Making the Mission: Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Making the Mission

Edited by Lilia Fernández, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Becky M. Nicolaides, and Amanda I. Seligman

James R. Grossman, Editor Emeritus

Also in the series:

A Nation of Neighborhoods: Cities, Communities, and Democracy in the Modern American Imagination, 1940–1980

by Benjamin Looker

The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s

by Evan Friss

World of Homeowners: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid

by Nancy H. Kwak

Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis

by Andrew R. Highsmith

Metropolitan Jews: Politics, Race, and Religion in Postwar Detroit

by Lila Corwin Berman

Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

by Gillian O’Brien

A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

by Marta Gutman

A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida

by N. D. B. Connolly

Urban Appetites: Food and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York

by Cindy R. Lobel

Crucibles of Black Power: Chicago’s Neighborhood Politics from the New Deal to Harold Washington

by Jeffrey Helgeson

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972

by Christopher Lowen Agee

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto

by Camilo José Vergara

Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run

by Sarah Jo Peterson

Additional series titles follow index

Making the Mission

Planning and Ethnicity in San Francisco

Ocean Howell

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

Ocean Howell is assistant professor of history in the Clark Honors College and the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14139-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29028-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226290287.001.0001

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Neil Harris Endowment Fund, which honors the innovative scholarship of Neil Harris, the Preston and Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago. The Fund is supported by contributions from the students, colleagues, and friends of Neil Harris.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howell, Ocean, author.

Making the Mission: planning and ethnicity in San Francisco / Ocean Howell.

pages; cm. — (Historical studies of urban America)

ISBN 978-0-226-14139-8 (cloth: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-29028-7 (e-book) 1. Mission District (San Francisco, Calif.)—History—20th century. 2. Urban renewal—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 3. Community development—California—San Francisco—History— 20th century. 4. Mission District (San Francisco, Calif.)—Ethnic relations. 5. Hispanic Americans—California—San Francisco. I. Title. II. Series: Historical studies of urban America.

HT177.S3H69 2015

[F869.S36 M57]

307.3′41609794610904—dc23

2015014462

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Laural

Contents

ONE / Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco

Part I: Neighborhood Power in the White Man’s Territory, 1906–29

TWO / Make No Big Plans: The City Beautiful Meets Improvement Clubs

THREE / Neighborhood Capitalism: Urban Planning, Municipal Government, and the Mission Promotion Association

FOUR / The Mission and the Spatial Imagination: Discourse, Ethnicity, and Architecture

Part II: The New Deal in the Mission: Revitalizing Community, Eroding Local Power

FIVE / A New Population, Not a New Public: Latino Diversity in San Francisco and the Mission District

SIX / Economic Equality, Racial Erasure: The Spatial and Cultural Interventions of Federal Public Works Agencies

SEVEN / No-Lining and Neighborhood Erasure: Washington, D.C., and Downtown San Francisco Come to the Mission

Part III: Progress for Whom? Transportation Planning, Urban Renewal, and Multiethnic Coalition Building, 1945–60

EIGHT / The Motoring Public and Neighborhood Erasure: The Culture and Practice of Postwar Transportation Planning

NINE / Latino as Worker: The Changing Politics of Race in the City and the Neighborhood

Part IV: Return to the City within a City: Multiethnic Coalitions and Urban Renewal, 1961–73

TEN / A Salvable Neighborhood: Urban Renewal, Model Cities, and the Rise of a Social Planning Regime

ELEVEN / Who Holds Final Authority? The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Mission Council on Redevelopment

TWELVE / The Return to the City within a City: The Mission Coalition Organization and the Devolution of Planning Power

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Plates

San Francisco in the twenty-first century. Map by Blake Swanson.

ONE

Neighborhood Power in Twentieth-Century San Francisco

Early in the morning of April 18, 1906, an earthquake measuring between 7.7 and 8.3 on the Richter scale struck two miles off the coast of San Francisco, rupturing gas mains in the city and igniting a fire that raged for four days, over four square miles. The temblor shook hundreds of buildings to the ground, and the ensuing firestorm consumed almost thirty thousand structures. More than three thousand people were killed.¹ The residents of San Francisco’s Mission District had a unique and terrifying view of the event. From the hill above Mission Park (today Dolores Park), they watched the fire destroy their city’s most densely built and populated neighborhoods, including downtown, North Beach, Chinatown, the Tenderloin, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, and South of Market.² They stood in crowds in the streets of the northern Mission, and watched as the dome of city hall disappeared behind a wall of smoke. (See fig. 1.1.) On Dolores Street, they watched as the flames finally died at the doorstep of the city’s oldest building, the Misión San Francisco de Asís, the structure from which both the district and the larger city had taken their names.³

Figure 1.1. April 1906 fire as seen from the northern Mission District. The dome of city hall is visible to the left of frame. Library of Congress.

