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2 Constructing San Francisco’s Growth Control and Housing Rights Movements T his chapter tells the story of the emergence of San Francisco’s land use and affordable housing movements. All the movements recounted in what follows can date their origins to the battles against the proposed freeway extensions and to the urban renewal movements that occurred in the 1960s. These movements have typically been treated as distinct social movements motivated by different and often antagonistic agendas and political priorities (DeLeon 1992). The case studies in this and the following chapters challenge some of the underlying assumptions of this still-prevalent interpretation . Recognition of divisions rooted in social location and differences in the social and political objectives of neighborhood activists must be balanced with the fact of overlap in terms of both key personnel and shared understandings regarding the roots of urban inequality as manifestations of the larger contradictions of U.S. society. This activist core possessed a shared commitment to enhancing the power of ordinary people to exercise meaningful control over local government through the creation of popular forms of grassroots political power rooted in the community-based organizations and neighborhood associations. Over time there has been significant rapprochement among the more radical strands of the environmentalist, land use, and affordable housing movements. Neighborhood struggles led by activists working within immigrant and poor working-class communities are today found at the forefront of fusing concerns over the quality of the urban environment and redistributive justice. The result is a new type of fusion politics that combines preservationist commitments with the defense of the rights of working-class, low-income, and often immigrant populations to have voices in land use decisions and enjoy tenant protections. Constructing San Francisco’s Growth Control and Housing Rights Movements 19 The Freeway Fight and the Origins of Growth Control in San Francisco We may date the origins of land use battles in San Francisco to the struggles by neighborhood activists to block the construction of proposed freeway extensions that would have ringed the perimeter of the city and cut vast swaths through several older central city neighborhoods and Golden Gate Park. The first extension was planned to run along the northeastern waterfront connecting the Golden Gate Bridge to downtown and the Bay Bridge into Oakland. The second extension would have cut a path through Golden Gate Park to link the northern freeway corridor to the expanding suburban frontier south of San Francisco. A coalition of home owners and local merchants that included the West Portal Homeowners Association, the Marina Civic Improvement and Property Owners Association, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association, the Central Council of Civic Clubs, and the Council of District Merchants Associations was formed to oppose the extensions. Membership in many of the neighborhood associations active in the early phase of the freeway battle was limited to property owners, and groups were composed predominantly of affluent professionals .1 Through direct lobbying of individual supervisors and testimony at public hearings, neighborhood activists convinced the Board of Supervisors to strike down the proposed northeastern extension. In 1959, the board halted all work on the northeastern Golden Gate–Bay Bridge connection. (For various accounts, see Jacobs 1978, 17; R. Walker 1998, 5; Barton 1985; and Boal 2004.) The freeway coalition subsequently shifted its focus to proposed extensions through the Golden Gate Park Panhandle that would have cut through the predominantly black Western Addition and portions of the Haight-Ashbury. In a move that would have important long-term ramifications, the anti-freeway coalition was expanded to include activists from the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) and members of the Western Addition then active in struggles against urban renewal in the A-2 project area. HANC was formed in 1959 by neighborhood activists dissatisfied with the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association and the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association, which restricted membership to home owners and small business owners. Organizational leadership came from a core of white middle-class liberals who were strong supporters of civil rights and residential integration. Deploying similar strategies to those used in the first phase of the freeway fight, activists engaged in a vigorous public education campaign, presented testimony before the board, and lobbied individual supervisors. The neighborhood council again prevailed when the Board of Supervisors issued a final vote halting all proposed freeway construction in 1965 (Barton 1985). Activists who would later emerge as central architects of land use policy in San Francisco drew several conclusions from the freeway fight. For one, the campaigns...

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