tenants in
Berkeley, Oakland, and Richmond. By 1946, more than half of the total
Black population in the region lived in temporary war housing.173 These
residents were essentially trapped, as racial discrimination continued
to limit their housing options. Johnson notes that while Bay Area cities
permitted over 75,000 residential units from 1949 to 1951, only 600 of
these were open to Black homebuyers.174 She explains that their limited
residential mobility restricted access to job opportunities in the postwar
economy, especially as industry moved out to the suburbs, “literally freez-
ing some families into unemployment.”175
Amid changing public housing demographics, regional economic shifts,
and intermunicipal competition in the postwar era, local public debates
turned toward urban redevelopment, “slum clearance,” and the removal of
war housing as a necessity for progress. In 1949, Oakland officials stat-
ed that the war housing projects were the city’s “sorest blight problem,”
“beyond the salvage point,” and “unsuitable for housing or any other use.”
Richmond administrators echoed this sentiment, stating that the south
side of the city where public housing was concentrated was becoming “a
vast ugly slum, a reproach to the City and a constant source of trouble,
conflict, and expense.”176

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Real Estate Industry Influence over Public Housing


For some local housing authority officials, demolition of public housing
had been the goal all along. Since their establishment, the local housing
authorities that controlled and operated public housing in the East Bay
were led by realtors, builders, and other private sector leaders.177 The
Richmond Housing Authority was actually founded by the Chamber of
Commerce in 1941 in an attempt to control pending federal efforts to
construct public housing. The Oakland Housing Authority was estab-
lished after the labor movement successfully pressured the Oakland City
Council to create a housing authority and utilize available federal funding
for public housing, but the council appointed a business-dominated board
with representatives from the banking, insurance, and real estate sectors,
including past presidents of the Alameda County Apartment House Own-
ers Association and the California Rental Association.178 Their position
was clear: “the business-dominated local housing authorities remained
steadfastly opposed to permanent public housing that might undercut
postwar private construction,” and were thus quick to allow the construc-
tion of temporary war housing, with the assumption that defense migrants
would return to their home states and the temporary developments would
all be demolished after the war.179
The campaign against public housing was led by the National Association
of Real Estate Boards, which selected California as a test case for its na-
tional efforts.180 In Richmond, city officials abandoned plans to build over
4,000 permanent public housing units to pursue industrial growth and
new private housing. In its demolition plans, the city prioritized develop-
ments primarily occupied by Black families. Without replacement housing
and adequate relocation arrangements, over 700 Black families were dis-
placed from their homes in 1952, only 16 percent of whom were able to
find housing in the private market.181 Thousands of former public housing
residents lost their homes by 1960. While many white families were able
to move out to the suburbs with federally guaranteed loans, the southside
of Richmond became predominantly Black by the late-1950s.
During the postwar housing shortage, the Oakland Housing Authori-
ty estimated that the city needed at least 23,000 new housing units.
In 1949, the Oakland City Council narrowly voted to construct 3,000
units of public housing on areas designated as “blighted” near the city’s
downtown using federal funds authorized by the National Housing Act
of 1949. The proposal spurred a massive backlash led by the Apartment
House Owners Association, the Associated Improvement Clubs, and the
Associated Home Builders of Alameda County, which all came together
with the support of the National Association of Real Estate Boards to
form the Oakland Committee for Home Protection.182 The Oakland Post

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42

The San Francisco-based Northern California Committee


for Home Protection’s 1950 campaign for Proposition
10 framed its opposition to public housing as a matter of
democracy. The back of the pamphlet reads, “Proposition
10 guarantees the right to vote where that right is most
important of all—at the local, grass roots level. Proposition
10 strengthens democracy. Proposition 10 protects the
rights of citizens in every community of California.”
Courtesy of Liam Dillon, Los Angeles Times.

Enquirer reported that during one hearing on the proposal, a “throng of


more than 500 [people] jammed every inch of the council chambers and
another crowd of 500 demonstrating outside doors” to protest the plan
forced the council to adjourn and postpone the hearing.183 The committee
capitalized on anti-Communist sentiment and attacked public housing as
“socialistic.”184 Following the city council vote, the Committee for Home
Protection launched an aggressive, well-funded recall campaign to unseat
three of the council members who supported the public housing pro-

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43

posal. One council member lost his seat in the


recall election by just five votes, while the other
two lost their seats in the following year’s regular
election to candidates endorsed by the Commit-
tee for Home Protection. Without a majority in
support for public housing, the new city council
quietly rescinded the public housing plan.185

Creating New Barriers to Affordable


Housing: Article 34’s Bay Area Roots
The defeat of the Oakland public housing pro-
posal had statewide ramifications. Just one
month after the recall election, the Oakland
Committee for Home Protection played a key
role in a statewide effort to amend the state
constitution to mandate a local voter referendum
for any federally or state-financed housing for
“persons of low income.”186 This would create
a massive political barrier to constructing new
affordable or public housing. The Oakland
Committee for Home Protection treasurer, John
Hennessey, who was also the secretary of the
Home Builders’ Council of California, organized
the petition drive for the 1950 ballot measure
(Proposition 10).187 Its passage in 1950 was codified as Article 34 of the
state’s constitution. Courts and the California legislature have consistent-
ly narrowed its scope, and legislators are currently considering a measure
to place the repeal of Article 34 on the state ballot,188 but the provision
remains valid today.189
Article 34 created a major barrier for affordable housing in the Bay Area.
It forced votes that blocked multiple public housing proposals in the
1950s and 1960s, including one in the City of San Jose (1968) and two
in San Mateo County (1966), which had no public housing at the time.190
Moreover, as historian Aaron Cavin explains, because local housing au-
thorities fully recognized that referenda were likely to fail, they rarely even
submitted proposals for new low-income housing.191
The US Supreme Court upheld Article 34 in a 1971 case, James v. Valt-
ierra (Valtierra II), after a group of citizens eligible for low-cost housing
challenged the failed referenda in the City of San Jose and San Mateo
County.192 After the citizens argued that the low-income housing projects
rejected by the referenda would have been predominantly occupied by
non-white residents, the trial court that initially heard the case held that

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the initiative was unconstitutional because “the law’s impact falls on


minorities, resulting in an impermissible burden which constitutes a sub-
stantial and invidious denial of equal protection.”193 The Supreme Court
did not see this disproportionate impact as evidence of an intent to deny
housing opportunities for people of color in San Jose and San Mateo
County. Rather, the court concluded that “the procedure ensures that all
the people of a community will have a voice in a decision, which may lead
to large expenditures of local governmental funds for increased public
services and to lower tax revenues.”194 This is despite evidence from local
city planners that aligned with the trial court’s conclusions and calls from
the NAACP for the court to view the racially “neutral” fiscal justification
for the initiative in context with the prior usage of such justifications to
support other racially motivated ballot initiatives.195 By establishing the
principle that unconstitutional racial harm must be intentional and explicit,
the decision was a legal turning point that severely undermined recently
enacted fair housing laws and gave rise to a national politics of color-
blindness. As historian Aaron Cavin argues, “The Supreme Court took
the defensive, localist, meritocratic, and colorblind sensibility that infused
American political culture and transmuted it into a precedent that shield-
ed suburbs from further critiques, and in this sense, Valtierra not only
justified but also constitutionalized suburban economic exclusion.”196

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THE BEGINNINGS OF URBAN


RENEWAL AND SUBURBAN
REVOLT

With plans to replace temporary war housing with permanent


public housing effectively shelved, cities proceeded with demolition and
federally funded urban renewal in the postwar era that displaced thou-
sands and particularly devastated major centers of Black culture and
community, such as the Fillmore District in San Francisco and West Oak-
land. Due to these consequences, urban renewal became known nation-
ally as “Negro removal.”
In the 1950s, economic interests and investment fueled displacement
through eminent domain, a process in which local redevelopment agen-
cies condemned areas as “blighted” and seized properties from home-
owners and tenants within blighted areas in order to facilitate demolition.
The Oakland Planning Commission declared all of West Oakland as
blighted and set in motion a neighborhood renewal plan to clear the way
for new middle-income homes and industry. While poor housing condi-
tions were a reality, they were the direct result of segregation, institutional
disinvestment, and discriminatory lending practices that restricted access
to loans for home improvement and maintenance.197 With the goal of
increasing property values and attracting investment downtown, urban re-
newal in Oakland also involved the construction of three major interstate
highways (the Nimitz/I-880, Grove Shafter/I-980, and MacArthur/I-580)
and later a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) rail line, which destroyed entire

As part of the
San Francisco
Redevelopment Agency’s
"slum clearance"
effort, buildings in the
Western Addition were
razed with no intent to
rebuild for displaced
residents. Courtesy of
San Francisco History
Center, San Francisco
Public Library. 204

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46

blocks of homes and thriving commercial districts. While the plans for
the highways were designed by the State Department of Public Works,
the Oakland City Council selected the exact routes by 1958.198 In total,
between 6,600 and 9,700 housing units were demolished between 1960
and 1966, displacing over 10,000 people from West Oakland.199
In San Francisco, urban renewal targeted the Western Addition, which
included most of Japantown, and by the 1950s was where the largest
concentration of African Americans in the city resided. Evictions from
a 28-block area of the Western Addition began in 1958. By 1960,
8,000 individuals, most of whom were Black or Japanese American,
were displaced to clear the way for new development and greater ac-
cess to downtown for commuters from the northwestern part of the
city.200 After his retirement, the former San Francisco Redevelopment
Agency deputy executive director and Western Addition Area Director
Gene Suttle plainly stated, “One of the purposes of renewal when it
was called slum clearance was not only to get rid of the people and the
structures but to make sure those blighting influences didn’t come back.
And so there was no intent to rebuild for the kind of people who were
being displaced.”201 Many of those displaced had nowhere to go. A San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency survey showed that 34 out of every
35 apartments in the city prohibited African Americans, and the housing
that was available was typically segregated, substandard, and expen-
sive.202 In the latter half of the 1960s, a second phase of redevelopment

