The Loneliness of Being Black in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

The Loneliness of Being Black in San Francisco

nytimes.com

35 pointsandyraskin72 comments

As a black San Franciscan I can say it's palpable.

Remarkable article revealing that there was once Black History in San Francisco, which you'd never know walking around.

It's remarkable that there was once Native American history in this country, which you'd never know traveling around.

Gentrification is not integration... Integration would have bi-directional flows of color between neighborhoods. This is far more akin to colonization.

I live in the neighborhood that is profiled in the article. I am not surprised that blacks are leaving. I want to leave myself.

The Fillmore has a long history of changing ethnic hands. Once upon a time it was a Japanese neighborhood. Once upon a time it was a Jewish neighborhood.

When people discuss the Fillmore and its history, that discussion tends to start at roughly 1945-1950 when there's just suddenly a black neighborhood. Like maybe it materialized out of the aether as a jazz center or something.

Are you saying that was a result of the Japanese internment camps?

The Fillmore became a black neighborhood directly after the Japanese population was interned. I think it's reasonable to think there's a link there.

I'd love to learn more.

This history of the Western Addition (including the Fillmore) — http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Western_Addition:_A_B... — suggests that three factors contributed to the growth of its black community after WWII:

(1) a sudden rise in SF's black population in the aftermath of WWII (from ~5K residents in 1940 to 43.5K in 1950)

(2) the Western Addition's already diverse racial makeup (relative to other neighborhoods at the time)

(3) the internment of Japanese Americans, which removed ~5K residents from the Western Addition virtually overnight.

Wikipedia is actually a pretty good jumping-off point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fillmore_District,_San_Francis...

This country is like one crime after another . . .

But I guess the bright side is what a host to diversity a city can be.

Sometimes. The changeover from a Jewish neighborhood to a Japanese one was peaceful. The Fillmore has a more colorful history than many parts of SF.

Speaking of which, where'd the Jews move to? The SF jewish community feels a little sparse today. Maybe that's because SF Jews are strongly secular?

It moved a bit north into Pac Heights. There's still a significant community center there. As Jewish acceptance increased, the Jewish community of SF has dispersed.

What makes you want to leave?

Excessive human feces on sidewalks. Mentally ill on every block. People selling drugs up and down the street. Loud music played on the sidewalk into the evening. Very run-down grocery and convenience stores in the area. Drunks on the corners at night.

And that's just the neighborhood. You still have the generally crappy things about SF like how awful June/July are (cloudy, windy, and cold), how expensive it is, the fog.

Oh, I forgot to mention how drugs are sold all day long ("The Wire", corner-boy style) just catty-corner to the police station next to the McDonalds. Two people were shot there in January on the same day. Cars parked in the street are constantly broken into. Despite all the crime, I never see cops.

Yep. I lived a couple months in Tenderloin (little Saigon, to be specific) and the stories I could tell you. It wasn't uncommon to see people lighting up crack pipes in broad daylight, but I never did see anyone shooting H out in the open.

There was a closed building across the street, and most days a fence would sell stuff on a blanket in front it, with stuff they stole out of cars - or at least I assumed that's where he got them, because it was always CDs, travel mugs, umbrellas, jackets, etc. They're even on Google street view: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7835518,-122.4176013,3a,15.7...

I never had a problem with crime, probably because I'm a big guy and I never walked around after dark, but I knew people who were mugged nearby. I was paying $1350/mo for a (nice) room with a private bathroom.

Whoa. What neighborhood do you live in? The article mentions a couple. That doesn't sound like San Francisco.

It sounds every bit like San Francisco to me. Even nice neighborhoods have problems with car break-ins.

I've been here over 5 years and can concur the Mission is a hotspot for broken car windows, stolen bikes, and muggings.

Clearly you haven't walked around SF very much... I've only been twice and I see it everywhere. The Tenderloin is probably the most concentrated.

I'm actually quite a walker and there are only a few neighborhoods that seem bad, the Tenderloin is one of them. Maybe it's cuz I'm from Detroit.

