Book

City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco

Authors:
... San Francisco and Melbourne share similar patterns of urban development and industrial land use planning aligned with a "post-industrial" vision of the city (Grodach & Gibson, 2019). In response to deep recessions and waning manufacturing employment in the second half of the 20 th century, both cities turned to real estate capital as a fix for economic decline (Hartman, 2002;McLoughlin, 1992). Since then, planning authorities have rezoned a considerable amount of central industrial land for higher-return housing, office, and consumption space. ...
... Since then, planning authorities have rezoned a considerable amount of central industrial land for higher-return housing, office, and consumption space. As early as the 1960s, San Francisco's central industrial zones were subject to large-scale redevelopment to expand the downtown (Hartman, 2002). With the rise of the dot-com economy in the mid-1990s, this shifted to small-scale office and live-work developments enabled by ambiguously defined and poorly enforced zoning regulations (Solnit & Schwartzenberg, 2000). ...
Article
Full-text available
Recent urban scholarship shows how zoning and real estate dynamics shape ongoing processes of gentrification and deindustrialization. While studies demonstrate the impact of planning and property market pressures on the arts, less research has examined their effect on urban manufacturers in gentrifying industrial districts. Given the differential impact of zoning and real estate pressures, our research focuses specifically on how ‘cultural manufacturers’ negotiate changing land use patterns in gentrifying urban industrial areas in San Francisco and Melbourne. Our findings show how cultural manufacturers develop flexible workspace arrangements, business models and professional networks to negotiate urban restructuring and avoid displacement. Though innovative, these survival strategies provide limited ability to navigate structural barriers. Here, the presence of intermediary organizations can help coordinate a strategic response to industrial gentrification and indifferent planning policy. In our research we highlight the everyday practices of adaptation and collective action in an under‐researched cultural sector to provide a counterweight to macro‐scale transitional narratives. While cities have deindustrialized owing to technological and competitive pressures, to focus exclusively on this misses a range of resilience practices that have sustained manufacturers in restructuring cities.
... We selected San Francisco as a case study due to the persistent conflict around rezoning industrial lands for higher-value uses and the associated tension between preserving employment lands and creating affordable housing. The city's limited land area and lower value industrial zones near Downtown and the gentrifying Eastern Neighborhoods have made these zones a target for redevelopment for decades ( Fig. 1) (Hartman, 2002). This become particularly acute from the 1990s as the tech economy expanded (Solnit & Schwartzenberg, 2002;Stehlin, 2016). ...
... From the 1960s, central industrial areas were targeted by the city's growth machine for large-scale redevelopment to expand the downtown (DeLeon, 1992;Hartman, 2002). By the mid-1990s, this shifted to smaller-scale residential and office projects under a soaring dot-com economy driven by the growth of new internet-related firms (Solnit & Schwartzenberg, 2002). ...
Article
Full-text available
Problem, research strategy, and findings Manufacturing and industrial activity can contribute to sustainable economic development, but this potential is lost to urban industrial rezonings. This is particularly the case in strong market cities where pressures to develop higher-value residential and office space are strong. The literature has documented the industrial displacement process but has yet to probe the institutional factors behind industrial rezonings or the conditions that may catalyze supportive industrial land use policy. I contribute to filling this research gap by exploring how institutional dynamics shape industrial land use planning in San Francisco (CA). Drawing on interviews and document analysis, I show how formal governance institutions, locally embedded intermediary organizations, and policy imaginaries shape policy change. Despite success in redefining and promoting the value of urban industrial lands, ongoing pressures remain with balancing competing land use agendas and priorities. Takeaway for practice This research highlights the tradeoffs and pressures involved in creating urban industrial land use policy in high-cost cities. The case draws attention to the importance of considering how the local institutional context for policymaking intersects with industry and urban development dynamics rather than assuming market logic alone dictates land use. Planners can better balance competing land use agendas and achieve positive outcomes when they focus on controlling policy narratives and work with intermediary organizations that possess specialist knowledge and connections.