Excerpt from a page from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency’s 1960
brochure advertising land for sale in the Western Addition through the urban
renewal program. Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco
Public Library. 205

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47

Left: An image from a 1965 flyer protesting the Marincello Master Plan.
Right: A rendering of the unbuilt Marincello development. Courtesy of
the Golden Gate National Recreation Area Park Archives, Katharine
Frankforter Papers, GOGA 27066, and Interpretation Negative
Collection, GOGA-2316.

in the Western Addition covering 276 acres displaced an estimated


13,500 people, many of whom were originally displaced from the earlier
phase of redevelopment.203
Urban renewal projects also displaced communities of color in the South
Bay. Santa Clara County officials directed three interstate highways and
an expressway through east San Jose, which “involved the bulldozing
of entire neighborhoods with high concentrations of Spanish-speaking
people.”206 While the law required replacement of demolished homes, by
the late-1960s, local authorities had built only one unit for every 10 de-
molished.207 Throughout the Bay Area, the majority of new housing on the
land cleared through urban renewal was privately developed, market-rate
housing unaffordable to displaced former residents.
While low-income residents of color lacked the political power to pre-
serve their homes and neighborhoods from urban renewal, wealthy
white communities in Marin County successfully blocked infrastructure
(including a BART line) and development proposals that they viewed as
a threat to their property values and lifestyles.208 In 1966, a coalition of
property owners, local government officials, and conservationists fought
off a trans-bay road that would run from San Francisco to Point Reyes,
which developers saw immense potential in. Historian Louise Dyble notes
that developers rushed to secure approval for residential subdivisions,209
including a new 2,100-acre city of “Marincello” that would have included
50 apartment towers as well as single-family homes, low-rise apartments,

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48

and townhouses to accommodate 30,000 new residents.210 Dyble refers


to the campaign as a “revolt against sprawl” that galvanized an exclusion-
ary “growth control” movement that dominated local politics and planning
in Marin County for decades to come.211 As a result, nearly all develop-
ment came to a halt, and the county’s growth rate fell from 113 percent
in the 1940s and 1950s (when its rate of growth ranked third among the
nine Bay Area counties)212 to 42 percent in the 1960s, then to less than
seven percent in the 1970s.213 After state and federal fair housing laws
were passed in the late-1960s, Marin County led the country in enact-
ing some of the most stringent growth control measures in the name of
environmentalism, including a 1973 general plan that reserved over half
of the county’s land for agriculture and recreation.214 The vastly different
trajectory of postwar development in Marin County demonstrates the
tremendous differential of political power between low-income communi-
ties of color and wealthy white communities, which contributed to lasting
regional patterns of racial exclusion.

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49

EXCLUSIONARY REAL ESTATE


INDUSTRY PRACTICES

The real estate industry and homeowners used other tactics


that were less formal, but no less damaging than covenants, to create
racially segregated spaces in the Bay Area. These included “steering,” or
the practice of guiding prospective homebuyers toward or away from cer-
tain neighborhoods based on race. Some realtors refused to do business
with Black prospective homebuyers at all. These practices were perpet-
uated through industry guidelines, intimidation of realtors or community
members who were willing to do business with people of color, and intim-
idation of new or prospective residents of color themselves.

Racial Steering
For at least 25 years following its release in 1924, the National Associ-
ation of Realtors’ code of ethics provided the guidance that “A Realtor
should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a char-
acter of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any
individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values
in that neighborhood.”215 The California Real Estate Association (CREA)
set standards for segregation in its buying and selling policies, which
local real estate boards implemented. Throughout the Bay Area and the
rest of the state, “local realty boards assumed the role of disciplining any
members who violated [them] and determined which neighborhoods and
tracts would be designated for ‘whites only,’ refusing to share listings
with agents who openly served nonwhite clients.”216 A San Jose Mayoral
Committee on Human Relations in 1960 explained that the real estate
community in the Bay Area continued to discriminate against Black home-
buyers for several reasons. Firstly, the real estate firms understood their
code of ethics to prevent them from selling homes in a way that would
allow for integrated neighborhoods. Secondly, real estate agents feared
economic and social ostracism if they sold homes to Black homebuyers.
Thirdly, agents believed that owners and neighbors would fiercely oppose
integration. And finally, agents were operating according to their own
prejudices.217 A mutually reinforcing dynamic existed between homeown-
ers applying racial prejudice in selling or renting homes and narratives
from real estate agents that integration drives property values down. The
majority of real estate agents thus saw it as their responsibility to keep
existing white areas white.218
Realtors and community advocates servicing northern Santa Clara Coun-

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An excerpt from the Realtor Code of Ethics adopted by the National


Association of Real Estate Boards in 1924 and revised in 1928. The article
was amended in 1950 to read “A Realtor should never be instrumental in
introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or use which will
clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood,” but its
meaning remained clear, and discriminatory practices continued for years
following the change. 219

ty and southern San Mateo County reported widespread racial steering in


the 1960s. Real estate agents attempted to dissuade Black buyers from
purchasing in all-white areas, sometimes explicitly telling those families
that neighbors would object to their purchase or that the current owner
would not want to sell.220 Instead of allowing consumers to choose, the
real estate community forced the majority of the area’s Black population
into a “small region lying partly in the city of Menlo Park and partly in an
unincorporated portion of San Mateo County known as East Palo Alto.”221
To do so, the California Real Estate Association advertised that Black
homebuyers should move to East Palo Alto, “where there was good FHA
and VA supported housing,” when such was not the case.222 One Menlo
Park realtor, as part of an effort to assure a potential white homebuyer of
the neighborhood’s exclusivity, described the community’s willingness
to maintain segregation even while it was quickly becoming illegal: “Of
course, there is no restriction anymore because the Supreme Court says
that we cannot restrict areas on the basis of color or creed anymore.
However, property owners can keep an area all white by banding together
and agreeing to refuse to sell to orientals or Negros.”223
In Sonoma County, the local realty board had an unofficial agreement
not to show property to Black potential homebuyers in Sonoma, “thus
putting a heavy burden of disapproval and perhaps financial loss upon
any one of the group who chooses to go contrary to this group stand.”224
Surveys of realtors in the area revealed that they would not rent or show
homes to African Americans, saying they would be “finished” if they did.
And, indeed, realtors were fired during this period for showing homes to
Blacks.225 Realtors also admitted to artificially raising prices for African
American prospective buyers, outright refusing to show them homes, and
lying about the availability of properties in order to maintain exclusivity in

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In 1962 a Berkeley teacher, Miss Frances Fletcher, presents statistics


gathered by the National Real Estate Research Corporation on racial
discrimination in San Francisco's rental housing market, which show
that two-thirds of landlords refused to rent to African American tenants.
Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San F rancisco Public Library. 228

Sonoma.226 Realtors in San Leandro “refus[ed] to exchange multiple list-


ings with the integrated Oakland border. This refusal ban[ned] Oakland’s
minority population from the opportunity to purchase homes in San Lean-
dro by denying these homeseekers essential information about available
housing on the market.”227

Blockbusting
Blockbusting was a particularly pernicious and profitable form of racial
steering where real estate investors would provoke fear of racial change
in the neighborhood so they could profit from the transactions. For in-
stance, after the first African American family moved to East Palo Alto’s
new Palo Alto Gardens subdivision in 1954, real estate agents carried
out a blockbusting campaign:

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On the doorsteps of white families they left pamphlets forecast-


ing the collapse of local real estate values. Agents gave African
Americans free bus rides through East Palo Alto’s neighbor-
hoods to encourage black families to buy, while attempting to
scare white homeowners into selling. These agents would then
assist the white families to find housing in the new subdivisions
in Mountain View or Sunnyvale while offering their assistance to
incoming African American families. This way, they received com-
missions on both ends.229

Similar efforts to increase panic-selling occurred in Oakland neighbor-


hoods where African Americans had begun to move in. One white res-
ident recalled, “They hounded us to sell the house at that time so they
could give it to the colored at about twice the price.”230 In the racially
mixed southside of Richmond, homeowners reported blockbusting by
real estate agents who convinced white residents to sell and move to
the suburbs, while similar patterns occurred in other Bay Area shipyard
boomtowns such as Hunters Point, Marin City, and Vallejo.231
The outcomes of racial steering, blockbusting, and other tactics were
starkly evident in many areas of the region in the 1960s. A realtor in San
Carlos boasted that steering Black applicants away from the area had
kept the city entirely white as of 1957, stating, “We are proud that we
have no Negro living here in San Carlos.”232 In San Jose and surrounding
areas, surveys of the rental market revealed that just one in 15 apart-
ments for rent would be open to a Black tenant.233 As of 1960, no African
Americans were living in Sebastopol or Sonoma.234 In numerous jurisdic-
tions in the East Bay the Black population did not rise above a half of a
percent through the early 1970s, including Walnut Creek, Lafayette, San
Leandro, Pleasanton, and San Lorenzo.235