Really? Reading that description, I know it's the Fillmore.

Really? The Fillmore always struck me as a really nice place.

Go south of Turk along Fillmore sometime. At night. You'll see the McD's and the police station mentioned.

I went out to SF for a vacation and to check out if it made sense to move out there for job prospects, but the homelessness absolutely ruined it for me. Nobody ever seems to talk about it on HN for some reason, but it was the absolute most glaring part about SF.

Within walking distance of some pretty big named companies, I felt less safe than I do walking in Chicago. To make things even odder, it was in an area with fancy restaurants and folks in suits/dresses walking around. It was truly surreal. How can people have such strong blinders to those things?

It's hard to talk abot homelessness wihtout getting lampooned.

Most people choose to ignore it, thinking it's doing the homeless a favor.

In reality SF is actually very generous to the homeless, which is why they are here. Many, if not most, beg for money and can make quite a bit which is used to buy drugs (food is not hard to find in SF, for free).

I walk down a part of the civic center area almost daily and the drug dealer on one of the streets (who is there every day, same guy) is always doing business with the local homeless.

The vast majority of residents in SF want something done about the homeless situation, and they don't mind if the gloves come off. A couple of months ago _all_ the city's major newspapers coordinated a campaign to discuss and highlight the issue because they felt city officials weren't putting enough effort into devising solutions.

The root of the problem is IMO 1) a small minority of people who actively try to defend the homeless' "right" to live on the streets, and 2) who have concocted a ridiculous narrative about the homeless problem being caused by the so-called housing crisis. Because of #2, any effort by moderate politicians to enforce laws related to vagrancy and generally force homeless off the street and into assistance programs is cast by critics as being anti-housing.

If you want things to change, don't vote for politicians like Jane Kim, Aaron Peskin, and other figures who [usually opportunistically] perpetuate this braindead narrative. Donate as much money as you can to more moderate candidates.

For example, when Mayor Ed Lee wanted to break up an enormous homeless encampment, Jane Kim claimed the mayor was rousting homeless children, with the implication that their families had been kicked out of their apartments and rather than trying to re-house them the mayor was punishing them. It was totally opportunistic--Kim was just trying to get free airtime to improve her name recognition for her Senate bid. It was also 100% BS.

To paraphrase The Onion,

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only City Where This Regularly Happens

I take it you live towards the Western Addition? That's something that's always seemed weird about SF to me -- there are all these little pockets where it's night and day difference a block or two apart.

Now, yes. I live in Western Addition. Before I lived in the nice part of Soma by the Ballpark. There we still had the mentally ill and feces to some degree, but not the rest.

It's like that in Detroit too. Robber Baron mansions surrounded by open fields and burnt-out shells of houses with bodies in them.

While the articles that I've been seeing on HN lately aren't specifically uplifting, I /am/ glad to be (seemingly) seeing more related to the black experience.

I'm surprised there wasn't an influx after the Civil War. The article sort of glosses over that period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodusters

Most blacks who migrated to cities from the south after the war were met with at the very least skepticism, though usually outright racism and violence.

Between the beginning of this general 'migration' to urban areas and the MLK riots, white people became increasingly 'motivated' to move to the suburbs, which led over time to the urban centers deteriorating until they were completely unstable, usually necessitating rescue by the state [affordable housing, food stamps, etc]. Eventually a trickle of white development/business starts the reverse process of gentrification.

I am not aware of a single case of increase in urban development having a net benefit to the black community, mainly because they are almost never the target demographic for that development.

When people complain about shitty urban areas full of blight, homeless, mentally unstable, crime, etc, they're basically complaining about the state of the urban center which white people created when they moved out decades ago.

Wait, explain to me slowly how it's white-people's fault that an area deteriorates after they move out. Generally the absence of a person means they relinquish responsibility for what goes on in a place that they aren't occupying, at least in my fragile, tiny mind.

Dang, posted that to the wrong comment.