Over the following months and years, city boosters understandably recounted the drama of the crisis in much the same way that novelists and later filmmakers would: San Franciscans banded together in the wake of the disaster to support one another and to rebuild their city, leaving them more unified than they had ever been. There is certainly truth to this narrative. The historical record abounds with first-person accounts of bravery and selflessness, and there is little doubt that the shared experience of disaster and mutual assistance created a new psychological bond among San Franciscans. Yet the disaster also marked a moment when San Francisco became a profoundly divided place. The cinders had hardly cooled before a fight erupted over how the city should be rebuilt. The earthquake shook apart many stable political coalitions, but new ones formed almost immediately to advocate for the reconstruction plans that best served their own respective interests, interests that revolved around property, commerce, and cultural identity.

In the hopes of remaking the geography of San Francisco according to a grand, unifying, neoclassical vision—articulated in Daniel Burnham’s iconic 1905 plan for the city—many banks and high-profile real estate investors had joined city hall in an attempt to centralize urban planning authority. Resistance to the plan came from conservative business interests and from neighborhood groups, Mission District groups most prominent among them. The opposition prevailed, and San Francisco was left with a power vacuum: if the city had failed to centralize planning authority in the municipal government, then who would guide the rebuilding of the city? In the Mission District, local leaders emerged to announce that, at least in their section of the city, the neighborhood itself would call the shots.

The most prominent of these leaders was James Rolph Jr., a lifelong Missionite who would become the city’s longest serving mayor (1912–31) and later the governor of California (1931–34). When Rolph was later asked who had given the neighborhood groups the "authority to organize and govern the Mission during the panic days, Rolph replied, Nobody gave us authority. We took it."⁴ Before 1906, this would not have been possible. During that period, individual neighborhood groups had only spoken with a collective voice when it came to matters like street lighting and repaving. Now they stepped onto a larger stage, exerting influence in matters of city- and even statewide importance for the first time. It would not be the last.

In the twentieth century, many neighborhood-based groups in American cities would come to exert significant and sometimes decisive influence over the physical and social planning of the areas they called home. The story of how these neighborhood groups came to be—and of when and how they were able to operate effectively—holds many lessons for historians of urban America, lessons about urban planning, municipal government, ethnic and race relations, civil society, inequality, citizenship, and the relationship between cities and the federal government. Making the Mission brings these perspectives into focus by telling the history of one neighborhood with a particularly strong and deeply rooted planning tradition.

Now, more than a decade into the twenty-first century, San Francisco’s Mission District has become perhaps the most visible battleground over gentrification in the United States. The neighborhood has long been home to Latino and bohemian communities, but it has increasingly become both a playground and a bedroom community for the well-heeled of the Bay Area, particularly technology professionals who work in Silicon Valley. During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, the Mission was the epicenter of a conflict over affordable housing and cultural identity. With the 2010s came a new wave of public offerings from technology firms, and the Mission is again at the center of a fight. Neighborhoods from Williamsburg in Brooklyn to Silver Lake in Los Angeles have witnessed a similar phenomenon. While they enjoy improved city services and falling crime rates, they simultaneously suffer through mass displacement of the working classes, minority communities, and artists and students. Residents who remain complain that their neighborhoods’ deeply rooted cultural identities are under threat.

The Mission stands out among gentrifying urban areas for a few reasons. The fact that it is located in the geographical center of San Francisco, one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets, ensures that economic pressures and therefore social tensions are heightened. But economic tensions hardly appear less intense in places like Manhattan’s Lower East Side. What makes the Mission unique is the extent to which neighborhood groups have organized, and the savvy that they have demonstrated in enlisting the power of the state—particularly the tools of urban planning—to fight the tide. Present-day groups like the Artists Eviction Defense Coalition and the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition have not only distributed picket signs; they have also repeatedly convinced the city to reject permit applications from chain stores, to enact moratoria on condominium conversions, and to put in place strict if temporary limits on certain kinds of office development.⁵ These efforts have not halted real estate speculation or displacement, but most observers agree that they have slowed the process. Perhaps most importantly, these efforts have continued to reinforce the identity of the neighborhood and to convince people that the Mission has a unique and important culture, one that is worth fighting for.