Discriminatory Lending
Redlining, or the discriminatory practice of denying borrowers access
to credit based on the racial or socioeconomic makeup of the neighbor-
hood where their property is located, fundamentally contributed to racial
disparities in access to homeownership, residential segregation, and
disinvestment from communities of color throughout the United States
from the 1930s onward. While redlining, discrimination in the provision
of mortgage insurance, and other racially exclusionary lending practices
were driven in large part by the federal government, local actors played
a key role in their creation and use. When the Home Owners’ Loan Cor-
poration (HOLC) created its infamous “Residential Security” maps that
redlined neighborhoods and ultimately informed both public investment
and private sector lending decisions, the agency’s examiners gathered

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53

information from local bank loan officials, realtors, appraisers, and munic-
ipal officials to determine neighborhoods’ lending risk classifications.236
The maps thus not only captured, but further amplified the common
understanding and bias among local actors in charge of lending deci-
sions.237 Redlining maps were created in 1937 for the Bay Area cities
of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, Em-
eryville, Piedmont, and San Leandro.238
In addition to racial covenants that already restricted the supply of hous-
ing available to people of color, lending discrimination was yet another
barrier to contend with. “We know that the Negro cannot operate in a free
market. There are restrictions: by neighborhoods, property owners, real
estate corporations, companies and some financial institutions… [M]ost
banks are operating and are influenced by their experience of 20 years
ago, when Negroes were the first to go broke,” stated Jefferson Beaver
in 1956, who in 1949 established the Trans-Bay Savings and Loan As-
sociation in San Francisco to lend money to Black borrowers who were
denied financing by larger banks.239
In its Civil Rights Inventory of San Francisco, the San Francisco Coun-
cil of Civic Unity documented some of the racial factors considered
by major mortgage firms in the city. It found that loan approval “often
depended on whether property was in an ‘approved’ neighborhood,”
meaning a neighborhood where people of color already resided. All
of the lenders interviewed stated that they would not issue a loan to a
“‘first-entry’ minority in an all-white district,” and a majority also stated
that they “were sure that their depositors and policy holders would
threaten to, or actually would, withdraw their accounts if loans were
made to first-entry nonwhites,” and that “entry of nonwhites made loans
to white borrowers more difficult.”240

Proposition 14 and Local Connection to State Politics


In addition to the 1950 campaign to establish Article 34, the real estate
industry, organized statewide by CREA, initiated multiple exclusionary
ballot measures to protect their business interests. Representatives from
the Bay Area real estate community held significant influence in statewide
politics through CREA since its founding in 1905. In the Bay Area, local
agents had already founded a number of real estate boards in their cities,
including San Jose (founded in 1896 as the first local real estate board in
California), Berkeley (1902), and San Francisco (1905), and they took an
active role in the founding of CREA.241 In fact, CREA’s first president was
a Bay Area real estate agent, Francis Ferrier of Berkeley.242
Through the 1960s, CREA’s Bay Area chapters mobilized against local,
state, and federal fair housing initiatives, including the California Fair

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54

Housing Act, which was authored by Assemblymember William Byron


Rumford of Berkeley and passed by the state legislature in 1963. Known
as the Rumford Act, it prohibited discrimination in the private housing
market for properties with five or more units, and in housing financed by
public sources.243 In response, CREA put forth a statewide ballot initiative
in 1964 that would essentially nullify the Rumford Act by explicitly allow-
ing private discrimination in the housing market. The initiative, Proposition
14, proposed a constitutional amendment that read:

Neither the State, nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall


deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person
who is willing or desires to sell, lease, or rent any part or all of this
real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such
person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.

The initiative sought to frame the Rumford Act as constraining the rights
of individual homeowners to sell or rent their homes. Proposition 14 was
even framed as a “decision between ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘forced hous-
ing’.”244 Proponents argued that state officials were “seeking to correct . . .
a social evil [housing discrimination] while simultaneously destroying what
we deem a basic right in a free society.”245 The “basic right” spoken of here
is the illusory conviction that property owners must be allowed to sell their
property to whomever they choose. This is an argument that “the right to
discriminate by race was not only rooted in ‘natural law’ and guaranteed by
the U.S. Constitution but that it was a cornerstone of American prosperity
writ large.”246 Scholar Daniel Martinez HoSang writes that this connection
white homeowners made between the traditional property right to exclude
others from one’s land and the Rumford Act is one intended to preserve
both white power and wealth: “a central dimension of what made property
valuable was the prerogative of (white) property owners to discriminate by
race.”247 Voters understood the message encoded in the alleged threat to
their property rights. The Rumford Act would make it harder for communi-
ties and real estate agents to keep African Americans out of predominantly
white communities. Statewide, voters approved the proposition: 65 per-
cent in favor, 35 percent against.
Like the fight over public housing and Proposition 10 in 1950, the state-
wide fight over fair housing can be traced back to the Bay Area. In 1963,
the Berkeley City Council passed a fair housing ordinance. Debate over
the new ordinance roiled as Berkeley’s representative in the California
Assembly, William Byron Rumford, introduced the state Fair Housing Act.
Just three months after the local ordinance passed, the local real estate
association proposed a referendum to repeal the measure.248 Berkeley
residents voted by a narrow margin (22,750 to 20,456) to repeal the
ordinance and passed an initiative affirming the legality of housing dis-

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55

crimination in the city.249 The


defeat of Berkeley’s ordinance
emboldened CREA to fund the
Proposition 14 campaign, and
the industry made a concert-
ed effort to influence the Bay
Area vote.250 For example, law
professor David Oppenheimer
recalls that when UC Berke-
ley students set up a table on
Sproul Plaza to raise aware-
ness for the No on Proposition
14 campaign (among other civil
rights issues), “the university,
under pressure from the real
estate industry, prohibited them
from on-campus advocacy for
candidates or propositions,”
thus prompting student pro- “Get Back Your Rights,” Committee
tests and further emboldening for Home Protection flyer in favor of
the Berkeley free speech move- Proposition 14, 1964. Courtesy of
ment.251 In Alameda County, Max Mont Papers, Urban Archives
a vast grassroots network of Center, Oviatt Library, California
churches, labor unions, and State University, Northridge.
civil rights organizations united
with local and state represen-
tatives to oppose Proposition 14, while “only realtors and homeowners
associations were absent from the No on 14 coalition.” However, by
“operating through institutional networks cultivated over two decades of
city building, [they] proved far more able to convince and mobilize voters
than the county’s political leadership,” according to Robert Self.252 At that
point, CREA had 2,600 members in Alameda County alone253 and nearly
13,000 members throughout the region.254
In 1967, the US Supreme Court declared Proposition 14 unconstitutional
in Reitman v. Mulkey. While the Rumford Act was restored in 1966, Prop-
osition 14’s significance remains. The measure denoted what Robert Self
describes as a slow but powerful national shift during the mid-twentieth
century in which the historically more blatant discourse of white supremacy
“gave way in public forums to a right-based language of individualism and
freedom,” becoming “the dominant discourse through which white racial
privilege was articulated.”255 Self states that this framing “intended to in-
oculate segregation and white privilege against charges of racism through
appeals to hallowed American rights traditions.”256

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56

MUNICIPAL FRAGMENTATION
AND WHITE FLIGHT

At the same time white homeowners were leaving areas of in-


creasing diversity such as East Palo Alto, newly incorporated Bay Area
suburbs provided mechanisms for local political power to keep these
new communities exclusive. Periods of “white flight” accompanied
the proliferation of new suburban municipalities all over the country,
including in the Bay Area.257 john powell and Kathleen Graham em-
phasize that federal and state governments facilitated this process by
“delegat[ing] to individual municipalities the power to incorporate, tax,
spend tax revenues exclusively on those who live within the municipal
boundaries, and critically, to control their respective land use, primarily
through the zoning power.”258
Ease of incorporation leads to what social scientists call “municipal
fragmentation.” Municipal fragmentation describes a geographic and
demographic phenomenon in which regions have many small local
jurisdictions that remain independent from each other, often with local
governments retaining significant authority over their taxing and plan-
ning, creating even greater independence and competition between
jurisdictions.259 Regional areas experiencing municipal fragmentation
are more likely to have populations that fall into jurisdictions on socio-
economic lines.260 Self describes this phenomenon in his discussion
of the increase in the number of suburbs outlying Oakland in the
mid-twentieth century:

Impelled by the zero-sum logic of intercity competition, city


builders there [in unincorporated Alameda County] scrambled to
divide up hundreds of square miles of farmland and rolling hills, a
bonanza of potential factory and home sites, in a series of annex-
ation and incorporation contests in the 1950s. In the suburban
city-building environment of that decade, popular doctrine held
that all available, potentially profitable land would eventually be
incorporated. Property left unclaimed by one city would be an-
nexed by a competing neighbor. The resulting land rush, one of
the most ferocious anywhere in postwar California, produces in a
few short years three altogether new cities—Newark, Union City,
and the sprawling Fremont—and an enlarged, reinvigorated older
city, Hayward. In all, between 1951 and 1957, competitive incor-
poration and annexation converted Alameda County’s prewar
agricultural hinterland into a collection of cities bigger than Los

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57

Angeles. . . . [T]hese contests turned on fundamental questions


of class, racial geography, and competing visions of the rights
and responsibilities of property owners.261