... Left/progressives in San Francisco and Copenhagen oppose the neoliberal agenda of real estate developers, thereby making land use and transportation policy central to left/progressive politics. Historically, left/progressives battled developers over urban renewal in San Francisco's Western Addition and South of Market neighborhoods and were assertive in political debates over growth control and high-rises office buildings in downtown San Francisco (De Leon 1992;Hartman 2002). Beyond San Francisco, the Bay Area region had an environmental movement willing to challenge and critique capitalism and especially real estate developers (Walker 2007(Walker , 2018. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
In this chapter I consider how local politics shapes policies that promote or impede green mobility, including walking, cycling, and public transport organized around compact, high-density, car free and car-lite urbanism. I refer to municipal or city-scale politics and examine two aspirational green mobility cities, Copenhagen, Denmark, and San Francisco, California to help understand why green mobility transitions have been slow to realize in even the most promising localities. Despite different governing structures and histories, the politics of green mobility in both cities is remarkably similar. In both cities there are three broad factions demonstrating ideological difference over green mobility. (1) A left/progressive political faction promotes green mobility as a public good that government should actively promote. (2) A neoliberal faction, sometimes labeled “moderate” in both San Francisco and Copenhagen, also promotes green mobility, but with a market-oriented, deregulated hue, especially on housing and real estate. (3) A right/conservative politics of mobility expresses skepticism towards green mobility transitions and seeks to preserve car access to city spaces. I highlight how each mobility ideology is operationalized through debates over green mobility, including housing, in San Francisco and Copenhagen during 2022, two years after the Covid-19 Pandemic first locked-down cities.
... Within the United States resistance to urban renewal and school segregation along with calls for reworking social welfare programs (Piven & Cloward, 1977) precipitated the call for community control (Altshuler, 1970)-in other words, a demand that community members rather than professionals determine the policies that affected them. In New York parents of children of color demanded community school boards (Fainstein & Fainstein, 1974); in San Francisco evictions from single-room-occupancy hotels resulted in passionate resistance and similar demands for community power (Hartman, 2002). European social movements likewise reacted against bureaucratic authority (Clarke & Mayer, 1986;Donzelot, 1979). ...
... Described as such, this type of political action offers a stark contrast with practices of local politics in San Francisco, where interest groups are organized into "single-issue lobby groups" that advocate for the issues they care for. This mode of organization has resulted in coalitions that might be unexpected, as, for instance, pro-environment and pro-business groups become allies for the sake of limiting the development of high-rise buildings (Hartman 2002). ...
... Between 2011 and 2017, the city added 175,000 jobs but built fewer than 20,000 housing units (Graham 2018). Most new units were in the form of luxury high-rise development targeting upper-income residents rather than serving the city's poor (Hartman and Carnochan 2002;Stein 2019). Hence gentrification and displacement of low socio-economic communities ensued, and San Francisco's socio-economic mix was undermined (Beitel 2012). ...
Article
Full-text available
We explore the participation levels of NIMBY (‘Not In My Backyard’) proponents versus other voices at public hearings San Francisco, a city with an exceptionally dire housing crisis. Once very diverse, radical, and bohemian, San Francisco has become the most expensive city in the US, which caters to a wealthy minority—heavily connected to the tech industries of the neighboring Silicon Valley. Taking a qualitative approach, we review videos of planning commission meetings between 2018 and 2019 in San Francisco in which housing development proposals are considered. We find that NIMBYism continues to dominate the dialog at public hearings on development proposals. Planning meetings appear to be dominated by older, white, and financially stable residents, and this is a major (though not sole) barrier to the city’s social mix.
... federal policy (primarily HOPE VI) and the specific failure to replace housing one-for-one and ensure resident returns (Hartman, 2002). As a consequence, many residents in this community were forced to leave the city as part of a larger outmigration of mostly ...