Why has the Mission District organized so effectively when other neighborhoods have been left to the mercy of the market? It’s no good to point to an amorphous ethos, like San Francisco liberalism, to explain the phenomenon. The Dog Patch and the Inner Sunset neighborhoods have both gentrified without much of a fuss. Even the iconic Haight-Ashbury District—once a crucible of cultural politics—has undergone profound changes without putting up much of a fight, at least not the way the Mission has. To understand the Mission’s organizing energies, one must look to history. In the mid-1960s, Mission residents openly worried that the coming of two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations would spark a speculative boom that would push the poor and even the middle classes out of the Mission. This marked the first moment when fear of displacement prompted residents to organize. But to fully understand the resulting coalition, one must recognize its place in a long lineage of neighborhood-based groups, one that stretches back at least to the aftermath of the disaster of 1906, if not to the organizing efforts of the 1890s.

From the time of the great earthquake and fire through today, both residents and visitors alike have described San Francisco’s Mission District as a city within a city. In the national discourse, this phrase has had a variety of duties; it was used to describe opulent world’s fairs, homogeneous minority neighborhoods, isolated slums, insular office-tower complexes, and newly minted suburban tracts, among other urban forms.⁶ But in the Mission, observers meant something else. There they saw not only a physically separate space, but also a self-sustaining urban unit. The Mission was an area with its own little downtown, a commercial district that could clothe and feed you from the cradle to the grave, as James Rolph would put it in 1930.⁷ Perhaps more importantly, observers saw a cohesive urban identity, one distinct from that of the larger city. That identity would change profoundly across the twentieth century—from elite suburb, to the home of white union labor, to a gateway for immigrant newcomers, to the barrio, and most recently to a gentrification battleground—yet the neighborhood has somehow always maintained its distinctiveness. Local historians have even reported that the area’s inhabitants once spoke with an accent all their own, a sort of Irish Brooklynese, though no recordings have survived to confirm that.⁸ But with or without a Missionese accent, few would dispute that the neighborhood has always been a world unto itself.

In writing this book, I quickly found that it was no accident that the Mission came to function as a city within a city. Throughout the twentieth century, neighborhood residents cultivated an independent identity through festivals, architecture, ethnic politics, and in the area’s own newspapers, like the Mission Mirror, Mission Merchant’s News, Mission Enterprise, and, later, the New Mission/Nueva Misión. Yet I also found that the various forms of identification and cultural self-promotion were only the beginning of the story. The story was also about political power, particularly with respect to urban planning.

The concept of a city within a city gave neighborhood residents—Missionites, as they proudly called themselves—a framework through which to assert their distinctiveness against the Fillmore District, the Marina District, downtown, Los Angeles, and the East Coast. But that was only part of the point of asserting an independent identity. When James Rolph referred to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mission as a town within a town, he was not merely describing the neighborhood’s current condition; he was also describing the aspirations of both its leading citizens and its ordinary residents.⁹ For Rolph, as for many of his neighbors, it was not enough that one could visit a dentist, buy clothes, see a ballgame, or take in a movie without leaving the neighborhood. To truly be a city within a city, the neighborhood needed its own professional services and financial institutions. Most importantly, it needed a mechanism through which neighborhood residents might exert a measure of self-determination, particularly when it came to questions of schools and sewers, roads and rail connections. In other words, if there were decisions to be made about what should be built where, the residents of the neighborhood should be allowed to make those decisions for themselves.

Motivated by these convictions, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Rolph and his associates founded the Mission Bank and the Mission Savings Bank, as well as the Mission Promotion Association (MPA), a civic group dedicated to uniting the residents of the Mission District and to guiding and promoting the physical development of the neighborhood.¹⁰ This association would become remarkably powerful. Not only would it exert decisive influence over the planning process in the Mission, but it would also effectively establish itself as the de facto planning authority for fully half of the geographic area of San Francisco, pushing through municipal government its own plans for park space, schools, rail connections, new roads, and much more, throughout the southern portion of the city, while blocking plans that its members believed were at odds with the interests of the Mission. The MPA held no official power, but it was widely acknowledged that the association nonetheless wielded decisive influence over the planning process. In the early twentieth century, the San Francisco Chronicle also described the Haight-Ashbury District as a city within a city, in the sense that it had its own retail district and its own character; but the newspaper anthropomorphized the Mission, writing about the neighborhood as though it were a political actor—indeed, as one of the most powerful political actors in San Francisco.¹¹