Municipal incorporation offered the ability for control over the amount of
taxation residents would be subject to, what services and amenities the
municipality would pay for, and what kind of development would occur
within its boundaries (and when). Jessica Trounstine describes this logic,
writing, “Today, the most advantaged places are located outside of cen-
tral cities altogether so that disadvantaged residents have no direct role
to play in decisions about building affordable housing, expanding public
transportation, or diversifying schools.”262

A Fremont Citizen’s Committee flier advocating for Fremont’s


incorporation. Courtesy of Mission Peak Heritage Foundation and
Washington Township Museum of Local History. 267

In what is now Fremont, residents rallied for the incorporation of the


city in the 1950s, emphasizing their desire for low taxes and controlled
growth.263 After the city incorporated in 1956, it embarked on a planning
strategy that limited housing development by using zoning regulations
to increase the costs and approval barriers to large housing developers.
Simultaneously, they ensured that enough land was zoned for industrial
development so as to lure commercial and industrial businesses.264 These
new industrial zones could compete with existing industrial space in Oak-
land, leading to a massive shift in tax revenue from the city to the suburbs
as, for example, General Motors left Oakland for Fremont.265 As housing

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58

development remained constrained, the local government created a city


“where most of [the] workers couldn’t afford to live.”266
Municipal incorporation reinforced racial stratification. When capital left
the urban core of the East Bay for places like Fremont, most residents
of color were unable to follow it. In 1950, Richmond had 80,000 white
residents. Within a decade that number had fallen to 56,000 while the
African American population slightly increased.268 On the receiving end
of white flight, Fremont more than doubled in population within 15 years
of its incorporation, yet it remained 97 percent white.269 This pattern,
which was driven by “the federal subsidy to move, combined with the
local power to exclude,” typified postwar suburban incorporation and
development that effectively “drew white people and opportunity from
the city while walling in people of color with constantly diminishing
resources.”270 Racial exclusion and a desire for greater municipal ameni-
ties and lower taxes were bound together in the minds of hopeful white
homeowners.271,272
In other instances, areas remained unincorporated and without a munici-
pal government, such as the case with North Richmond. North Richmond
was one of the few areas of Richmond where African Americans were
permitted to live through the 1940s. Although it lacked paved streets and
public lighting, and was prone to flooding, it became a bustling African
American community and famed source of blues music. When incorpora-
tion of North Richmond was proposed in 1948 by the Richmond Cham-
ber of Commerce, the plan called for demolition of substandard housing
and resale to “private interests.”273 The plan was voted down by the Rich-
mond city council and North Richmond remains unincorporated today.

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59

DISCUSSION: TRACES
OF THE PAST TODAY

Concentrated Wealth and Poverty


The racialized concentration of wealth and poverty in the San Francis-
co Bay Area today is a direct descendent of history. Segregation was
lucrative for the white real estate brokers, investors, and homeowners
who participated in or benefitted from it. The wealth generated through
decades of these tactics exacerbated racial economic inequality with
double force—removing wealth from communities of color and adding it
to white communities. White communities were then able to invest this
wealth in education, property, and other ventures that could provide fu-
ture returns. Segregation created barriers to homeownership for African
Americans and other people of color, but it also limited the values of the
homes owned by people of color because they were located in areas
with lower rates of appreciation. The geography of segregation also lim-
ited employment opportunities. For instance, after World War II, the Ford
Motor plant moved from Richmond to Milpitas, where the Black workers
could not relocate because of its racial residential segregation. Data from
the Bay Area Equity Atlas reflect the continuing disparities in access to
opportunity: 52 percent of the Bay Area’s white residents live in either
high-resource or the highest-resource neighborhoods, compared to only
16 percent of Black residents. Ten percent of the region’s Black residents
live in “high segregation and poverty” neighborhoods, while another 52
percent live in low-resource neighborhoods.274

Gentrification and Displacement


Racial disparities in wealth and access to opportunity, as well as disin-
vestment in historic communities of color, left these neighborhoods vul-
nerable to later cycles of displacement and dispossession that continue
today. This impact can be observed in the current conditions in areas
marked as “hazardous” by the HOLC in its redlining maps of the 1930s,
which provide a snapshot of overlapping national and local forces of ex-
clusion at the time. An analysis of the redlining maps by researchers at
the Urban Displacement Project at UC Berkeley finds that the vast ma-
jority (87 percent) of San Francisco neighborhoods currently experienc-
ing gentrification were rated as “hazardous” or “definitely declining” by

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60

HOLC.275 They find similar patterns in the East Bay and San Jose, where
83 percent and 87 percent, respectively, of gentrifying areas were rated
as “hazardous” or “definitely declining.”276
According to researchers at Urban Habitat, current processes of gentri-
fication and displacement are creating new patterns of segregation, with
disproportionate shifts of Black and Latinx populations outward to the
region’s fringe as the core grows more unaffordable.277 The same red-
lined neighborhoods were also among the hardest hit by the foreclosure
crisis, as mortgage lenders targeted communities of color with predatory
subprime loans, a practice referred to as reverse redlining. Investigations,
including one from 2013 of the Richmond and Vallejo metropolitan statis-
tical areas by Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California, have shown
that as banks repossessed foreclosed properties, they failed to maintain
and market these houses in the same manner as they did in predominant-
ly white neighborhoods.278
In the wake of the foreclosure crisis, private equity and investment firms
purchased thousands of foreclosed properties in neighborhoods of color,
converting them to rental units, maximizing profits through constant rent
increases, and aggressively evicting tenants who are often unable to
afford the increased housing costs.279 In March 2019, United Nations
human rights officials denounced these racially discriminatory and ex-
tractive practices of commodifying homes for undermining the human
right to housing.280

Lasting Effects on Public Health


Segregation in housing concentrated people of color in areas closer to
the harm of hazardous land uses like heavy industry and hazardous ma-
terials facilities. Communities of color have long fought against the siting
of hazardous land uses like toxic landfills, incinerators, and industrial
plants in their neighborhoods, giving birth to the environmental justice
movement. Early studies in the 1980s confirmed that race was highly
correlated with the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities.281
More recent studies have confirmed that communities of color continue
to have greater concentrations of hazardous materials, after controlling
for socioeconomic status and other factors.282
Racial exclusion in housing has had lasting effects on access to public
infrastructure and amenities like parks, health service providers, and
other resources. This inequitable geography of burdens and benefits has
led public health experts to point out that a person’s zip code is one of
the best predictors of life expectancy,283 and part of why there are per-
sistent racial inequities in health.284 An extensive body of literature has
confirmed the power of neighborhood conditions to influence health,285

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61

economic mobility,286 and other life outcomes. The trauma of racial ter-
ror, like lynchings, militia violence, and related threats, also has lasting
effects on health that too often go without recognition.287 Recent studies
have also found that displacement and the stress of housing instability
can cause severe harm to one’s physical and mental health.288

Echoes of Past Racial Narratives


The narratives that attempted to rationalize racial exclusion of the past
echo today in campaigns against protections for low-income renters,
funding and permits for affordable housing, zoning decisions, and be-
yond. Comments often reflect a sense of entitlement to unbridled profits
from property ownership, and the judgment that an increased presence
of low-income people of color will compromise these economic benefits.
The following statement, which was submitted online in response to the
Marin Independent Journal’s reporting on Fair Housing of Marin’s activi-
ties, hearkens back to the mid-twentieth century rhetoric regarding public
housing that led to the passage of Proposition 10 in 1950:

What is affordable housing? It is government-subsidized hous-


ing - PROJECTS. I remember the project housing in Philadelphia
where I grew up. I remember project housing in San Francisco
where I went to school. We have had a taste of what this brings
in Novato recently, people shot while sitting in a car in the Safe-
way parking lot, assaults, drugs, gangs, graffiti. The market is fair.
Social planners are utopians who will destroy our way of life and
the value of our property. But they will feel good about it.289

Recognition of the “social planning” that produced segregation in the


first place is missing. A racial “other” is seen as a threat, government is
viewed as unjust when it advances inclusiveness, and property rights and
unfettered profits are upheld as sacred.

Discrimination Continues
Racial discrimination by real estate agents, lenders, and homeowners
continues today. The fair housing group Project Sentinel settled a case
in 2016 against an apartment complex in Santa Clara after claiming
that the complex had refused to accept Mexican forms of identification,
among additional forms of discrimination, against applicants of Mexican
national origin.290 A recent survey in Sonoma County found that a quarter
of residents had experienced discrimination in the rental market. Hispanic
families had been denied rental opportunities by landlords stating that
they would not rent to single parents with children.291 Another recent

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62

Each dot on this map represents an Oakland property that was foreclosed
on between 2007 and 2011. Those marked in red represent foreclosed
properties that were later acquired by investors. The vast majority of
foreclosures occurred in formerly redlined areas, shaded in this 1937 HOLC
map in red (“hazardous”) or yellow (“definitely declining”). Image credit:
Evan Bissell

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63

study analyzed whether African Americans in Sonoma


County were denied housing at higher rates than white
callers based on their voices. Sixty-eight percent of calls
resulted in at least some differential treatment favoring
whites.292 In a similar study in Marin County, Black callers
received fewer returned calls, less advantageous terms
and conditions, and higher quotes for rent.293 East Bay
residents report instances of discrimination in housing
based on race today as well. In Contra Costa County, a
majority of surveyed legal service providers, professional
associations, and housing authorities reported having
clients who experienced housing discrimination. In 47
percent of those cases, race was the reason for such
discrimination, and in 37 percent of cases, national or-
igin was cited.294 Similar results were found in a review
of fair housing complaints in Alameda County from 2009
to 2014. In those cases, discrimination based on race
comprised 30 percent of complaints.295

“Colorblind” Exclusionary Policies


Implicitly discriminatory or “colorblind” forms of exclusion
continue to perpetuate racial inequity in housing and
beyond, decades after state and federal laws banned
discrimination. Euclidean zoning has become normal-
ized to the degree that it is simply known as zoning, and
many Bay Area jurisdictions continue to employ it in an
exclusionary manner. Zoning codes frequently establish
districts exclusively for single-family homes, in which
large lot sizes and setbacks, and low building heights
are required.296 Whether intentional or not, protecting such uses tends to
result in “large, expensive homes being the only feasible development op-
tion.”297 Because racial disparities in wealth have been continuous, a lack
of affordable housing options works to exclude people of color, particu-
larly African Americans. Further local government regulation of residential
subdivisions and municipal growth, such as establishing a cap on the
number of housing units a municipality can permit in a year or enacting
a moratorium on building, may have similar exclusionary effects.298 In the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these tools have made multifamily
and affordable housing difficult to build in wealthy, white enclaves.