White people push back against black kids going to their schools, businesses, etc. Few good jobs for blacks. Eventually white people move out, bringing their businesses, and revenue, with them to the suburbs. Money doesn't come into the city, no new businesses are developed, racially-divisive restrictions from banks make things worse. Crime and drug abuse increases, partly due to the squalid nature of the resulting segregation and lack of economic stability. Riots in a reaction to all this and the biggest civil rights leader of the century dying verifies white people's worst fears and the white flight moves into overdrive.

With record low access to education, jobs, housing, record high drug use/crime, and racist authority figures/policies, what was a not very good situation becomes a terrible situation, and literally the whole society is engineered to fail, with no recourse for improvement.

Read my other comment below for reading material.

So what should white people have done in the past/what should they do in the future, to not be guilty of these terrible social sins that appear to be their fault no matter what actions they take?

There's a lot more going on than that. If that's not obvious then I'd expect its because you haven't investigated the issues. Black communities and neighborhoods are specifically targeted for destruction and/or acquisition. Black families and communities have born the brunt of the War on Drugs. A community is not going to do well when a large swath of its fathers are rounded up, caged, and permanently barred from living a life of dignity.

Would you allow black people at least some moral agency? Certainly you'd say that blacks who avoid crime and instead thrive in the legit economy are responsible to at least some degree for their own success? Why would you not then hold those who become criminals equally responsible for their failure?

The issue isn't moral agency.

Being a moral agent doesn't stop you from being unfairly accosted—or killed—by law enforcement.

Being a moral agent doesn't mean you don't get death threats for trying to enroll your children in better public schools.

Being a black moral agent is actually likely to get you in more trouble— not less.

Blacks seeking there own betterment find roadblocks in every direction each step of the way.

Excuse me? I grew up in Detroit and Flint, and come from a broken family. I earned my way up and out of those particular hell-holes, making my way to the East Coast and lately the West. Please, do tell me more about how I haven't investigated the issues of Black families and communities being targeted for acquisition, etc.

Have you familiarized yourself with the psychology of trauma and the praxis of healing? Are you a descendant of Black slaves?

Blacks who fled the South forming enclaves in the Cities of America were refugees. But unlike other refugees they never received the post-trauma treatment we give other survivors.

They also encountered crushing discrimination wherever they went. They were shut-out of opportunities to improve their lives and the lives of their families, the effects of enslavement, slavery, terrorism, segregation, and discrimination do not disappear because a new law is passed making those things illegal. They reverberate across generations.

No, and yes. If I leave a location, I am so incredibly not-responsible for what happens to it after I'm gone. If you think otherwise, I suspect you have some cause-and-effect bits in your brain that are irreparably damaged.

I think you're misunderstanding. No one is saying that "you are responsible for what has happened in Flint and Detroit."

We are saying that racism is one of the driving engines—if not THE driving engine—of these processes.

EDIT: And being blind to that perpetuates the problems!

G-G-GP said "When people complain about shitty urban areas ... they're basically complaining about the state of the urban center which white people created when they moved out decades ago."

I said, "Tell me how a person's absence means they're at fault for what happens to a place after they're gone". I've achieved some level of economic success since I moved myself out of 'the hood'. The implication I'm picking up on is that the blight that has continued/worsened since I've left is somehow, inexplicably, my fault for not sticking around. Please, explain how that is or is not the case.

> The implication I'm picking up on is that the blight that has continued/worsened since I've left is somehow, inexplicably, my fault for not sticking around. Please, explain how that is or is not the case.

IMO comes down to the economics of how a city operates. The city needs money to provide services. The people need money to afford to patronize businesses, keep up their properties, and keep their city government afloat. Businesses need paying customers, and employees.

If you don't stick around, you can't contribute to any of that, other than if you were perhaps a business owner. But then if the people working there aren't from there, or if the owner moves the money out of the city, it can still provide no net benefit.

Try not to take it personally, but yes, moving away does not help and may even do the opposite of helping. But maybe if you stayed you would have ended up worse off and dragged the whole thing down? Can't say for sure, but it is obvious, and widely accepted by academics, that in the general case, white people leaving hurt black communities more than it helped.