Remarkable though the MPA’s accomplishments were, the association was only the first in a series of Mission-based groups that would effectively, and sometimes even officially, wield planning power within the neighborhood. The MPA operated from 1906 until 1920. In the 1920s, the Mission Merchants’ Association would take up the mantle and continue to influence the planning of the area. In the 1950s, the Mission Neighborhood Centers (MNC) would initiate a revitalization campaign that would soon involve city agencies and federal monies. In the l960s, using funds from the federal Model Cities program, a civic group called the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO) would found and effectively control both a planning authority, the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation (MMNC), and a housing authority, the Mission Housing Development Corporation (MHDC), both of which had official standing as state entities. The Nixon administration’s 1973 moratorium on funding for Model Cities led quickly to the demise of the MCO and marks the end of this study—but not the end of neighborhood-based planning in the Mission. By exerting control over the process, this series of neighborhood groups established and reestablished the Mission as an actor among a larger cast of characters in the city, the region, and even the state. Both participants and observers of planning politics would speak of what the Mission wanted, or what the Mission opposed, in the same way that they might speak about what the California Department of Transportation wanted or what the Chamber of Commerce opposed.

There were certainly moments when it did not much matter what the Mission wanted. When in the early 1950s elderly residents living in the path of the proposed Bayshore Freeway spoke out against the condemnation of their houses, their protests not only fell on deaf ears in city hall, but were even mocked in the daily press as a quaint reaction to inevitable progress.¹² Similarly, during the Great Depression the Mission Merchants’ Association declared that the city’s housing authority was operating like the Gestapo when it announced plans for public housing projects in the neighborhood without having first consulted the local residents and businesses. The Merchants vowed to stop the projects, warning all comers that the Mission has never taken anything lying down.¹³ The Mission may not have taken the housing authority’s plans lying down, but neither did it win.

Neighborhood groups struggled to be heard during the Great Depression and World War II, as well as during the immediate postwar period when freeway construction and slum clearance topped the agendas of urban planners. Yet even during the decades when local institutions appeared to be moribund, the area’s deeply rooted planning energies were still nurtured by entities like the Catholic parish churches, the Mission Merchants’ Association, the Mission Neighborhood Centers, and ordinary residents who remembered a time when the Mission determined its own fate. The embers were always there, and they would be reignited in the 1960s.

The present study tells the story of how one neighborhood qua neighborhood was able to exert influence over the planning process over such a long period. Taking a step back, the historiography of urban America gives the impression that neighborhood-based planning existed, to a limited degree, in the Progressive Era as a result of the efforts of improvement clubs and settlement houses, and again in the 1960s and 1970s under the auspices of Great Society programs and the Community Reinvestment Act.¹⁴ Studies focusing on the latter era advance a narrative of rebirth. This is not, however, a rebirth of neighborhood-based planning, but rather a rebirth of cities themselves; these studies narrate cities’ painful process of emerging from the urban crisis.¹⁵ Without discounting the many insights in these studies, Making the Mission argues not for a rebirth narrative but for a longer, continuous life of neighborhood-based planning. Ultimately, I argue that, for all their obvious differences, the improvement clubs of the Progressive Era and the Community Development Corporations of the 1970s need to be understood as different moments in a single lineage, not as two unrelated planning movements. Some historians have pointed to this longer lineage, though only one has undertaken a study of the entire period.¹⁶ A declension narrative dominates the scholarship on neighborhoods between the Progressive Era and the 1970s; those planning energies that do emanate from within neighborhoods appear limited to protest-oriented activities, such as freeway revolts and anti–public housing campaigns.¹⁷ From the literature, then, one might guess that between the 1920s and the 1970s, neighborhoods spoke with a single voice only when they banded into single-issue interest groups, groups that splintered the moment the battle at hand was won or lost.

The Mission District provides at least one example of a neighborhood where planning energies were less episodic and reactionary than they were durable, deeply rooted, and broad ranging. Even during those periods when the Mission-based organizations found themselves outmatched by other interests, they continued to play a role among a cast of other actors that have become archetypical in the historiography of urban America, entities that included construction unions, government agencies, elite families, chambers of commerce, corporations, political machines, and the editorial boards of daily newspapers. This book asks when, and under what circumstances, were neighborhood-based groups best able to guide the planning process? When and why did their influence wane?