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64

CONCLUSION

While the San Francisco Bay Area is often heralded today


as a leader in progressive values and policies, historical facts also show
that the region led the country in inventing and implementing new tactics
for racial exclusion in housing. San Francisco’s anti-Chinese land use ordi-
nances in the late-1800s were among the earliest in the country and were
copied by other cities. Berkeley’s 1916 comprehensive zoning ordinance
that established exclusive single-family residential zones, celebrated by Cal-
ifornia Real Estate magazine for its “protection against invasion of Negroes
and Asiatics,”299 pushed the limits of local zoning authority and became a
standard in cities throughout the United States.300 In Oakland, after local
developers, real estate agents, and landlords defeated a major public hous-
ing plan, their organization spearheaded the statewide ballot proposition
that would establish Article 34 in California’s state constitution, creating a
major barrier to public and affordable housing across the state for decades.
The spatial boundaries, scale, mechanisms, and targets of racial exclu-
sion and dispossession have changed over time, but the systems of
racial capitalism and outcomes of hoarding resources and power that
were firmly entrenched by the late-1960s still remain. The Bay Area’s
early history shows how this foundation was laid using a multitude of
local exclusionary tactics that evolved in response to court rulings and
antidiscrimination legislation, and in many cases, persisted in spite of
them. Historian George Lipsitz describes this process as a reiterative
pattern of “white resistance and refusal [that] has always led to a rene-
gotiation of the terms of open housing.”301
History also reveals how the real estate industry, comprised of agents, de-
velopers, builders, landlords, and investors, served as a major organizing
force for, and beneficiary of, many of the tactics of racial exclusion and
dispossession throughout the twentieth century. Beyond asserting direct
control over discrimination in the private market through racial covenants,
racial steering, and blockbusting, industry leaders exerted political control
over state and local government in order to deliberately advance a policy
agenda to “protect and serve the commodity in which Realtors deal.”302
In addition to creating the legal structures to support the industry’s
goals, government programs such as the demolition of public housing
and urban renewal facilitated profits even as they perpetuated racial
inequities. The real estate industry also played a major role in mobilizing
and compelling white homeowners to maintain segregation, as evi-
denced by stories like the vote to exclude the Shengs from South San
Francisco and the movement against public housing after World War II.

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65

Racial discrimination in housing has been illegal for more than 50 years,
yet glaring racial inequities persist. Racial disparities in wealth, income,
and ownership translate into differences in economic power in markets.
This difference in economic power has meant that white people have had
signficant advantages in the housing market even after individual acts of
racial discrimination were prohibited. Policies that are not explicitly racial,
but create disadvantages for low-income people and renters, have per-
petuated racial inequities. These include cuts to funding for affordable
housing, concentration of affordable housing in low-opportunity areas,
and lack of protections for low-income renters.
Efforts toward building an equitable future must start with recognizing the
extensive history of racial exclusion and dispossession in the Bay Area,
its adaptive and enduring nature, and its manifestations today. The tactics
documented here are not restricted to the past. They may go dormant and
later be resurfaced, as we have seen with the recent surge in racially moti-
vated violence. While it is convenient to think of racism as a fixed structure
of the past that we are progressively moving away from, this view has
flaws. What if instead, as scholar Daniel HoSang poses, “we imagine rac-
ism as a dynamic and evolving force, progressive rather than anachronistic,
generative and fluid rather than conservative or static?”303 How would this
change our approaches? History facilitates an understanding of dynamic
racial tactics that is instrumental in preventing them from being deployed
again. Achieving inclusive communities requires us to directly confront the
roots of exclusion, provide restitution for historical racial injustices, and
transform the power structures that continue to perpetuate them.
A true reckoning with our region’s history prompts some critical questions
such as the following:
• What roles and responsibilities should local jurisdictions and Bay Area
residents have in righting past wrongs?
• How can we transform our institutions of local governance, zoning or-
dinances, housing markets, systems of property rights, connection to
land, and relationships to our neighbors in order to fully realize racial
equity and belonging?
• What systems must be established to prevent the tactics of racial exclu-
sion and dispossession from the past from being implemented again?
• How can we act locally and regionally to bring about this change?
Recognizing that some tactics of exclusion originated in the Bay Area
and spread throughout the country, how might we seed transformative
change locally to allow it to take root more broadly?
We invite you to reflect on these questions and take actions informed by
the region’s history. n

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66

ENDNOTES 10 Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social


Equity at Duke University, The Plunder of
Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings
1 Mitchell Postel, “The Cases of Sing on the Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing
Sheng and Robert U.M. Ting,” La Pen- Contracts (Durham, NC: Samuel DuBois
insula xliii, no. 2 (2015): 22-29,https:// Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke
historysmc.org/sites/default/files/La%20 University), 2019.
Peninsula%2C%20Chinese%2C%20 11 Dorceta Taylor, Toxic Communities: En-
Summer%202015%2C%20ONLINE.pdf. vironmental Racism, Industrial Pollution,
2 David Torres-Rouff, Before L.A.: Race, and Residential Mobility (New York: NYU
Space, and Municipal Power in Los Press, 2014), 106.
Angeles, 1781-1894. New Haven: Yale 12 Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide:
University Press, 257 quoted in Jessica The United States and the California Indi-
Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local an Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven:
Politics and Inequality in American Cities Yale University Press, 2016).
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2018), 197. 13 James Loewen. “Sundown Towns in
the United States,” Sundown Towns: A
3 Stephen Menendian and Samir Gambhir, Hidden Dimension of American Racism
“Racial Segregation in the San Francisco by James W. Loewen, accessed July 16,
Bay Area, Part 3: Measuring Segregation” 2019, https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sun-
(Berkeley, CA: Haas Institute for a Fair downtowns.php
and Inclusive Society, May 2019), https://
haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/racial-segrega- 14 Jovanka Beckles, “The Gary Family of
tion-san-francisco-bay-area-part-3 Richmond: Fighting for Equality and
Standing for Their Rights,” http://www.
4 PolicyLink and USC Program on Regional jovankabeckles.net/GARYSTORY.pdf.
and Environmental Equity (PERE), An
Equity Profile of the Nine-County San 15 Marilynn S. Johnson, The Second Gold
Francisco Bay Area Region (PolicyLink Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World
and PERE, 2017), accessed June 5, War II (Berkeley: University of Califor-
2019, https://bayareaequityatlas.org/ nia Press, 1993), http://ark.cdlib.org/
analyses/an-equity-profile-of-nine-county- ark:/13030/ft6x0nb4kn/.
san-francisco . 16 Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race,
5 Destin Jenkins, “Who Segregated Class, and Political Community in Oakland
America?,” Public Books, December (Berkeley: University of California Press,
21, 2017, https://www.publicbooks.org/ 2004).
top-10-2018-who-segregated-america/. 17 Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race
6 Ibid. and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
7 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (New 2005), 256-290.
York: Liveright Publishing Corporation,
2017), 59-75. 18 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 97.

8 john a. powell & Kaloma Cardwell, 19 Marc A. Weiss, “Urban Land Developers
“Homeownership, Wealth & the Produc- and the Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case
tion of Racialized Space,” Joint Center of Berkeley,” Berkeley Planning Journal 3,
for Housing Studies Harvard University no. 1 (1986):12, https://doi.org/10.5070/
(2013): 13-18, http://works.bepress.com/ BP33113187.
john_powell/67/. 20 In re Lee Sing, 43 F. 359, 361 (N.D. Cal.
9 The California Fair Housing Act, also 1890).
known as the Rumford Act was first 21 Joshua S. Yang, “The Anti-Chinese Cubic
enacted in 1963, but was nullified in Air Ordinance.” American Journal of
1964 with the passage of Proposition 14. Public Health 99, no. 3 (March 1, 2009):
After the California Supreme Court ruled 440–440, https://doi.org/10.2105/
Proposition 14 unconstitutional 1966, the AJPH.2008.145813.
Rumford Act was reinstated.

