San Francisco’s proposed reparations plan, which would give $5 million to each eligible Black person, will be publicly discussed for the first time at the city’s Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday afternoon.
Details: To be eligible for reparations, a person would need to be at least 18 years old and have identified as Black or African American on public documents for at least 10 years.
- They may also need to prove they were born in San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and lived in the city for at least 13 years, and were displaced, or a descendant of someone displaced, from the city by urban renewal.
State of play: The city is trying to make amends for previous actions that ultimately led to a lack of opportunities and displacement of a portion of the city’s Black population.
- San Francisco’s urban renewal of the 1960s and ’70s, for example, decimated the Black population in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, an area once known as the Harlem of the West due to its bustling jazz scene.
- The city’s redevelopment of the Fillmore shuttered 883 businesses, displaced 4,729 households and damaged the lives of nearly 20,000 people, according to the reparations committee.
- Black people made up 13.4% of the city’s population in 1970, according to U.S. Census data. That has dropped to just 5.7%, according to 2021 Census population estimates.