Making the Mission demonstrates that neighborhood groups were able to operate effectively only when certain institutional and cultural conditions were in place. Institutionally, there needed to exist a larger political climate—in city hall, as well as in state and federal agencies—that was conducive to decentralized decision making. The institutional climate within the neighborhood was important also. Internally, the most influential entities—including unions, merchants, churches, and civic groups—needed to form broad-based coalitions that could claim to represent the neighborhood as a whole. The cultural conditions were of course intertwined with the institutional ones, but were nonetheless distinct. In the most basic sense, neighborhood residents and groups needed to believe that there was such a thing as the Mission to begin with, and to commit psychological as well as material resources to the promotion, maintenance, and defense of that collective identity.

So what did these institutional and cultural conditions actually look like on the ground?

The Institutional Life of Neighborhoods

San Francisco enjoys a reputation for being an open place, one that welcomes and celebrates broad diversity. Not everyone has always experienced it as such—for example, both residents of Asian descent before World War II and African Americans in the early 1960s often withstood brutal discrimination. But though there are some important exceptions, San Francisco’s popular reputation as a socially liberal place is largely deserved. That liberal cast helps to explain some of the cultural dimensions of the story told in this book, but it actually complicates the telling of the institutional side of the story. Neighborhoods like the Mission District were able to exert influence over the planning process not simply because San Francisco was generally welcoming to diverse cultures. In fact, for much of the twentieth century (and for the entire period discussed here), the governance context of the city made neighborhood power difficult to attain.

This is largely explained by a feature of the city’s electoral system: at-large voting. In many respects, San Francisco resembled the industrial cities of the East more than it did the Sunbelt cities—it always maintained a strong mayor system, for example. The City by the Bay did, however, share one important governance feature with the rising cities of the Southwest. The city adopted an at-large voting system with the passage of Progressive charter reform in 1900 and did not abandon it until 1977. The well-known story of Harvey Milk’s political career illustrates some of the historical complexities of this system. Milk’s first two runs for supervisor of San Francisco’s Castro District failed largely because of the fact that the entire city voted for candidates in each individual district. In this at-large voting system, the residents of the conservative Pacific Heights neighborhood had as much say over who would represent the Castro as did the residents of the Castro themselves. Milk became a viable candidate only when that at-large voting system was abandoned in favor of district elections, where only the residents of the individual districts could vote for who would represent them on the Board of Supervisors.

Twenty-first-century residents of San Francisco are accustomed to a system in which their supervisors fight vigorously for the interests of their neighborhoods or face accountability at the ballot box. So San Franciscans may be surprised to see, in the following pages, that while the entire Board of Supervisors makes frequent appearances, the Mission’s elected supervisor is discussed only sporadically and doesn’t appear to have been pivotal in the neighborhood’s planning debates. This is not an oversight, but a finding. Mission-based newspapers endorsed candidates for supervisor, but would otherwise pay little attention to the elected representative of the old District Six (which contained the Mission). Municipal reports, proceedings of the Board of Supervisors, planning documents, and newspaper accounts all illustrate that when citizens wanted a new park, or when a business wanted a zoning variance, they would bring their request first to one of the neighborhood’s civic groups, like the Mission Promotion Association or the Mission Merchants, or later to the Mission Coalition Organization. Citizens expected these groups to represent their interests in the larger city government.¹⁸ We know that in many of the urban centers on the East Coast, citizens went directly to their city councils with requests or complaints.¹⁹ In the Mission, neighborhood associations more often fulfilled that role.

This book covers the period between the planning debates that raged in the wake of the disaster of 1906 and the moratorium on federal funding for the Model Cities program in 1973. At-large elections were in place from 1901 to 1977, which means that this story is firmly nested in a period in which neighborhoods were as likely to win planning power by working around their elected supervisors as through them. After 1977, San Francisco’s broader neighborhood politics would come to more closely resemble the ward system of Chicago. But the Mission’s route to power was different, situated, as it was, within the era of at-large elections. Yet within this larger framework, there were some moments when the governance context afforded more opportunities than others.

To Decentralize?

In Progressive Era San Francisco, political conditions were conducive to decentralized decision making, particularly in the arena of urban planning, for a number of reasons. After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, San Franciscans rejected a charter amendment that would have centralized planning authority in order to rationalize the city’s chaotic grid system. This left municipal government with limited means for implementing citywide plans, and thus ensured that most decisions over land use would be made on a more ad hoc basis. Not until 1917 would San Francisco even establish a planning commission, and in its early years the commission was relatively toothless, focusing primarily on drawing up the zoning map. Add to these conditions a generalized political instability—with strikes, graft investigations, and frequent turnovers of city hall—and the result was a political climate that enabled groups like the MPA to emerge and claim power.