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67 67
22 Taylor, Toxic Communities, 106. 41 US Census Bureau, American Community
Survey 2017 (5-Year Estimates), Table
23 Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the
B02001. Race.
Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of
Berkeley,” 18. 42 Vue du Presidio de San Francisco [ca.
1815], California Cornerstones: Selected
24 Sonia Hirt, Zoned in the USA: The Origins
Images from The Bancroft Library Pictorial
and Implications of American Land-Use
Collection, fG420.K84C6 1822x Part 3,
Regulation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Plate II, The Bancroft Library, University of
Press, 2014), 165.
California, Berkeley.
25 Rhomberg, No There There, 241.
43 Karen B. Clay, “Property Rights and Insti-
26 Brian Byrd, Shannon Dearmond, and Lau- tutions: Congress and the California Land
rel Engbring, “Re-Visualizing Indigenous Act of 1851,” The Journal of Economic
Persistence during Colonization from the History 59, no. 1 (1999): 122–42.
Perspective of Traditional Settlements in
44 Jeremy Rosenberg, “How Rancho Owners
the San Francisco Bay-Delta Area,” Jour-
Lost Their Land And Why That Matters
nal of California and Great Basin Anthro-
Today,” KCET, April 16, 2012, https://
pology 38 (December 1, 2018): 163–90.
www.kcet.org/history-society/how-rancho-
27 Monica Arellano, Alan Leventhal, Rose- owners-lost-their-land-and-why-that-mat-
mary Cambra, Shelia Guzman Schmidt, ters-today.
and Gloria Arellano Gomez. An Ethnohis-
45 Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The
tory of Santa Clara Valley and Adjacent
Other Californians: Prejudice and Dis-
Regions; Historic Ties of the Muwekma
crimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the
Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay
United States to 1920 (Berkeley: Universi-
Area and Tribal Stewardship Over the
ty of California Press, 1977), 150.
Tupiun Táareštak [Place of the Fox Man]
Site: CA-SCL-894 (2014), http://muwek- 46 Yuji Ichioka. “Japanese Immigrant Re-
ma.org/tribalhistory/ethnohistory.html. sponse to the 1920 California Alien
Land Law.” Agricultural History 58, no. 2
28 Madley, An American Genocide, 26.
(1984): 163, 169.
29 Ibid., 28.
47 Ibid., 159.
30 Five Spanish missions were established
48 Ibid., 163.
in the Bay Area: San Francisco de Asis
(1776, also known as Mission Dolores), 49 Ibid., 167.
Santa Clara (1776), San Jose (1797), San
50 The Virtual Museum of the City of San
Rafael Arcángel (1817), and San Francis-
Francisco, “Internment of San Francisco
co Solano (1823).
Japanese,” http://www.sfmuseum.org/war/
31 Madley, An American Genocide, 26. evactxt.html.
32 Arellano et al., An Ethnohistory of Santa 51 “SF Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs,” San
Clara Valley and Adjacent Regions; 9-16. Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 1942,
accessed July 12, 2019, http://www.
33 Madley, An American Genocide, 27.
sfmuseum.org/hist8/evac19.html.
34 Elias Castillo, A Cross of Thorns: The
52 Sandra C. Taylor, “Evacuation and Eco-
Enslavement of California’s Indians by the
nomic Loss: Questions and Perspectives,”
Spanish Missions. (Fresno, CA: Craven
in Japanese Americans: From Relocation
Street Books, 2015).
to Redress, rev. ed., ed. Roger Daniels,
35 Madley, An American Genocide, 156. Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano
(University of Washington Press, 1991),
36 Ibid., 171.
163-167.
37 Ibid., 165.
53 Brian Niiya, “The Last Alien Land Law,”
38 Ibid., 168. Densho, accessed July 22, 2019, https://
densho.org/last-alien-land-law/.
39 Ibid., 171.
54 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 3.
55 Ibid.

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56 Photograph: San Francisco, Calif. (2031 75 Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality:
Bush Street), War Relocation Authority The Chinese Struggle against Discrim-
Photographs of Japanese-American Evac- ination in Nineteenth-Century America
uation and Resettlement, WRA no. C-423 (Berkeley, CA: University of California
[recto], The Bancroft Library, University of Press, 1994), http://ark.cdlib.org/
California, Berkeley. ark:/13030/ft3r29n8p4/.
57 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 167. 76 H.A. Rodgers, “California--The Chinese
Agitation in San Francisco--A Meeting
58 Oakland Observer, May 15, 1943, quoted
of the Workingmen’s Party on the Sand
in Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 167.
Lots,” line drawing, Chinese in California
59 Ibid. Virtual Collection: Selections from the Cal-
ifornia Historical Society, http://ark.cdlib.
60 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 168.
org/ark:/13030/hb8n39n9d0, California
61 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 169. Historical Society.
62 Self, American Babylon, 77. 77 James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hid-
den Dimension of Segregation in America
63 Ibid., 226.
(New York: The New Press, 2005).
64 Ibid., 229.
78 Loewen, “Sundown Towns in the United
65 Charles Wollenberg, Marinship at War: States.”
Shipbuilding and Social Change in War-
79 Loewen, Sundown Towns, 394.
time Sausalito (Berkeley, CA: Western
Heritage Press, 1990), 92. 80 Ibid.
66 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 182. 81 Tuskegee University Archives, Box
132.020, cited by MonroeWorkToday,
67 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 67.
“MonroeWorkToday Dataset Compilation,”
68 Rhomberg, No There There, 53. Map of White Supremacy Mob Violence,
accessed July 24, 2019, http://www.
69 E. A. Daly, “Alameda County Political
monroeworktoday.org/explore/#.
Leader and Journalist,” an oral history
conducted 1971, in Perspectives on 82 Ken Gonzales-Day, Lynching in the West,
the Alameda County District Attorney’s 1850-1935 (Duke University Press,
Office, Regional Oral History Office, 2006); Michael James Pfeifer, Rough
Bancroft Library, University of California, Justice: Lynching and American Society,
Berkeley, 1972, p. 10; “U.S. to Probe 1874-1947 (University of Illinois Press,
‘Friendly’ Warning to Negro Woman,” 2004); William D. Carrigan and Clive
Oakland Times, July 23, 1926, quoted in Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence
Rhomberg, No There There, 52-53. against Mexicans in the United States,
1848-1928 (Oxford University Press,
70 Edward Castillo, “Short Overview of
2013); cited by MonroeWorkToday, “Mon-
California Indian History,” California Native
roeWorkToday Dataset Compilation.”
American Heritage Commission, ac-
cessed July 11, 2019, http://nahc.ca.gov/ 83 Equal Justice Initiative, “Lynching in Amer-
resources/california-indian-history/. ica: Confronting the Legacy of Racial
Terror,” accessed June 2, 2019, https://
71 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Dis-
lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/.
arming History of the Second Amendment
(San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 84 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 54.
2018), 53.
85 Ibid., 53-54.
72 Madley, An American Genocide, 182.
86 Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, To Place Our
73 Loewen, “Sundown Towns in the United Deeds: The African American Commu-
States.” nity in Richmond, California, 1910-1963
(Berkeley, CA: University of California
74 Yang, “The Anti-Chinese Cubic Air Ordi-
Press, 2000), 41.
nance.”
87 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 52.
88 Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 45.
89 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 55.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
69 69
90 Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 12 and 101. Housing Act, 101 Cal. L. Rev. 1437, 1447
(2013), https://scholarship.law.berkeley.
91 Stephen Menendian and Samir Gambhir,
edu/californialawreview/vol101/iss5/4/.
“Racial Segregation in the San Francisco
Bay Area, Part 2: Racial Demographics” 107 In re Lee Sing, 43 F. 359 (N.D. Cal.
(Berkeley, CA: Haas Institute for a Fair and 1890).
Inclusive Society, February 2019), https://
108 Ibid.
haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/racial-segrega-
tion-san-francisco-bay-area-part-2. 109 Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).
92 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 54. 110 Wilhelmina A. Leigh and James B. Stew-
art, eds., The Housing Status of Black
93 Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 25.
Americans, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-
94 Wide-angle photograph of Ku Klux Klan tion Publishers, 1991), 9.
gathering in the Oakland Auditorium,
111 Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917).
Photographs of Ku Klux Klan assemblies
in Oakland and Contra Costa County, 112 Yang, “The Anti-Chinese Cubic Air Ordi-
BANC PIC 2013.023--A, The Bancroft nance.”
Library, University of California, Berkeley.
113 “Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire,” Chi-
95 Beckles, “The Gary Family of Richmond: nese in California, No. 83, The Bancroft
Fighting for Equality and Standing for Library, University of California, Berkeley.
Their Rights,” 2.
114 Yick Wo v. Hopkins, 118 U.S. 356
96 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 6. (1886).
97 Beckles, “The Gary Family of Richmond: 115 Taylor, Toxic Communities, 106.
Fighting for Equality and Standing for
116 Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the
Their Rights,” 3.
Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of
98 Wilbur Gary, Daily People’s World, March Berkeley,” 18.
13, 1952, quoted in Beckles, “The Gary
117 Kevin Fox Gotham, “Racialization and
Family of Richmond: Fighting for Equality
the State: The Housing Act of 1934
and Standing for Their Rights,” 9.
and the Creation of the Federal Housing
99 Loewen, Sundown Towns, 393. Administration,” Sociological Perspectives
43, no. 2 (2000): 291–317, https://doi.
100 United States Commission on Civil Rights,
org/10.2307/1389798.
Hearings before the United States Com-
mission on Civil Rights. Hearings held 118 Weiss, “Urban Land Developers and the
in Los Angeles, California, January 25, Origins of Zoning Laws: The Case of
1960; San Francisco California, January Berkeley,” 13.
27, 1960, January 28, 1960 (Washington,
119 Ibid., 18.
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960),
590. 120 Hirt, Zoned in the USA, 165.
101 Paul T. Miller, The Postwar Struggle for 121 Ibid.
Civil Rights: African Americans in San
122 Ibid., 171.
Francisco, 1945–1975 (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2009), 57. 123 Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272
U.S. 365 (1926).
102 Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They
Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and 124 Hirt, Zoned in the USA, 165.
Racial Conflict in American Neighbor-
125 Richard H. Chused, Euclid’s Historical
hoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little-
Imagery, 51 Case W. Res. L. Rev. 597
field, 2000), 132.
(2001).
103 Hirt, Zoned in the USA, 3.
126 Charles Abrams, “The Housing Prob-
104 Edward H. Ziegler, Rathkopf’s The Law of lem and the Negro,” Daedalus 95, no. 1
Zoning and Planning, 4th ed (2017). (1966): 68.
105 Ibid. 127 Ibid.
106 Swati Prakash, Racial Dimensions of 128 Trounstine, Segregation by Design, 197.
Property Value Protection Under the Fair

