SFHA’s “Neighborhood Pattern” and Geographies of Segregation
The first public housing project that was open to Black residents was Westside Courts which was built in 1943. Westside Courts was constructed in the Western Addition neighborhood, which back then was a racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhood. The Housing Authority assigned nearly all of the units in the building to Black residents who were elsewhere denied placement. This lead to the reconfiguration of the Western Addition as a segregated, majority Black and low-income neighborhood. On top of this, Westside Courts was built as a “slum clearance project”, meaning The City seized land and demolished substandard housing in order to build the project. Substandard housing of course was disproportionately occupied by workingpoor Black and other non-white residents. The City continued to open white-only public housing projects despite significant in-migration of Black residents as part of the Great Migration. Faced with discrimination in the private rental market and in public housing, Black residents waged strong resistance campaigns calling for an end to the segregationist policy. A 1954 lawsuit by the NAACP against the Housing Authority for its discrimination against Black applicants reached the Supreme Court and ruled the “neighborhood pattern policy” illegal. This lawsuit did not provide a mechanism for enforcement, so it wasn’t until the passage of the Fair Housing Act that a formalized end to segregation in public housing took place. By that time though, whiteflight was already well underway and the demographics of public housing changed drastically. The damage of segregation, exclusion, and disinvestment was already spatialized in neighborhoods where now majority-Black public housing projects were located.
The first map shows the locations of the first permanent public housing projects built in San Francisco between 1940 and 1955 and Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC) graded areas of The City, a process known as “redlining” that took place during the same period. In 1937 the HOLC mapped areas of The City using a A to D grading system of “most desirable” to “hazardous” areas in terms of home loan investment. Black neighborhoods were typically rated at the lowest tier, grade D which is delineated in red. The second set of maps shows census data on the total Black population where Westside Courts was built, comparing 1940 to 1960. In 1940 the area was less than 15% Black, 57% white, and 28% other. By 1960 it was 59% Black due to racist housing processes that are foundational to the devastation of present-day gentrification and the displacement of lowincome Black communities in SF.