Through the 1920s, neighborhood groups would guide the planning process in the Mission, while also competing remarkably well in the citywide contest for tax and bond revenue. But if the most powerful neighborhood groups became adept at lobbying for municipal largesse during the Progressive Era, they found there was no longer any largesse to be lobbied for when the Great Depression struck. Empty city coffers were part of the reason that the political climate became adverse for the exercise of neighborhood power, but there was more to the story. As many observers have commented, the New Deal marked a fundamental reordering of the relationship between citizen and state, and between federal and municipal governments.²⁰ Before the New Deal, the federal government was never much involved with questions of urban land use, except when it came to ports, rails, and military installations. While New Deal agencies like the Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration, and the United States Housing Authority did much to revitalize the built environment of the Mission, they also concentrated planning power in municipal agencies and in the federal government itself. These organizational arrangements persisted through World War II and into the immediate postwar period, when traffic engineers and the heads of urban renewal agencies would be given a freer hand than any American planners had had before or have had since. During the New Deal and in the immediate postwar period, then, the technocratic and rigidly hierarchical governance context left little opportunity for smaller, unofficial interest groups to exert influence over the planning process. Yet that is not to say that those groups went away. On the contrary, they were there all along.

By the late 1950s, having seen neighborhood after neighborhood vanish beneath the bulldozer, observers from many quarters around the country began to question the wisdom of technocratic and centralized planning, or what had sometimes been called total planning.²¹ Perhaps concentrating so much power in so few hands was resulting in destructive governmental overreach. These worries found expression not only in the nationwide freeway revolt and protests and litigation over urban renewal plans, but also within San Francisco’s city hall and indeed within the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) itself. By the mid-1960s, even Justin Herman, the notoriously autocratic SFRA chief, began to occasionally push back against planning proposals that did not include real and substantial neighborhood involvement.

At the federal level, too, things were changing. Though in some ways the Great Society can be described as a new New Deal, many of its programs took a fundamentally different view of where authority should reside. The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Model Cities program, in particular, were motivated by a conviction that decision-making power should be devolved to smaller units of organization. This meant that by the mid-1960s, public opinion, as well as sentiment within municipal and federal governments, had created a new policy climate, one in which neighborhood-based groups could once again claim planning power. For the first time in decades, the Mission had a real opportunity to reassert itself as a city within a city, not only physically, not only culturally, but also institutionally. Neighborhood residents seized this opportunity, winning Great Society funding to form a new network of organizations that exerted considerable influence over the planning of the neighborhood and represented the Mission in the city’s larger planning debates.

But no sooner were these operations up and running than they found themselves in a more constrained political context on the heels of Nixon’s election in 1968. Conservative appointees to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would soon balk at neighborhood-designed plans, particularly for low-income housing, plans that would have likely met easy approval under the Johnson administration. When Nixon summarily cut funding for Model Cities in 1973, an era of unprecedented neighborhood planning power came to an end. Yet the legacy of that era has persisted to the time of this writing, not only in the form of organizing energies but also institutional savvy.²²

Coalition Building

In the early twentieth century, a wide variety of civic and other nongovernmental organizations called the Mission District home. These included white ethnic clubs, Catholic parish congregations, homeowners’ groups, merchants’ associations, and unions. The last two types of groups were the most powerful in the neighborhood, and they also had the most reason to be suspicious of each other. Many business groups in San Francisco, most prominently the Chamber of Commerce, were well known for endorsing lockouts and open-shop campaigns. Labor groups, for their part, were well known for strikes and boycotts. However, the Mission’s powerful labor groups—most prominently the Building Trades Council (BTC) and the San Francisco Labor Council (SFLC)—made common cause with the Mission Merchants, and especially the MPA, around the amorphous goal of shared prosperity.

In practice, this meant that labor could rely on Mission business groups to support the closed shop and to defend unions against anti-anarchist campaigns and a variety of other anti-labor tactics. It also meant that Mission business groups faithfully supported the unions’ radical positions on immigration restrictions, in spite of the fact that many business leaders in the neighborhood personally opposed such policies. On the other side, labor groups could be relied upon to support the MPA’s planning initiatives within the neighborhood; this was especially true of the building trades unions who saw jobs in such plans. Secure in its conviction that no substantial group would challenge its claim to truly represent the various interests in the neighborhood, the MPA was free to speak of the Mission as a singular entity, endowed with its own volition, its own desires, and its own hopes and fears. In the political context of Progressive Era San Francisco, the MPA would often encounter resistance to specific plans, but never to its claim to represent the Mission.