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129 David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: 149 Trounstine, Segregation by Design, 67.
State Policy and White Racial Politics in
150 Rothstein, Color of Law, 79.
Suburban America (University of Chicago
Press, 2010), 46. 151 National Committee Against Discrimina-
tion in Housing, Inc., A Study of Patterns
130 Trounstine, Segregation by Design, 152.
and Practices of Housing Discrimination in
131 Freund, Colored Property, 51. San Leandro, California, (May 1971), 2, 8,
9.
132 Trounstine, Segregation by Design, 152.
152 Julie Chao, “HUD Tracking ‘whites-Only’
133 Self, American Babylon, 265.
Covenants in N. California.” SFGate, Oc-
134 Ibid. tober 25, 1998. https://www.sfgate.com/
realestate/article/HUD-tracking-whites-on-
135 Freund, Colored Property, 65.
ly-covenants-in-N-3062955.php.
136 Robert C. Ellickson, “The Zoning
153 Julia Scott, “Racist remnant struck from
Strait-Jacket: Evidence from the Silicon
covenant,” San Jose Mercury News,
Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater
August 18, 2007.
Austin” Working Paper, Stanford Law and
Economics Seminar, Stanford, CA, No- 154 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 100.
vember 2018.
155 Ibid., 99.
137 Ybarra v. Town of Los Altos Hills, 370 F.
156 Ibid., 100.
Supp. 742 (N.D. Cal. 1973).
157 Ibid., 103.
138 Ibid.
158 Ibid., 106.
139 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 78-79.
159 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 5.
140 Ibid., 82.
160 Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil
141 The Argonaut, 1906, f F850 .A8 set 2
Rights, 48-51.
v.59 (1906), The Bancroft Library, Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley. 161 Ibid.
142 George Friend Company, Berkeley Park, 162 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 6.
Amended Map No. 2, http://oskicat.berke-
163 Gary Kamiya, “How SF’s Housing Au-
ley.edu/record=b22254223~S1, Earth
thority Kept Its Early Projects All White,”
Sciences and Map Library, University of
San Francisco Chronicle, July 22, 2016,
California, Berkeley.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/
143 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 88-90. article/How-SF-s-Housing-Authority-kept-
its-early-8403968.php.
144 Elaine B. Stiles, Every Lot a Garden Spot:
‘Big Dave’ Bohannon and the Making of 164 Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil
San Lorenzo Village (San Lorenzo Heri- Rights, 51.
tage Society, 2015).
165 Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil
145 United States Commission on Civil Rights, Rights, 54.
Hearings before the United States Com-
166 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 109.
mission on Civil Rights, 257.
167 Ibid., 108.
146 George Lipsitz, The Possessive Invest-
ment in Whiteness: How White People 168 Rothstien,The Color of Law, 5.
Profit from Identity Politics, 20th century
169 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 93.
edition (Philadelphia, PA: Temple Universi-
ty Press, 2018), 26. 170 Ibid., 107.
147 United States Commission on Civil Rights, 171 Ibid., 107-108.
Hearings before the United States Com-
172 Ibid., 213.
mission on Civil Rights, 559-560.
173 Ibid., 215.
148 Eva Goldberg, “Making Art / Making Histo-
ry: The Negro History Quilt Club Of Marin 174 Ibid., 214.
City And Sausalito,” American Popular
175 Ibid.
Culture, http://www.americanpopularcul-
ture.com/archive/politics/quiltclub.htm. 176 Ibid., 217.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
71 71
177 Ibid., 97. ierra I) (N.D. Cal. 1970).
178 Ibid. 194 James v. Valtierra, 402 U.S. 137, 143
(Valtierra II) (1971).
179 Ibid., 98.
195 NAACP brief, 21-26; Valtierra I, 313 F.
180 Ibid., 218.
Supp. at 5 & n.2.
181 Ibid., 223-224.
196 Cavin, “A Right to Housing in the Sub-
182 Rhomberg, No There There, 114-116. urbs,” 443.
183 Diego Aguilar-Canabal, “The Deplorable 197 Self, American Babylon, 142.
Politics Behind Article 34,” The Bay City
198 Ibid., 150.
Beacon, accessed July 23, 2019, https://
www.thebaycitybeacon.com/politics/ 199 Ibid., 155.
the-deplorable-politics-behind-article/
200 Ibid.,114.
article_d5421448-b4ba-11e8-9847-
6fb4a6f5cf5c.html. 201 Ibid.,109.
184 Johnson,The Second Gold Rush, 219- 202 Ibid.,117.
220.
203 Ibid.,120.
185 Rhomberg, No There There, 114-116.
204 Left: “Crane smashes against a dwell-
186 Cal. Const. art. XXXIV. ing in the Western Addition,” August
11, 1958, photograph,San Francisco
187 Rhomberg, No There There, 241.
Historical Photograph Collection, AAK-
188 SCA-1 Public housing projects, 2019- 1461, San Francisco History Center, San
2020 regular session, (2018). https:// Francisco Public Library, http://sflib1.sfpl.
leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavCli- org:82/record=b1040341. Right: George
ent.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SCA1. Place, San Francisco News-Call Bulletin,
“Construction at Geary and Fillmore,” June
189 Kathleen Morgan-Martinez, “Local Control
30, 1960, photograph, San Francisco
in Low-Income Development: The Prom-
Historical Photograph Collection, AAC-
ise of California’s Article 34,” Santa Clara
1917, San Francisco History Center, San
Law Review 33 (1993): 765-798, http://
Francisco Public Library, http://sflib1.sfpl.
digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview/
org:82/record=b1016813.
vol33/iss3/7.. “Persons of low income” is
defined as “persons or families who lack 205 San Francisco Redevelopment Agency,
the amount of income which is necessary “The San Francisco Redevelopment
(as determined by the state public body Agency now offers… 43 acres of prime
developing, constructing, or acquiring the land in the Western Addition,” (San Fran-
housing project) to enable them, without cisco, 1960), accessed September 5,
financial assistance, to live in decent, safe 2019, https://archive.org/details/sanfran-
and sanitary dwellings, without over- ciscorede1960sanf.
crowding.” James v. Valtierra, 402 U.S.
206 Cavin, “A Right to Housing in the Sub-
137 (Valtierra II) (1971).
urbs,” 430.
190 Aaron Cavin, “A Right to Housing in
207 Ibid.
the Suburbs: James v. Valtierra and the
Campaign against Economic Discrim- 208 Louise Nelson Dyble, “Revolt Against
ination.” Journal of Urban History 45, Sprawl: Transportation and the Origins
no. 3 (May 1, 2019): 435. https://doi. of the Marin County Growth-Control
org/10.1177/0096144217712928. Regime.” Journal of Urban History 34,
no. 1 (November 2007): 39, https://doi.
191 Ibid.
org/10.1177/0096144207308049.
192 Ibid., 427-451.
209 Dyble, “Revolt Against Sprawl,” 41.
193 Brief Amici Curiae of the NAACP Legal
210 John Hart, “How Grit and Grace Saved
Defense and Education Fund, Inc., and
Marincello,” Bay Nature, accessed August
the National Office for the Rights of the
12, 2019, https://baynature.org/article/
Indigent, James v. Valtierra, 3 (Oct. 26,
saved-by-grit-and-grace/.
1970); Valtierra v. Housing Authority of
City of San Jose, 313 F. Supp. 1, 5 (Valt- 211 Dyble, “Revolt Against Sprawl,” 38.