There's also the social aspect of which people that make up the community to consider. The less homogeneous the community, the more difficult it is for people to empathize with and help people different than them, which perpetuates systemic racism and inequality, etc.

So by that logic, my choice of not-moving to Atlanta, Gary, or any other economically-disadvantaged area contributes to those places' continued slide into a lawless hellhole too, right?

No, because that is not logic.

The main thing you're doing to cause a slide into a "lawless hellhole" is continuing to make pointed statements with no evidence in order to elucidate your world view that you have no responsibility whatsoever for abandoning impoverished communities. You do have a responsibility, even if you really don't want it or think you should have it. It's a civic responsibility that everyone in a democracy has. And it directly benefits you a lot of the time, which is what I find so ironic about this position.

You are trying to perpetuate ignorance and selfishness, which does indeed contribute to a "lawless hellhole", not that I or anyone else has claimed such is the state of things, but the hyperbole sure helps your obviously misguided and uninformed argument. I recommend you stop fearing your culpability, and accept that anyone who isn't helping is indeed making the situation worse. Collecting wealth at higher social levels, deepening social and financial inequality, willfully segregating communities and ignoring their problems, yes, all of this makes things worse.

If you reply again, please make it with some kind of evidence or other remark that isn't inflammatory or puerile. Trolls are boring.

Troll? "Pot to kettle, pot to kettle - you are black".

So you're literally re-stating that it is in some part my fault, with different words - "You do have a responsibility, even if you really don't want it...".

Because I choose to not shunt what money I may or may not have towards Atlanta, or Gary, I'm deepening 'social and financial inequality' or whatever your babble is. So my question for you is, where does it stop? At what level of removedness can I, in your hilarious and impractical worldview, stop having to feel guilty for any success I may have gained?

If it's not the country, perhaps the continent? Do I still need to have some vestigial guilt over not sending money to the far-flung reaches of Canada? Am I supposed to lay awake nights, beating my chest over inequality in the favelas and how just maybe, if I'd sent half my paycheck to a random orphan (which orphan though?), it would've fixed all the things?

> or whatever your babble is

This breaks the HN guidelines. If you find yourself carried away enough to abandon civility in your comments here, please stop for a while.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

The railroad didn't get finished until a few years after the Civil War. Prior to that, going west would involve considerable capital expenses (if you've played Oregon Trail, you know you need oxen/horses, a wagon, parts, food, etc, etc). Kind of hard for freedmen in the wake of the Civil War, in devastated Southern territory, 40 acres and a mules notwithstanding, to scrape up that initial investment.

That makes a lot of sense and I think answers my question. Thanks!!

This is not a black-white or other racist issue.

The issue is unaffordable housing and it is a problem in many cities such as NYC where I live, not just SF.

The cause of the unaffordable housing is zoning restrictions that limit housing density and overuse of historic landmark status through politically induced scarcity. Using politics to induce scarcity creates an additional "economic rent" or profits above for landowners (housing and apartment owners) above what they could get in an efficient market.

This is a basic concept of microeconomics: the use of politics to induce scarcity for receiving profits above what one would get in an efficient, competitive market.

This "rent seeking" makes landowners like Donald Trump much wealthier than they otherwise would be in an efficient market.

Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser has written extensively about this. NYTimes columnist and Economics Nobelist Paul Krugmann has written about this in his columns, and Financial Times columnist (with a masters in Economics Tim Harford) has also written about this.

Another example of gaining "economic rent" or "rent-seeking" is in NYC there had been a political limit of the number of taxi medallions to 13,000. The result was a medallion market value of $1.2 million per medallion. Taxi drivers that leased cabs had to pay for use of the medallion as well as the cab, and gasoline. The result is much higher fares approved by the NYC Taxi and Licensing Commission.

Then Uber/Lyft came along and the price of the medallions dropped from the $1.2 million to less than $700,000.