Article
Full-text available
Low-income communities of color experience significant political, economic, and health inequities and, not unrelatedly, are disproportionately exposed to violent crime than are residents of higher income communities. In an effort to mitigate concentrations of poverty and crime, governmental agencies have partnered with affordable housing developers to redevelop public housing “projects” into mixed-income communities and to do so within a “trauma-informed” framework. The current study analyzes how residents have historically and contemporaneously negotiated, endured, and resisted structural and interpersonal violence in 2 long-standing, predominately African American, public housing communities undergoing a public–private housing redevelopment initiative. Interviews with 44 adult public housing residents (age range = 18–75 years; 82% African American/Black) were conducted during a 2-year period while residents’ homes were being demolished and rebuilt into mixed-income communities. Analysis of in-depth interviews used constructivist grounded theory principles to reveal a common theme and basic social process of the ongoing formation of homeplace, with subthemes focusing on the ways homeplace emerges through shared lineage, knowing and caring practices; how homeplace is maintained through networks of protection in unsafe contexts; how homeplace is disrupted as a result of redevelopment activities; and the reclamation of homeplace during redevelopment in the service of hope and healing. These findings offer a nuanced view of resident’s lived experiences of place-based trauma and collective resistance and resilience, while also highlighting the place-specific ways in which redevelopment unsettles deeply rooted sociocultural configurations of home and community.
... According to San Francisco Homeless Count & Survey Comprehensive Report 2019, there are around 8000 people experiencing homelessnessin the city of the population of roughly 800,000. Critics argue that the crisis was fomented over a century as the city has favored interests of developers and property owners rather than public housing(Baranski, 2019;Hartman and Carnochan, 2002). Their analyses are consistent with earlier criticism of San Francisco's urban development steeply inclined for private interests:Jackson (1987) had pointed out that San Francisco's citywide zoning policy introduced in 1920 in a reaction to the 1906 earthquake "was a device to keep poor people and obnoxious industries out of affluent areas… They sought minimum lot and setback requirements to ensure that only members of acceptable social classes could settle in their privileged sanctuaries". ...
Thesis
Full-text available
My doctoral dissertation accepted by the University of Tokyo in February 2020 with Graduate School of Frontier Sciences Dean's Award for Outstanding Achievement.
... war California Community Redevelopment Act of 1945, and a San Francisco Planning Commission act of 1947 (Hartman 2002;Thompson 2016). In short, over 104 square blocks of homes, small businesses, venues, and churches were destroyed, including over 2,500 historic Victorian houses. ...
Article
Full-text available
https://www.radicalhistoryreview.org/abusablepast/?p=3191
... It is true that slow-and anti-growth Bay Area histories have contributed to structures of racialized exurbanization by opposing the earlier suburban spatial fix and by attaching to a liberal imaginary of a perfect, quaint city. However, the movement has been more heterogeneous and nuanced than simply that (Hartman and Carnochan 2002). From opposition to Proposition 13 2 to dissention against lofts of the 1990s and towers of the 2000s, which were developed to meet the housing needs of Silicon Valley venture capital, there have been different iterations of opposition that responded specifically to racialized uneven development (Smith 1982). ...
Article
Full-text available
In this article, we trace the emergence of the false YIMBY/NIMBY dialectic now dominant in Bay Area housing justice discourse, studying its constitution and material effects. Specifically, we investigate how racial capitalism is constitutive of YIMBYism, drawing upon Cedric Robinson’s argument that racialization has always been constitutive of capitalism, and racism is requisite for capitalism’s endurance. We make our argument by drawing upon empirical research conducted by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), a data analysis, oral history, and critical cartography collective of which we are both a part. We also draw upon collaborative research between AEMP and community-based housing rights nonprofits and local housing justice organizing efforts, as well as literary and cultural analysis. Such a methodological approach facilitates the unearthing of the racial logics undergirding YIMBYism, pointing to the need for alternative analytics to theorize and mobilize against heightened forms of racialized dispossession. We begin by outlining San Francisco’s YIMBY and NIMBY genealogies, and then proceed to unravel the basic statistical logic underpinning YIMBYism. In doing so, we introduce an additional analytic that we argue is requisite for deconstructing YIMBY algorithms: aesthetic desires of wealthy newcomers. In doing so, we suggest that the YIMBY “build, baby, build” housing solution fails when architectural and neighborhood fantasies are taken into account. We then study now racialized surveillance informs not only the NIMBY but also the YIMBY gaze, arguing that both camps are ultimately tethered to racial capitalism’s liberal legacies.