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212 Ibid., 40. Public Library, http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/
record=b1035549.
213 Richard A. Walker, The Country in the
City: The Greening of the San Francisco 229 San Mateo County Historical Association,
Bay Area (Seattle: University of Washing- and San Mateo County Historic Resourc-
ton Press, 2009), 93. es Advisory Board, City of East Palo Alto
Historic Resources Inventory Report
214 Benjamin Ross, Dead End: Suburban
(February 1994), 71.
Sprawl and the Rebirth of American
Urbanism (Oxford University Press, 2015), 230 Self, American Babylon, 165.
91.
231 Johnson, The Second Gold Rush, 228.
215 National Association of Real Estate
232 United States Commission on Civil Rights,
Boards, Code of Ethics: Adopted by
Hearings before the United States Com-
the National Association of Real Estate
mission on Civil Rights, 726.
Boards at its Seventeenth Annual Con-
vention, June 6, 1924, quoted in Troun- 233 Ibid., 638.
stine, Segregation by Design, 166.
234 Ibid., 588.
216 Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Proposi-
235 Terry Link, “The White Noose: How Racist
tions; Ballot Initiatives and the Making of
Federal Policies Put a Stranglehold on
Postwar California. (Berkeley, CA: Univer-
the City,” San Francisco, November 1971,
sity of California Press, 2010), 56.
26-56.
217 United States Commission on Civil Rights,
236 Bruce Mitchell and Juan Franco, HOLC
Hearings before the United States Com-
“Redlining” Maps: The persistent structure
mission on Civil Rights, 616.
of segregation and economic inequality
218 Ibid., 735. (National Community Reinvestment Coa-
lition, 2018), 5, https://ncrc.org/wp-con-
219 National Association of Real Estate
tent/uploads/dlm_uploads/2018/02/
Boards, Code of Ethics: Adopted by
NCRC-Research-HOLC-10.pdf.
the National Association of Real Estate
Boards at its Seventeenth Annual Con- 237 Ibid., 7.
vention, June 6, 1924, http://archive.
238 Richard Marciano, David Goldberg, Chien-
realtor.org/sites/default/files/1924Ethics.
Yi Hou, Testbed for the Redlining Archives
pdf.
of California’s Exclusionary Spaces,
220 United States Commission on Civil Rights, accessed August 9, 2019, http://salt.umd.
Hearings before the United States Com- edu/T-RACES/mosaic.html
mission on Civil Rights, 616, 637.
239 Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil
221 Ibid., 637. Rights, 58.
222 Ibid. 240 Trevor Thomas, San Francisco’ Housing
Market--Open or Closed? Civil Rights
223 Ibid., 726.
Inventory of San Francisco, (San Fran-
224 Ibid., 587. cisco, CA: Council for Civic Unity of San
Francisco), 29-30.
225 Ibid., 590.
241 California Department of Real Estate, Ref-
226 Ibid., 589.
erence Book: Information Relating to Real
227 National Committee Against Discrimina- Estate Practice, Licensing and Examina-
tion in Housing, Inc., A Study of Patterns tions (Sacramento: California Department
and Practices of Housing Discrimination in of Real Estate, 2010), 35, http://dre.
San Leandro, California, 2. ca.gov/Publications/ReferenceBook.html.
228 Bob Warren, San Francisco News-Call 242 Center for California Real Estate, “About
Bulletin, “Miss Frances Fletcher, Berke- C.A.R.,” Center for California Real Estate,
ley teacher pointing at chart that shows accessed August 11, 2019, http://center-
racial discrimination in housing sales and forcaliforniarealestate.org/about/car.html.
rentals in San Francisco,” March 9, 1962,
243 HoSang, Racial Propositions, 62.
photograph, San Francisco Historical
Photograph Collection, AAF-0302, San 244 Self, American Babylon, 204.
Francisco History Center, San Francisco
245 HoSang, Racial Propositions, 68.

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
73 73
246 Ibid., 70. The First Thirty Years (Mission Peak Heri-
tage Foundation, 1989), 33-34.
247 Ibid., 71.
268 US Census Bureau, 1950 and 1960
248 Earl Warren Oral History Project, “Legisla-
Decennial Census, retrieved from Asso-
tor for Fair Employment, Fair Housing, and
ciation of Bay Area Governments, Bay
Public Health William Byron Rumford,”
Area Census, http://www.bayareacensus.
Regional Oral History Office, University of
ca.gov/cities/Richmond50.htm
California, Berkeley, 1970-1971, https://
oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt5h4n- 269 US Census Bureau, 1970 Decennial
b0wd&brand=oac4&chunk.id=meta. Census, retrieved from Association of Bay
Area Governments, Bay Area Census,
249 David B. Oppenheimer, “California’s An-
http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/
ti-Discrimination Legislation, Proposition
Fremont70.htm.
14, and the Constitutional Protection of
Minority Rights: The Fiftieth Anniversary 270 john a. powell and Kathleen M. Graham,
of the California Fair Employment and “Urban Fragmentation as a Barrier to
Housing Act,”Golden Gate University Law Equal Opportunity,” 79-80, 81.
Review 40, no. 2 (2010): 121, http://dig-
271 Ibid., 81.
italcommons.law.ggu.edu/ggulrev/vol40/
iss2/1. 272 Self, American Babylon, 259.
250 Ibid., 124. 273 Moore, To Place Our Deeds, 100.
251 Ibid., 125. 274 Bay Area Equity Atlas, “Neighborhood
Opportunity,” Bay Area Equity Atlas,
252 Self, American Babylon, 264.
accessed August 12, 2019, https://ba-
253 Ibid., 261. yareaequityatlas.org/indicators/neighbor-
hood-opportunity#/.
254 California Real Estate Association, Califor-
nia Real Estate Magazine, October 1964. 275 Miriam Zuk & Karen Chapple, “Redlining
and Gentrification,” Urban Displacement
255 Self, American Babylon, 267.
Project, 2015, https://www.urbandis-
256 Ibid., 268. placement.org/redlining.
257 john a. powell and Kathleen M. Graham, 276 Ibid.
“Urban Fragmentation as a Barrier to
277 Tony Roshan Samara, Race, Inequality and
Equal Opportunity,” Report of the Citi-
the Resegregation of the Bay Area (Urban
zens’ Commission on Civil Rights; Rights
Habitat, 2016), https://urbanhabitat.org/
at Risk, Equality in an Age of Terrorism
sites/default/files/UH%20Policy%20
(2002), 79, 85.
Brief2016.pdf.
258 john a. powell and Kathleen M. Graham,
278 Fair Housing Advocates of Northern
“Urban Fragmentation as a Barrier to
California. June 26, 2018. “Civil Rights
Equal Opportunity,” 85.
Organizations Accuse Bank of America of
259 Rebecca Hendrick and Yu Shi, “Mac- Housing Discrimination in 37 Metropolitan
ro-Level Determinants of Local Gov- Areas.” http://www.fairhousingnorcal.org/
ernment Interaction: How Metropolitan uploads/1/7/0/5/17051262/fhanc_bank_
Regions in the United States Compare,” of_america_final_pr_6-26-18.pdf
Urban Affairs Review 51, no. 3 (2015):
279 Surya Deva and Leilani Farha to the
417.
United States of America, March 22,
260 Ibid. 2019, https://www.ohchr.org/Docu-
ments/Issues/Housing/Financialization/
261 Self, American Babylon, 120.
OL_USA_10_2019.pdf.
262 Trounstine, Segregation by Design. 25-27.
280 Ibid.
263 Self, American Babylon, 121 and 124.
281 U.S. General Accounting Office, Siting
264 Ibid., 125-27. of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their
Correlation with Racial and Economic Sta-
265 Ibid., 126 and 171.
tus of Surrounding Communities (1983).
266 Ibid., 127. Commission for Racial Justice, United
Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race
267 Oral History Associates, City of Fremont:

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haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/rootsraceplace
74
in the United States (1987). 3-6.
282 Paul Mohai and Robin Saha, “Racial 292 BBC Research & Consulting, Sonoma
inequality in the distribution of hazardous County Regional Analysis of Impediments
waste: a national-level reassessment.” to Fair Housing Choice, Section iv, 1.
Social Problems, 2007; 54 (3): 343-370.
293 Peattie and Tankersley, Marin County
283 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Could Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing
where you live influence how long you Choice, Chapter 3, 12-13. Note: Fair
live?” accessed July 22, 2019, https:// housing testing done via telephone relies
www.rwjf.org/en/library/interactives/ on people’s assumptions regarding the
whereyouliveaffectshowlongyoulive.html. race of the caller. Linguistics experts have
found that people called correctly identify
284 Sharon Stein Merkin, Ricardo Basur-
the race of the speaker about 80 percent
to-Dávila, Arun Karlamangla, Chloe E.
of the time, allowing fair housing organi-
Bird, Nicole Lurie, Jose Escarce and
zations and researchers to rely on voice
Teresa Seeman, “Neighborhoods and
and accent recognition to conduct testing
Cumulative Biological Risk Profiles by
studies.
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of U.S. Adults: NHANES III,” Annals of 294 Contra Costa County Consortium, Anal-
Epidemiology 19, no. 3 (March 2009): ysis of Impediments to Fair Housing
194–201, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. Choice (2016), 105.
annepidem.2008.12.006.
295 BAE Urban Economics, Alameda County
285 Elizabeth Arias, Loraine Escobedo, Joce- Home Consortium Analysis of Impedi-
lyn Kennedy, Chunxia Fu and Jodi Cisewki, ments to Fair Housing Choice (2015), iv.
“U.S. Small-Area Life Expectancy Esti-
296 Ziegler, Rathkopf’s The Law of Zoning and
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286 Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick
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287 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in Amer-
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289 Caroline Peattie and Jessica Tankersley,
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r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e
76

The rampant displacement seen


today in the San Francisco Bay
Area is built upon a history of
exclusion and dispossession,
centered on race, and driven
by the logic of capitalism. This
history established massive
inequities in who owned land,
who had access to financing, and
who held political power, all
of which determined—and still
remain at the root of deciding—
who can call the Bay Area home.

@haasinstitute

r oot s , r ac e, a nd p lac e

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