{"id":26614,"date":"2023-05-20T12:34:49","date_gmt":"2023-05-20T19:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=26614"},"modified":"2023-05-20T12:34:50","modified_gmt":"2023-05-20T19:34:50","slug":"chester-hartman-s-f-planner-and-activist-who-fought-redevelopment-dies-at-87","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2023\/05\/20\/chester-hartman-s-f-planner-and-activist-who-fought-redevelopment-dies-at-87\/","title":{"rendered":"Chester Hartman, S.F. planner and activist who fought redevelopment, dies at 87"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sam Whiting<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

May 18, 2023Updated: May 20, 2023 12:08\u00a0a.m. (SFChronicle.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Chester
Chester Hartman, shown in his home office in Noe Valley in the 1970s, had ideas on city planning, redevelopment and rent control that are still relevant today.Provided Rachelle Resnick<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When urban planner Chester Hartman was moving back to San Francisco after 30 years on the East Coast, he wandered into the Noe Valley branch library and there was his book, \u201cCity for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco,\u201d on display as a young librarian\u2019s pick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It dawned on Hartman that his once-radical ideas on city planning, redevelopment and rent control were still relevant as he finalized his move back to the Elizabeth Street Victorian he\u2019d hung onto for all these years. On a typewriter at the kitchen table, he\u2019d tapped out \u201cYerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco,\u201d published in 1974, \u201cDisplacement: How to Fight It,\u201d published in 1982, and a half-dozen other academic treatises in-between. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hartman returned to San Francisco full time in 2017 and spent his remaining years climbing the hills and walking the flats of the city to see whether his analysis of housing trends and tenants rights had held true. Hartman \u2014 who believed urban planning must protect the individuals whose homes and neighborhoods are at risk of being bulldozed in the name of economic progress \u2014 died in his Noe Valley home on May 9, said his wife, Amy Fine, a retired health policy consultant. The cause of death was complications of dementia, a condition he had fought to co-edit his final book, an anthology titled \u201cFrom Foreclosure to Fair Lending,\u201d published in 2013. Hartman was 87.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSince the 1960s, no one played a greater role in promoting progressive urban planning and housing policy than Chester,\u201d Peter Dreier, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, wrote in a tribute titled \u201cA Mensch With a Mission,\u201d which was published in the newsletter Progressive City. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor five decades, Chester was on the front lines of the key battles: fighting top-down urban renewal, challenging displacement from gentrification, organizing for rent control, pushing for decent affordable housing, advocating for racial justice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He helped devise legal strategies for resisting the demolition of  single-room-occupancy residences, most prominently the International Hotel. In the late 1970s, he co-chaired San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, a broad coalition that put a rent control measure on the ballot. It failed, but it set the stage for the rent control law that was finally approved by voters. From the same kitchen table where he wrote his books, he started the Planners Network, an advocacy group that served as a counterweight to conventional planning and is now a national organization with chapters across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChet was full of energy and cared deeply about social justice and people not being forced out of their neighborhoods,\u201d said Fine, who met her future husband when they had adjacent offices in Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley, where Hartman taught graduate courses in the Department of City and Regional Planning. \u201cHe came of age during the time of urban renewal, and he saw the devastating impact it had on already-marginalized communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chester Warren Hartman was born April 12, 1936, in the Bronx, N.Y., where he grew up. His extended family grew up in the same apartment building, and the elder generation only spoke Yiddish. His father, Irving Hartman, was an importer of straw hats and baskets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he reached school age, Chester was enrolled at Walden School, a private school with a progressive philosophy and he rode the subway down to Manhattan in the company of his older sister. Walden took him all the way through high school, which he graduated in 1953.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He enrolled directly in Harvard University and studied Germanic languages and literature. Steered toward urban planning by a family connection, he went directly to the doctorate program in urban planning and would have sailed through if he hadn\u2019t been drafted into the Army during the Berlin missile crisis. This necessitated six months of active duty, followed by five years in the Army Reserve as a combat engineer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in uniform he was a soft touch for a radical cause. As Dreier noted in his eulogy, Hartman was once on leave in Memphis when he came upon a group protesting segregation of a Woolworth lunch counter. He grabbed a picket and joined the march in his Army uniform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wrote his doctoral dissertation on displacement in the impoverished West End of Boston, and after receiving his doctorate in 1967 he accepted a teaching position in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Hartman was also active in the antiwar and tenant rights movements, beliefs that bled into his teaching. This apparently irritated the pro-development administration because he was denied reappointment in 1969. In response, there were editorials in the Harvard Crimson on his behalf and buttons that stated simply \u201cChester,\u201d as if he were running for office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of the student activists were up in arms,\u201d said John Mollenkopf, who was in the Harvard doctoral program in political science at the time. \u201cChester had a thorough and well-grounded critique of urban planning as being technocratic and in service of market forces and not people.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was bounced out of Harvard, Hartman was working on Urban Planning Aid, which he had co-founded as one of the first community-based advocacy planning organizations in the country, according to Mollenkopf, now a distinguished professor of political science and sociology at City University of New York.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One organization influenced by Urban Planning Aid was the National Housing Law Project, which was affiliated with the law school at UC Berkeley, which Hartman joined as a senior researcher when he moved west in 1970.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hartman was \u201cfull immersion in everything he did,\u201d said his wife, and this included the regular pickup basketball game where he was known as Chet the Jet. The games were coed, but that did not dampen his competitiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChet was not tall, but he was quick and had an accurate shot,\u201d recalled Mollenkopf, who played in the games. \u201cThe players were all people who cared about neighborhood activism, and Chester was universally admired.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hartman often aired his views on planning and development in Common Sense, a socialist newspaper published in San Francisco.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe way Chester thought about urban planning South of Market and on the Embarcadero was really amazing,\u201d said Rachelle Resnick, a Common Sense photographer who became a library administrator in Alameda.  \u201cHe was an original thinker in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1981, Hartman was recruited to be a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina. It was only supposed to be a one year deal so they rented the house on Elizabeth Street and moved to Chapel Hill en route to Washington, D.C. where one year turned into 37. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For 25 years he served as founding executive director, or research director at the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, an independent civil rights law and policy organization. They found a block in the Chevy Chase neighborhood that was just like Elizabeth Street, and their sons Jeremy and Ben grew up there. Hartman also wrote his memoir, \u201cBetween Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades of Radical Urban Planning,\u201d while in Washington. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was published in 2002, the same year he published \u201cCity for Sale,\u201d an updated edition of  \u201cThe Transformation of San Francisco.\u201d This was the book he found on display in the Noe Valley library 15 years later. He also found its cover image of the Transamerica Pyramid memorialized in the Clarion Alley Mural Project, on one of his city walks with his wife, Amy Fine.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course, he was pleased to see his book there,\u201d she said, \u201cbut even more than that he was excited to see public artwork that tells the story of the people living in that community.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A memorial service is pending. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reach Sam Whiting: swhiting@sfchronicle.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written By Sam Whiting<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam Whiting has been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. He started as a feature writer in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen’s column, and has written about people ever since. He is a general assignment reporter with a focus on writing feature-length obituaries. He lives in San Francisco and walks three miles a day on the steep city streets.VIEW COMMENTS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"San<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\"HEARST\u00a92023 Hearst Communications, Inc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sam Whiting May 18, 2023Updated: May 20, 2023 12:08\u00a0a.m. (SFChronicle.com) When urban planner Chester Hartman was moving back to San Francisco after 30 years on the East Coast, he wandered into the Noe Valley branch library and there was his book, \u201cCity for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco,\u201d on display… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[615],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26615,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26614\/revisions\/26615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}