... Second, these business interests represent a small group of relatively powerful people trying to convince other merchants and the city to go along with their project (Hartman & Carnochan, 2002). Not even all the local merchants were convinced of the plan: the MSDP asked the city to fine merchants who did not keep their sidewalks clean ("Market Street group," 1975), and asked the city to "clamp down on pornographic bookstores and massage parlors in the Union Square area", wanting to get rid of them before they became a problem ("Merchants call", 1976). ...
Article
Full-text available
After over a decade of reports, designs, and public outreach, the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco was dedicated in 1976. Using historical documents such as government reports, design guidelines, letters, meeting minutes, and newspaper articles from archives, I argue that while the construction of the UN Plaza has failed to completely transform the social and economic life of the area, it succeeds in creating a genuinely public space. The history of the UN Plaza can serve both as a cautionary tale for those interested in changing property values purely through changing design, and as a standard of success in making a space used by a true cross-section of urban society.
Article
This article works with a definition of care that encompasses expansive models of kinship and collective and communal life. Specifically, it explores representations of such interdependencies in the liminal space of the single-room occupancy hotel (SRO) through the literary and artistic creations of two understudied African American artists. Fiction writer Robert Dean Pharr and visual artist Frederick Weston created their work in SROs in New York City beginning in the 1960s, during a time of massive transformation of the city's built environment in the name of urban renewal. Their novels and artwork, respectively, provide some of the only uncovered (to date) literary and cultural representations of New York City's SROs. Pharr's and Weston's works memorialize rituals of survival that center care and interdependencies over and against competitive individualism and a climate of uncare. Further, both explicitly articulate this vision by working with conceptual and material waste. Trash is their literal and metaphoric medium. These artists relied upon what is seen as surplus value by the city. But as Pharr and Weston use it, trash offers a critique of negative assumptions about the lives of SRO residents. The pandemic has shocked us into awareness of our inescapable interdependencies. Therefore, it behooves us to revisit these understudied, early proponents of care—an ethics that today's mutual aid and other liberation movements often center. Pharr's and Weston's documentation and interpretation of care offer us ways to survive within our current environments in crisis without repeating the death-making logic and history of urban renewal.
Article
Full-text available
Scholarship surrounding the Black Power Movement has shifted from the previous century to articulate a new perspective conducive to the realities of the past. Similarly, contemporary scholars have become the conduit of Black Power’s revolutionary violence. This illustrates the Black Power Movement as a more significant movement, leaving behind legacies and beliefs that transpired into modern-day protest tactics. Additionally, Contemporary scholarship, by being aware of historical writing, has expanded the production of history through the lenses of race, gender, class, and power. Such categories have been used as an analytical lens to interpret the past and correctly characterize the legacies of various Black Power Movement organizations and people, unlike in the previous century. Contemporary scholarship has made it clear that the legacy of the Black Power Movement has played a role in constructing modern-day literature and perspectives.
Article
Full-text available
This paper is the introduction of the journal Mondes du Tourisme (21 / 2022), which deals with tourist imaginaries and practices in the USA. We focus here on the economic and territorial impacts of this industry, which weights–stricto sensu–6% of the GDP, and 12% including related activities. Though these imaginaries are conjured up ahead of the tourism practices, they fully partake in the tourist experience, and contribute to the emergence and popularity of top tourist destinations as well as discarding and marginalizing places which come to be seen as places of little interest, even repulsive, whether this assessment is based on facts or not.
Article
Full-text available
Ce texte constitue l’introduction de la revue Mondes du Tourisme (21 / 2022), et porte sur les imaginaires et les pratiques touristiques aux États-Unis. Nous mettons ici l’accent sur les impacts économiques et territoriaux d’une activité qui – stricto sensu – pèse pour quelque 6% du PIB, et quelque 12% en prenant en compte les effets d’entrainement. Situé essentiellement en amont de la pratique touristique elle-même, cet imaginaire participe de l’expérience touristique et contribue tant à l’émergence puis au développement de certaines destinations touristiques que, a contrario, à la mise à l’écart et au délaissement de lieux considérés comme peu intéressants, voire répulsifs, à tort ou à raison.