The coalitions that made this possible were quite durable. It was not until public housing projects were proposed for the neighborhood in the mid-1930s that the Mission unions (who supported public housing) found themselves openly at odds with the homeowners’ groups, real estate interests, and the Merchants Association (who opposed it). Yet this crisis would be short-lived. Once the projects were built, the ever-pragmatic merchants abandoned their position that the new residents would put the stigma of ‘slum area’ in the Greater Mission District, and soon set about trying to win the new residents as customers.²³ During the Depression and World War II, neighborhood coalitions frayed but never completely failed. Even so, the broader political context of the New Deal and the war left little room for the Mission’s coalitions to assert planning power. The immediate postwar period saw a shake-up of the organizational character of the neighborhood. The Merchants’ Association continued to thrive, as did the Catholic parish churches, but the unions, and many of the associated white ethnic organizations, began to move away. Many of the old German, Irish, Italian, and Scandinavian residents remained in the Mission, but many also left. These latter residents were replaced by immigrants from Central America and Mexico, and the new arrivals soon organized both unions and ethnic mutual aid groups of their own.

While this circumstance might have fostered mistrust and tension between the old guard and the newcomers, that is not in fact what happened. Once again, the pragmatic merchants took the position that one person’s money was just as good as the next’s, in spite of the fact that the merchants themselves remained overwhelmingly white. Eager to win Latino congregants away from the new Pentecostal storefront churches that began appearing around the neighborhood, the Catholic parish churches also made special efforts to accommodate the newcomers. With a strong tradition of ministering to union laborers, the aging Catholic clergy emphasized the common dignity of all people who worked for a living. This was to ease possible tensions between white old-timers and brown newcomers, and all available evidence suggests that while there was indeed some tension, the effort was surprisingly successful. But while the parish churches, white unions, Latino unions, merchants, and the emerging social service agencies all had amicable relationships during the immediate postwar period, the larger political context was such that there was little reason for any of them to hope that they might join forces to exert influence over the planning process.

But when the political context began to shift in the 1960s, the Mission found itself better positioned than any other neighborhood in the city to take advantage of the new environment, thanks in no small part to a legacy of neighborhood organizing. Powerful coalitions were still fresh in the institutional memory of the unions, merchants, and Catholic parish churches. Indeed, the wisdom of coalition building seemed to constitute a kind of inherited common sense in the Mission. In the early 1960s, a social service group called the Mission Neighborhood Center partnered with the Merchants’ Association to invite the SFRA to join them in a collaborative planning exercise for the district. When the SFRA eventually proposed a plan that was not to the liking of anyone in the Mission, the neighborhood organized and succeeded in stopping the plan.

Impressed by the capacities of the Mission, Mayor Joseph Alioto would put the neighborhood forward as a candidate for new Great Society programs that were designed to foster local planning efforts. With the help of organizers trained by Saul Alinsky, the churches and social service providers mounted an effort to form the Mission Coalition Organization (MCO), a broad-based group that claimed membership from conservative white homeowners’ clubs, unions, ethnic mutual aid groups, Latino social service providers, merchants, churches, and even self-described third-world nationalist groups. As one prominent organizer put it, the MCO was the organization which represented the Mission . . . it was the organization recognized by the major public institutions in the City. While some of them sought to go around it, and even succeeded on occasion, they did so with the fear that MCO might come after them.²⁴ Like the MPA before it, the MCO was able to speak about what the Mission wanted without having its claims to representativeness challenged from outside. And as with the MPA before it, the MCO’s strength was rooted in the art of coalition building.

The Culture of Neighborhood

Any collective actor is, in the end, a collection of individual people, and yet collective actors can operate in ways that the individuals who animate them cannot. This is most obviously the case with powerful and stable entities like corporations, city councils, or state governments. While many of these entities are much longer lived than the people who work in and through them, it is nonetheless true that all collective actors have their own histories, their own beginnings and inevitable ends. This fact comes sharply into focus when one considers informally organized entities like neighborhood groups. It is not only that small civic associations are often fragile, but that the very neighborhoods around which such groups cohere are themselves contingent. No large American city has ever vanished entirely, but many well-known neighborhoods have.

