- By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer |
- Mar 19, 2024 (SFExaminer.com)
Federal transportation officials are granting San Francisco $2 million to fund a study identifying how to reconnect the Fillmore with Japantown and the Western Addition neighborhoods.
Sixty years after The City widened Geary Street into an expressway, cutting the neighborhood off from other communities in The City and displacing residents and businesses, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s multimillion-dollar award will create a community council representing Black, Japanese and Jewish residents displaced by the construction of the Geary Boulevard and Fillmore Street underpass.
The federal grant has signaled a long-awaited change to the Fillmore’s residents and business owners, many of whom have grappled with the ripple effects of urban renewal since the 1960s.
“I think it’s long overdue,” said Majeid Crawford, the executive director at New Community Leadership Foundation, one of the Fillmore-based organizations that wrote a letter of support for the grant project. “I believe that the federal government seems to have recognized the harm that transportation and freeway projects have caused Black communities throughout the country, and this is a first step toward undoing that damage.”
Construction of the eight-lane Geary Expressway and an underpass along Fillmore Street in the early 1960s amounted to one phase of The City’s urban-renewal efforts that closed hundreds of businesses and displaced thousands of households from the Fillmore, according to the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee’s final report submitted last year.
“They did this to widen Geary Street so that the so-called ‘elite’ could get from work to their house in the suburbs of San Francisco 5-to-10 minutes earlier,” Crawford said.
The City’s first application for the federal Reconnecting Communities grant wasn’t accepted, but Supervisor Dean Preston — whose district includes the Fillmore — called upon the San Francisco County Transportation Authority to spearhead another application last year. Federal transportation officials approved it last week.
Preston said he is hopeful the funding can help bridge together communities that have been divided because of San Francisco’s actions.
“It’s my hope, with these funds, to develop a plan where we see physical changes that make that area more pedestrian-friendly and reunify these neighborhoods,” he said.
The $2 million federal grant will help establish the community council, as will another $350,000 from the SFCTA’s Proposition L fund and $150,000 from the San Francisco Planning Department.
SFCTA will facilitate the council of representatives from Black, Japanese, and Jewish communities in the area, who in turn will collaborate on the Geary-Fillmore Underpass Community Planning Study.
The council will consider transportation and safety, as well as opportunities to build affordable housing and implement strategies to prevent further displacement.
“The Japantown Task Force is particularly supportive of the US Department of Transportation’s Equity Strategic Goal to reduce inequities across transportation systems and the communities they affect,” said Alice Kawahatsu, secretary of the Japantown Task Force, in a statement last week. “The Geary Boulevard expansion during Redevelopment literally cut off San Francisco Japantown from Black neighbors in the Fillmore District/Western Addition.”
SFCTA officials said the agency is hoping to get as diverse a committee as possible, extending beyond ethnic and geographic groups to businesses, residents and most anyone else who uses Geary Boulevard.
Bay Area in terms of growth between July 2022 and 2023, seeing a roughly 0.15% increase in residents calling The City home
While there is no current limit on the number of participants, about 15 organizations have already written letters of support for the grant, including Crawford. In order to join the committee, organizations will have to apply.
“We’re going to be reaching back out to everyone who provided letters of support and let them know that this opportunity is now real, and hopefully they’re still interested,” said Rachel Hiatt, the deputy director of planning for SFCTA. “Of course, it’s not limited to anyone who provided a previous letter of support, but we will definitely include those folks.”
Hiatt said she anticipates that the application process won’t begin for another six months while elements of the grant acceptance process are finalized. Once the committee is formed, the study itself will likely take around 18 months to complete.
“When this roadway was designed originally, it was not developed in consultation with the surrounding communities,” she said. “What we’re trying to do here is ensure that the community has the opportunity to voice what their needs are and to have the improvements designed to respond directly to those.”
The recommendations gathered from the study will then go before the SFCTA board for approval. The board will then determine how to fund or implement the recommendations.
This isn’t the first time that local agencies have been involved in plans to address the expressway and the underpass. Ten years ago, San Francisco officials proposed filling in the underpass, which carried a $50 million price tag that couldn’t be funded.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency reduced the number of lanes on the Geary Expressway in 2021, seeking to improve the safety and efficiency of the 38 Geary Muni line.
Some residents are taking a wait-and-see approach to the study.
“I’m really tied to the devastation and the breaking apart of a thriving community that existed before the urban renewal and redevelopment,” said Ericka Scott, the owner of Honey Art Studio in the Fillmore and a neighborhood native. “A lot is owed to the African American community.”
Scott said the council’s study, and any of the changes it recommends, must represent the interests of “Black people who’ve been a part of the community.”
“It’s always people from outside the community,” she said, referring to perceived support for newer businesses that have opened along the Fillmore corridor rather than longtime tenants. “So my main hope for whatever the development is, is that Black people just have access. That’s really what matters to me, more than anything.”
Crawford echoed these concerns.
“They wanted to slow traffic to make transportation more accessible to the new residents of the neighborhood,” he said of the SFMTA’s efforts three years ago. “But those aren’t the same residents that were harmed … That’s the critical thing this study has to get right.”