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the topographical and socio-cultural developments during the Golden Age in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, three Beat Generation epicenters, which determined the deconstruction of traditional norms. Modifications at both city and society levels were represented by the emergence of countercultures, such as the Beat. The visibility received by urban problems, due to the increase in social demonstrations and activism, fostered the formation of a unified front that demanded equality and encouraged social and political movements, such as the Civil Rights and the Second Wave Feminism. The socio-political challenges which the American society was confronted with from the 1950s to the 1970s in these three cities, also reveal a few problems regarding the status of the Beats as well as of minorities in metropolises.
Thesis
This thesis examines the emergence and early history of venture capitalism in the US as a project of capitalization. As theorized in recent literatures on valuation studies and the “new” history of capitalism, capitalization is a collective activity, simultaneously cognitive and socio-technical, of “turning things into assets.” As such, it requires the capitalizing subject to “think as an investor.” The history of capitalism can be reconstructed as a history of successive “regimes of investment,” differing in terms of which assets get capitalized and under what terms. Before stabilizing as a “regime,” however, capitalization begins as a project that is logically and historically anterior to the institutions and technologies that will later hold it together. Rather, projects of capitalization emerge as ways of imagining certain objects as investments, or capital assets. In the early history of venture capital in the US, this imagination was targeted at young, small, technology-based firms. Prospective investors — who eventually became early venture capitalists — deployed a set of informal heuristics adopting some of the categories from the classifications used by the applied financial and managerial disciplines. This thesis follows the sequence of episodes through which these heuristics increasingly became centered on “people,” eventually helping create a novel action under a description and, to put it in Ian Hacking’s terms, a corresponding human kind — technical entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the analytical approach is nominalist: no claim is made as to whether the heuristics deployed by the actors featuring on the pages to follow could serve as a substitute for probabilistic calculation or any other formal calculative device. Yet however “effective” these heuristics might have been, they did have certain dynamic effects, applying and creating new classifications of investment opportunities, companies, and, eventually, people. As a result, in the early 1970s, venture capitalists defined themselves as being engaged in the “people business.” Rather than effectively “turning engineers into entrepreneurs” through coercive or performative effects, they created the category of “technical entrepreneurs” as a human kind, that is, as an open possibility for being a certain kind of person, without necessarily becoming one.
Article
This article examines the opposing sides taken by elderly tenants and labor unions over a major urban renewal project in 1970s San Francisco. Tenant activists sought to block the construction of the Yerba Buena Center and the resulting relocation of thousands of elderly residents of residential hotels. City labor unions lined up in support of the project, even though some of the displaced residents were former industrial workers and union members. By examining the path taken by both sides in the redevelopment struggle, this article grapples with their competing visions of working-class identity and interests. Ultimately, it argues that the position taken by labor leaders narrowed the labor movement’s vision of its constituents and its mission. This narrowed vision led them to view impoverished retired union workers as their opponents rather than as comrades in a shared struggle for working-class dignity and self-determination.
Article
Scholars have long argued that the marginalized racial status shared by ethnic minority groups is a strong incentive for mobilization and coalition building in the United States. However, despite their members’ shared racial status as “Orientals,” different types of housing coalitions were formed in the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver during the 1960s and 1970s. Asian race-based coalitions appeared in San Francisco and Seattle, but not in Vancouver, where a cross-racial coalition was built between the Chinese and southern and eastern Europeans. Drawing on exogenous shocks and process tracing, this article explains how historical legacies—specifically, the political geography of settlement—shaped this divergence. These findings demonstrate how long-term historical analysis offers new insights into the study of minority coalition formation in the United States.
Article
Scholars have recognized how new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have reduced and transformed barriers to producing and circulating community-based media. Yet community media projects tend to apply these technologies within established communities whose histories have been shaped by broader socio-spatial factors. This article draws from critical geography and studies of technology and infrastructure to reconceptualize the problem of media accessibility. Rather than programs for addressing disparities in technology or training, community media projects would benefit from recognizing how significantly their media production activities rely on local communication infrastructures and a collective sense of home. This article uses a case study of public access television in San Francisco to demonstrate how cable and telecommunications policy, urban redevelopment, and community-based media groups co-constitutively determine a scale of political extensibility by providing broader access to decision-making arenas beyond local TV programming.