The rent-seeking is very harmful to the economy and of course adds to the income inequalities. It is in invisible "tax" that transfers wealth from the less wealthy to the wealthy. Money that one could be spending on goods and services in an efficient housing market is instead going towards paying additional housing costs with that money ending up in the pockets of the wealthy.

The race issue headline undoubtedly gets more page clicks than an article that would state that billionaires such as Donald Trump owe much of their wealth to inefficient markets resulting from the use of politics to create artificial scarcity.

The solution is a simple one which is to get rid of the destructive laws that create the artificial scarcity in land use.

It is upsetting to me that the NYTimes reporters appear not to understand basic economics.

For more information see: Edward Glaeser: Build Big Bill (Mayor of NYC) http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

An on-line article about "rent seeking" and the damage to the economy (includes land use restrictions) http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-rent-seeking-is-too-...

This book is a very fun read: Tim Harford: The Undercover Economist https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199926514

> This is not a black-white or other racist issue.

> The issue is unaffordable housing and it is a problem in many cities such as NYC where I live, not just SF.

Yet NYC is 23% black. If the issue is unaffordable housing, why did it almost eliminate black people from San Francisco but had had little effect on the number of black people in NYC? (The black percentage of NYC has gone down a little over the past 20 years, as has the white percentage, but this is because of a large growth in the NYC asian population over that time and a significant growth in the hispanic population).

tl;dr : NYC is much larger than SF, and there are more affordable neighborhoods.

"Bed-Stuy, Inwood, and Crown Heights bottom out the rankings, with prices per square foot between $488 and $503. These more affordable neighborhoods of New York bring up an important distinction between the two cities. While New York does boast a high price per square foot in many neighborhoods, it still has the benefit of density that San Francisco does not. San Francisco is simply a less dense city, with less inventory, so its rapid price growth has more effectively pulled many city neighborhoods into a relatively narrow, expensive price range. "There aren't as many affordable neighborhoods there as there had been," Valhouli says. "By comparison, New York City is a larger city with a broader price range and still more opportunities at the more affordable end of the market.""

http://ny.curbed.com/2016/6/27/12040004/nyc-vs-san-francisco...

Blacks (and other low-income people) are being squeezed out of SF because the politicians have made the zoning laws to squeeze them out.

To me and my friends, diversity, both racial and economic, is important. To the politicians of SF, not so.

If this were important to citizens of SF, they'd elect politicians that fixed the housing problem by removing the deliberate attempt to make housing more expensive. It costs no money, just a vote to fix the zoning laws and the price of housing will drop as supply increases (as the Edward Glaeser article explains).

Wait wait. So:

1. White people commit racism and violence against blacks

causes

2. White people flee to the suburbs

causes

3. Urban centers to deteriorate.

Let's examine:

1->2 So white people were fleeing... their own violence against blacks?

2->3 So when those violent people left, this cause the areas to get... worse?

Apparently you believe white people being present is a problem, and white people leaving is a problem. Their presence hurts blacks, and when they leave it hurts blacks too. So literally everything is the fault of white people, whether they're coming or going, here or there.

Even more surreal - these blacks voluntarily moved towards the whites. Then the whites moved to escape the blacks. And the bad guys here are... the whites! The ones who blacks want to live around, and who are trying to flee them.

It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.

You've been using HN exclusively to fight political battles. That's an abuse of this site. We asked you repeatedly to stop, but you've continued doing exactly the same thing, so I'm banning your account.

This community has a single guiding value: intellectual curiosity. That is profoundly incompatible with single-purpose ideological participation. If HN is to survive in its intended form, we need to get clearer about differentiating these two. I'm sure there are other internet communities where people can fight their wars-by-other-means.

> It really is remarkable the rationalizations a mind is capable of.

This kind of incivility is particularly unwelcome here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12134673 and marked it off-topic.

