- By Marcus White | Examiner staff writer |
- Jul 11, 2023 Updated Jul 12, 2023 (SFExaminer.com)
To qualify for reparations payments, San Francisco’s Black residents would need to have lived in The City for less time and more recently than initially proposed.
The final reparations report, published last week, said that to be eligible, Black residents must — at a minimum — be adults who were born in San Francisco or moved to The City before 2006 who can document they lived there for at least 10 years.
They must also have listed themselves as Black and African American on public documents for at least a decade, or been descended from a chattel slave or “a free Black person prior to the end of the 19th century.”
That’s a departure from the initial draft, published in December, which had more stringent guidelines.
The San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee‘s final plan would also extend eligibility to Black residents who were victimized by law enforcement and those who have been relocated within The City’s foster care system.
Among more than 100 specific policy recommendations, the committee recommended that The City pay $5 million in a lump sum to eligible Black residents.
That figure attracted national attention, thanks in part to San Francisco’s reputation as a liberal lightning rod and The City staring down a potential budget shortfall soon after the committee submitted its draft report in December.
The Board of Supervisors accepted the draft but didn’t adopt its recommendations earlier this year. It’s unclear whether the current budget or its successors will provide funding for them.
The December draft’s eligibility requirements for payments and other reparations were less remarked upon. It only required that all recipients be adults who identified as Black and African American on public documents for at least 10 years while mandating that they also meet two additional criteria.
Those criteria included demonstrating that they had lived in San Francisco for at least 13 years between 1940 and 1966, been displaced between 1954 and 1973 amid urban renewal, or experienced lending discrimination at some point between 1937 and 2008.
If the Board of Supervisors and Mayor London Breed were to implement the committee’s July 7 recommendations, recipients would also have to prove they or their direct ancestors experienced at least one of a number of historical harms, including displacement by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency between 1954 and 1973 or before 2012.
That could include living in substandard or dangerous public or subsidized housing; suffering “documented physical injury, psychological trauma” or — in the case of a person with surviving direct descendants — death at the hands of law enforcement, the report noted.
While the December draft required two additional criteria and last week’s final report mandated one, there was overlap among the lists, such as a record of attendance at a San Francisco public school amid the consent decree mandating desegregation between 1983 and 2005 and documented lending discrimination.
The July 7 final report expanded the criteria to include Black residents and their direct descendants who had been arrested, prosecuted or sentenced in San Francisco for a drug-related crime between 1971 and now. The December criteria included only people who had been incarcerated.
It’s unclear how many people would be eligible for reparations under the July criteria. Still, the decadeslong decline of San Francisco’s Black population offers some insight into the scope of the committee’s recommendations.
Although San Francisco has grown by about 100,000 residents since the 1970 U.S. Census, the Census Bureau’s 2022 data estimated The City had 46,000 Black residents that year — about 50,000 fewer than in 1970.
Eric McDonnell, the reparations committee’s chair, told the Board of Supervisors in March that the committee was not charged with writing “a feasibility study.” Instead, the body sought to “chronicle” and “determine the value” of the harm The City had done to Black residents.
In its report, the committee noted it was “only empowered to make recommendations.”
“(The) body has no authority to implement these recommendations, and City officials are not required to implement any part,” the committee wrote.