Article
This article traces the terms and practices underwriting emergent forms of urban government to technical efforts to simulate markets after the Second World War. With an eye toward contemporary techno-utopian schemes and city-building initiatives, I argue that the basis of technological approaches to urban rule today—a conception of cities as complex socio-economic systems amenable to market-driven optimization—was forged by postwar administrators and technicians in response to the vicissitudes of uneven development. To advance this claim, I examine the history of San Francisco’s Community Renewal Program, an early modeling initiative sponsored in the US by the federal government. After situating it in the context of racialized housing markets and policies, I probe the Community Renewal Program’s attempt to build a computer model capable of forecasting the effects of redevelopment on housing markets. Though the Community Renewal Program model ultimately proved unviable as a planning tool, expert appraisals of it at the time simultaneously confirmed the characterization of cities as systems of market signals and affirmed in principle the ability to model and thus manage them given an appropriate technological infrastructure. In this light, current municipal design and development projects premised on interactive and remote-sensing technologies express something of the technocratic politics and optimism of the mid-20th century.
Article
Full-text available
This article considers how private property functions as a technology of racial dispossession upon gentrifying terrains, particularly in San Francisco amidst its ‘Tech Boom 2.0.’ By engaging with collective work produced with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), by reading the film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and by foregrounding critical race studies and urban studies literature, I decenter the novelty of technology in contemporary times. Rather, I consider how property itself has long served as a technology of racial dispossession, constituting a palimpsest for the contemporary gentrifying moment. This, I suggest, is particularly pertinent in theorizing the anti-Blackness of Tech 2.0 urbanism and its new instantiations of property technology, platform real estate, residential surveillance, eviction, and speculation. Thus, I argue that studies of techno-urbanism would do well to consider temporalities outside of their often-reified present. Yet at the same time, I look to community-based projects such as the AEMP which seek to repurpose geospatial technologies and data in order to produce emancipatory propertied futures, for instance, those of expropriation and decommodification. How might studies produced outside of the academy and the real estate industry alike serve as technologies for housing justice? How might practices such as these act as counterweights to property as a technology of racial dispossession?
Thesis
Full-text available
My research analyzes the intersection between culture and activism, through oral histories with participants and organizers of SoMa Pilipinas, the Filipino cultural heritage district in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. I analyzed the impact of the establishment of the Filipino cultural heritage district on the Filipino community in the South of Market neighborhood. I examined what motivates members of this community to be politically active by organizing and attending protests and rallies, speaking at Planning Commission hearings at City Hall, attending planning meetings for SoMa Pilipinas, building relationships across organizations and fields, and providing resources for community members.
Chapter
This chapter reflects on methodological and historiographic insights gained using GIS to reconstruct the impact of urban renewal on “hangouts for homosexuals” on the San Francisco waterfront during the 1950s and early 1960s. These stigmatized places—which entered the popular-spatial imaginary through contemporaneous local press coverage of bar raids—were initially documented as historical sites by LGBTQ community archivists who culled basic information about the physical location, approximate years of operation, and business type from oral history transcripts, newspaper clippings, early gay bar directories, and nightlife columns in the city’s first gay periodicals dating to the early 1960s. In a collaborative project with the GLBT Historical Society of Northern California, the author mapped these and similar sites in order to “sketch out” temporal and spatial changes in the sexual geography of the city. The pragmatic and technical challenges of mapping the waterfront sites, in particular, drew the author deep into the urban planning and redevelopment archives of the city in a search for basic information about the physical landscape prior to the transformation of the area from a low-rise, mixed-use, wholesaling, and maritime trade-oriented district into a freeway-oriented gateway to an expanding downtown financial district. Charting this transformation demonstrates the productive possibilities of triangulating a historical-geographic fix on the queer past from personal recollections, contemporaneous published sources, and historical urban planning documents in pursuit of a new spatial imaginary of “gay community” formation. Informed by—but ultimately not constrained by poststructural critiques of GIScience—this chapter illustrates how the representational artifices and associative power of GIS can serve as instruments for unraveling teleological narratives that conflate urban development and modern LGBTQ subjectivities.