You might want to read up on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

Excerpt:

However, some historians have challenged the phrase "white flight" as a misnomer whose use should be reconsidered. In her study of Chicago's West Side during the post-war era, historian Amanda Seligman argues that the phrase misleadingly suggests that whites immediately departed when blacks moved into the neighborhood, when in fact, many whites defended their space with violence, intimidation, or legal tactics. The business practices of redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants contributed to the overcrowding and physical deterioration of areas where minorities chose to congregate. Such conditions are considered to have contributed to the emigration of other populations. The limited facilities for banking and insurance, due to a perceived lack of profitability, and other social services, and extra fees meant to hedge against perceived profit issues increased their cost to residents in predominantly non-white suburbs and city neighborhoods. According to the environmental geographer Laura Pulido, the historical processes of suburbanization and urban decentralization contribute to contemporary environmental racism.

A quick thing that can be easily dispelled: minority groups didn't voluntarily move anywhere from '34 to '68 [1], because the FHA policy of redlining prevented them from getting a mortgage in predominately white neighborhoods. Shockingly or not, the higher quality property was reserved for whites.

'68 was the end of formal, legal requirements to disapprove of mortgages in heterogeneous communities (for lack of a better term). There's plenty of evidence that the practice continues even to this day, informally. [2]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-raci...

[2] http://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/program_offices/fai...

Do you think any of this has to do with the fact that it was illegal to teach Blacks to read and write.

Do you think any of this has to do with the mental trauma of enslavement.

Do you think the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment make all the bad things go away.

Ubiquitous discrimination grinds on the soul. Do you blame the oppressed for being ground down?

We're at least two or three generations away from any of this. Hell, slavery's been abolished for five generations. Five generations ago, my family was poor-as-a-churchmouse country bumpkins (still are, by and large). They didn't have any education, and they got drafted to fight in a war they didn't give a tinker's damn about to fight and die on Little Round Top and a dozen other places in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, and many of them died.

My Grandmother's Grandmother was a slave and my Grandparents fled the segregated South where lynchings were common.

Ever see any of that horrifying Civil Rights Movement footage? A lot of those people are still alive. The victims and the perpetrators. All those people protesting the integration of schools, throwing things at harmless black children? Still alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Started 1934, continued to at least the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching

> Nearly 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, mostly from 1882 to 1920.

(Someone born in 1968 is 46 / 47.)

I think your post and mine must have waved to each other when they passed in The Tubes :-)

It is not my responsibility to teach you basic American history. But here's some things to get you started.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-fl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Migration_(Africa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_African-Americ...

Read them or don't, I don't really care, but if you want to be less ignorant of how this developed these are useful starting points.

So what should white people have done/what should they do, to not be guilty of these terrible social sins that appear to be their fault no matter what actions they take?

In a sentence? They need to do something to help.

In a larger sense: they should recognize that the entire American society was splintered a long time ago by racism and it never un-splintered. A metric fuck-ton of work needs to be done to rehabilitate the communities and whole socioeconomic strata that have been affected by this. It will probably take 20-50 years to undo, just because so many people have this "It's not my fault, so fuck it, I don't need to do anything" attitude.

Societies do not self-heal.

I don't know about you, but I am responsible for my own actions. I don't need a hug from Whitey or anyone else to know the difference between right and wrong, or hard work versus sloth. If you do, I feel bad for you son. I choose the action, I choose the consequence, same as pretty much anything else on this planet.

When you chose to leave Michigan, were you faced with endemic discrimination while looking for a place to live? While buying a home? While shopping? While walking around town doing nothing wrong? While driving while black?

It's not that Black people's choices are bad, it's the racist responses to those choices that are the problem.

Endemic discrimination while renting an apartment? Nope.

Owning a house? Haven't achieved that yet, but I haven't exactly been trying.

While shopping? Nope.

Walking around town? Nope.

Driving? If I'm speeding and/or driving like an idiot, I get attention from the cops. My driving record isn't exactly squeaky clean, but each infraction is because I was making the choice to not follow the rules of the road.

Sorry if my experience doesn't fit a different narrative, but in my experience if I'm looking/acting like an idiot I get treated as such. Nothing that is outside of my control though.

Are you uninterested in familiarizing yourself with the data that show that people of color have an unfairly different, damaging, and too often deadly experience?

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