The most obvious examples of neighborhood erasure were those brought about through clearance. Five Points does not exist anymore because the City of New York razed it; the physical area of the notorious nineteenth-century slum is now partly occupied by the Civic Center, partly by Chinatown, and partly by Columbus Park. After a San Francisco barber named Reggie Pettus was displaced by SFRA-led clearance, he observed that his beloved neighborhood, once known as the Fillmore, had become the No More.²⁵ The Fillmore did survive urban renewal, but not in a form that Pettus recognized. He was not alone. But reorganizations of neighborhood geography need not be so dramatic and need not be carried out through official action. In the early twentieth century, a largely Spanish and South American neighborhood clustered at the foot of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill; it was universally known as the Latin Quarter. Spanish-speaking residents gradually moved away from the area, while Italian and Chinese immigrants gradually moved in, until, by the end of World War II, the neighborhood was no more.²⁶ The street pattern remained, as did most of the buildings, but San Franciscans ceased to perceive the existence of a Latin Quarter, so it was simply absorbed by the larger North Beach.

By contrast, some neighborhoods survive so long, and have such strong identities, that they come to seem like institutions within their larger cities, and in some senses they are indeed institutions. Entities like the Mission and Pacific Heights have had not only distinct identities but also stable associations with specific policy positions on a whole range of issues. It is of course civic groups that enunciate and renew such positions, but those groups gain legitimacy only insofar as they speak on behalf of the neighborhood. But partly because the status of such institutions was rarely official, neighborhoods were also amorphous, contested, and internally inconsistent. Neighborhoods typically had porous boundaries, both organizationally and spatially speaking. Figure 1.2 illustrates how various neighborhood-based interests and governmental agencies have drawn the Mission on the map of San Francisco. For the purposes of collecting garbage or counting votes, the borders of the neighborhood were unambiguous, but when it came to defining the Mission as a sociopolitical entity, the lines blurred considerably. The very boundaries of a neighborhood changed dramatically depending on who was drawing the lines when, and with what interests in mind.

Yet if neighborhoods seem ephemeral when compared to other archetypical urban institutions, like political machines or business associations, it must be observed that these were not static either. Rather, they too were often contested and internally inconsistent, and they too had porous boundaries, at least in terms of their membership and the arenas in which they operated. Moreover, many entities that once seemed stable, even inevitable, have had their own trajectories. Thus, powerful unions wither under open-shop campaigns, public utility corporations have their operations municipalized, city agencies get defunded by charter amendments, and political coalitions fall apart. As with any other collective urban actor, the cohesion of a neighborhood depended upon the larger political context in which it operated, but also upon the material and psychological investments of the individuals who composed it.

Throughout the twentieth century, groups in the Mission expressed their commitment to a collective identity in a variety of ways—in festivals, newspapers, architecture, and also through discourses about ethnicity—but the most basic strategy was a narrative one.

Figure 1.2. The Mission District within the larger city of San Francisco, as mapped by various public agencies and neighborhood-based entities. Upper left: the Mission District proper, as defined by the Mission Promotion Association in 1909 (MPA, Constitution and Bylaws, 1909, unpaginated MPA file, California Historical Society). Upper right: MPA’s mapping of the Mission in 1912; more modest mapping reflects the association’s new collaboration with city’s other prominent improvement clubs (San Francisco Examiner with Civic League and MPA, Map of the Twelve City Beautiful Districts, 1912, case D, map collection, Earth Science Library, University of California, Berkeley). Middle left: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation mapping of residential areas of the Mission District (HOLC residential survey map of San Francisco, 1937 National Archives II, RG195, location 450, 68:6:2/box 147). Middle right: Land use plan, plate 1, The City-Wide Urban Renewal Plan, 1960, 4–6, in DCP, 1963. Lower left: San Francisco Department of City Planning’s mapping of the Mission for the master plan (DCP, District Names of San Francisco, map, n.d. [1964–1968], John Jack Shelley Mayoral Papers, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library, box 2, folder 11). Lower right: Mission Housing Development Corporation’s 1974 mapping of the Mission (MHDC, A Plan for the Inner Mission, book 1, page 3, 1974). Maps by Blake Swanson.

Cast of Characters: The Mission versus Downtown

Every time a person spoke about the neighborhood as though it were an institution, the existence of that institution was reinforced. There are abundant accounts confirming that residents of the Mission thought of themselves as a distinct group, and that they took an almost clannish pride in that identity, as a resident