Article
Racial/ethnic homophily in sexual partnerships (partners share the same race/ethnicity) has been associated with racial/ethnic disparities in HIV. Structural racism may partly determine racial/ethnic homophily in sexual partnerships. This study estimated associations of racial/ethnic concentration and mortgage discrimination against Black and Latino residents with racial/ethnic homophily in sexual partnerships among 7847 people who inject drugs (PWID) recruited from 19 US cities to participate in CDC’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance. Racial/ethnic concentration was defined by two measures that respectively compared ZIP code-level concentrations of Black residents to White residents and Latino residents to White residents, using the Index of Concentration at the Extremes. Mortgage discrimination was defined by two measures that respectively compared county-level mortgage loan denial among Black applicants to White applicants and mortgage loan denial among Latino applicants to White applicants, with similar characteristics (e.g., income, loan amount). Multilevel logistic regression models were used to estimate associations. Interactions of race/ethnicity with measures of racial/ethnic concentration and mortgage discrimination were added to the final multivariable model and decomposed into race/ethnicity-specific estimates. In the final multivariable model, among Black PWID, living in ZIP codes with higher concentrations of Black vs. White residents and counties with higher mortgage discrimination against Black residents was associated with higher odds of homophily. Living in counties with higher mortgage discrimination against Latino residents was associated with lower odds of homophily among Black PWID. Among Latino PWID, living in ZIP codes with higher concentrations of Latino vs. White residents and counties with higher mortgage discrimination against Latino residents was associated with higher odds of homophily. Living in counties with higher mortgage discrimination against Black residents was associated with lower odds of homophily among Latino PWID. Among White PWID, living in ZIP codes with higher concentrations of Black or Latino residents vs. White residents was associated with lower odds of homophily, but living in counties with higher mortgage discrimination against Black residents was associated with higher odds of homophily. Racial/ethnic segregation may partly drive same race/ethnicity sexual partnering among PWID. Future empirical evidence linking these associations directly or indirectly (via place-level mediators) to HIV/STI transmission will determine how eliminating discriminatory housing policies impact HIV/STI transmission.
Chapter
As “smart cities” or “eco cities” proliferate, innovation has become a central component of urban policy. This chapter discusses the politics of innovation in urban contexts by focusing on city experiment, that is, experiments conducted in the city and with the city. The analysis of city experiments is a path for displacing oppositions between (1) the stability of urban space and the “disruption” introduced by innovation, (2) “technical” innovation and “social” innovation, (3) the local life of cities and the global flows of technologies and capital. Instead, one can contrast various propositions for organizing innovation in the city. The example of innovation policy in San Francisco and its associated controversies shows that these propositions offer various imaginations of the beneficiaries of innovation, and eventually different understandings of urban democracy. In particular, the imagination of the city as a place for real-time experiments and the increasing role of global investment can be contrasted with other propositions, which make collective life the means and ends of urban innovation.
Article
Through a review of Richard Rorty’s philosophical work and critiques of original planning documents from the Urban Renewal era, this paper makes three points. First, a pragmatist epistemological approach offers a better foundation for planning than the current communicative paradigm. Second, updating planning’s Enlightenment roots with Rorty’s view of moral progress as a process of “redescription” can help reduce the anxiety planners feel in putting forward bold visions. Last, Rorty’s concept of the liberal ironist provides an interesting model for planners that sees equal value in the contributions made by both the Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Moses’s of the field.
