by Joel Kotkin at UnHerd
San Francisco, long a bastion of extremist progressivism, is currently outdoing itself. The city’s reparations committee has just adopted a proposal to give $5 million — and grant debt forgiveness — to all long-time black residents who can prove descent from slaves. It is a gesture, and one that is unlikely to be adopted at a time when the state is under severe fiscal stress. The city isn’t in much better shape either; San Francisco now stands as among the least recovered of America’s core cities after the pandemic.
Yet as gestures go, this is a particularly baffling one. Slavery was never allowed in California and San Francisco, in particular, was a bastion of pro-Union sentiment. Black Americans never formed a large part of the city’s population but it was hardly off-limits to their ambitions. Indeed, the most important San Francisco politician in the late 20th Century was Willie Brown, who served as the Assembly’s first African American speaker for 15 years and, later, as Mayor for eight years.
More recently, as the city has become ever more “enlightened”, conditions for African Americans have deteriorated. San Francisco’s black population has a lower income on average than African Americans in the nation overall. Some of this decline reflects a job market that has seen a huge drop in manufacturing and traditional business service employment. The big gains, at least pre-pandemic, were among college-educated techies, who tend to be overwhelmingly either white or Asian.
The gaps in real income and homeownership are particularly large:…
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