Chapter
The purpose of the chapter is to discuss how design can be used to mitigate segregation and what might Dr. King’s beloved community look like in the twenty-first century. The research of Lynch (1960), Jacobs (1961), Arnstein (1969), Farr (2007), Soja (2010), Fainstein (2011) and Gehl (2013) informed this focus group agenda. While the original intent for the conversation was to explore ways in which integration could be achieved, the participants expanded the dialogue by identifying the characteristics of an ideal community regardless of whether it was integrated or not. Three main themes emerged in the conversation. One, design is a reflection of policy. Two, design should promote economic diversity. Three, design should ultimately lead to equal opportunity. In the accompanying essay, “Mitigation Strategies: What My Practice Has Taught Me about Rebuilding Communities,” Michael Willis draws upon his career as an architect to identify the elements of an ideal community. For him, what poor African Americans want is a quality place to live which they have been deprived of. Unlike the massive public housing projects of the 1950s and 1960s that were situated inside desolate super blocks, Willis maintains that low-income African Americans want communities built at a human scale, walkable, with access to amenities, green spaces and transportation.
Article
Comparing the spatial dimensions of urban struggles. A critical analysis of mobilizations against gentrification in San Francisco (United-States), and against real estate predatory practices in Valparaíso (Chile) This paper intends to shed light on the theoretical and practical ways in which the comparison of urban struggles in distinct contexts can be conducted, in this case San Francisco (United-States) and Valparaíso (Chile). These urban struggles, which encompass distinct subjects and repertories of contention, are analyzed through the lens of social geography and sociology, to highlight their spatial dimensions. As a first step, the conditions for making the comparison possible lay within the researcher’s reflexivity and engagement while doing fieldwork. This contribution then analyses the subjects at the centre of struggles and the way that contexts shape them. It emphasizes the consistency of anti-dispossession motives in the actors’ discourses and actions. Finally, while going deeper into the cases studied, spatial controversies appear as both an analytical concept and a practical way to elaborate on the actors’ positions in relation to the spatial dimension of the subjects of contestation. In the controversies, people’s mobilization around the systems of municipal regulation stands out as particularly interesting cases of territorialization processes.
Article
Nationwide, place-based initiatives aiming to improve school and community outcomes are in the midst of neighborhood demographic change. We explore this issue through a case study of the Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN). We discuss how the social and educational context of MPN poses several challenges to implementing Promise Neighborhood reforms. Drawing on enrollment and residence data from San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) and the U.S. Census, we show that the MPN service population extends beyond the geographic boundaries of the neighborhood and includes two primary groups of increasingly unequal social and economic status: working-class Latinos and high-income Whites. We situate these findings within the context of SFUSD’s school assignment policy and gentrification in the Mission neighborhood. We conclude that complexities in the MPN service population have significant implications for MPN service provision and the definition of a “neighborhood community.” These implications apply to other place-based initiatives experiencing neighborhood demographic change.
Article
Full-text available
Public or state housing has ordinarily been viewed as an impediment to the forces of gentrification, as private property owners or developers are limited in their ability to purchase, renovate or redevelop houses in otherwise desirable areas. As a result, neighbourhoods with significant proportions of state-housing and low-income residents have often been able to establish unique identity and character, sense of place and belonging and strong social support networks. This article examines changes underway in Glen Innes, a central suburb of New Zealand's largest city, Auckland. Here, established norms around community and urban life are being rapidly and radically reworked through a wave of state-led gentrification. We focus on experiences of displacement, the disruption of long-established community forms, and the reconfiguration of urban life. Our particular contribution is to consider the speed and trauma of gentrification when the state is involved, the slippage between rhetoric and reality on the ground, and the challenges of researchers seeking to trace the impacts of gentrification in the lives of those who have been displaced.
Article
In 1985, San Francisco adopted a wind comfort standard in its Downtown Area Plan in response to increasing concerns about the city’s downtown public open spaces becoming excessively windy. After 30 years of implementation, this study revisits the standard and examines its effectiveness in promoting pedestrian comfort. Seven hundred one valid samples were collected from 6 months of field study, which combined surveying pedestrians and on-site collection of microclimate data. Statistical analysis and an assessment using the physiological equivalent temperature show that 11 mph (4.92 m/s), the comfort criterion in places for walking, performs as an effective determinant of outdoor comfort in San Francisco. This study sheds light on climate-resilience of cities, as they have become key urban challenges today.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.