San Francisco

San Francisco

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Policy Cut

San Francisco: San Francisco led by its large corporation leadership followed Portland’s planning-economic development approach. With local large corporations in the vanguard and Chamber leadership, San Francisco’s first, private-sector dominated, area wide planning meeting was held in August 1944. under the auspices of the new California  Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission[1]. In its first session, the Commission authorized the formation of the Bay Area Council[2], a private regional EDO co-headed by CEOs from the Central Bank of Oakland and Pacific Gas & Electric. In 1945 the cities of Oakland and San Francisco simultaneously appointed advisory committees to recommend postwar public works projects. After fifteen sessions the Committee  recommended a list of projects (including a new airport, streets and bridges, streetcars, and highways) $177 million for San Francisco and Oakland received a similar list. The list was handed over to the Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission for implementation[3]. San Francisco and Oakland, together, had previous to the end of WWII set in motion an urban renewal-style redevelopment which initially (1948) concentrated on housing and by the sixties into commercial/downtown renewal.

[1] Established in 1943 to anticipate and prevent postwar problems association with reconversion and demilitarization, the California Act abolished the State Planning Board and the Reconstruction and Reemployment Commission was clearly intended to be its replacement. The act focused principally on reemployment of workers, and intended the Commission to prepare studies and plans to guild localities in their reconversion efforts. In 1947, the Commission was disbanded in favor of the State Redevelopment Agency and an Office of Planning and Research. Considerable continuity in leadership and personnel was evident through the organizational transitions:  http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/view?docId=state-reconstruction-and-reemployment-commission-cr.xml

[2] The Bay Area Council, today’s “Voice of Business” was in 1944 (San Francisco News) ‘intended to coordinate the region’s efforts to whip crucial transition problems, and cash in on industrial, commercial and foreign trade opportunities”. According to its charter the basic mission of the Council was to coordinate regional economic development. “Earlier than most peer organizations, the Council recognized that rapid industrialization could bring with it challenges such as housing shortages, traffic gridlock, and air and water pollution. By the late 1940’s the Council was acting as the area’s environmental watchdog”: http://www.bayareacouncil.org/about-us/history/; in future years the Council was a leader in establishing BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, and in 1977 the Council spearheaded the present day Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

[3] Carl Abbott, The Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p.38.

 

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Policy System cut

 

San Francisco

To put perspective on Sacramento’s pioneering embrace of urban renewal and TIF, San Francisco’s urban renewal experience was just beginning. While the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency has hesitantly started its first projects in 1951, they came to naught by 1960-delayed by incompetence, politics, litigation, and a decade long feud with the branch office of the federal urban renewal program, headed by regional administrator Justin Herman. The mess began to be straightened out in 1959 when Justin Herman in 1959 was appointed to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency by a new mayor. In short order the Golden Gateway and Western Addition A-1 Projects (early 60’s) became San Francisco’s first real urban renewal projects.

 

Phoenix

The 1950’s were Phoenix’s breakout years. That story begins with the 1948-49 overturning of the old guard Phoenix business leadership, and its replacement with our earlier-described neo-Progressive business reformer coalition. Business reformers coalesced behind the “Phoenix Charter Government Committee” (which included department store owner, Barry Goldwater). The immediate cause of the system transformation was the “blatant corruption” exhibited by the Phoenix old guard. The municipal charter was quickly amended to strengthen the city manager’s powers and to install at-large elections and when that proved insufficient to induce change, the reformers assembled a slate of candidates, ran for office, and got themselves elected. The coalition would dominate Phoenix politics for the next generation (until the 1970’s). It was a city with ‘a good, clean, competent government run by the right people’.[1]

 

In a recent book, Elizabeth Shermer[2] asserts the “eastern-educated” Phoenix business reform coalition rejected New Deal Progressive policies, indeed regarded itself as freeing Phoenix from Eastern domination by adopting a “neoliberal” business climate. These 1950’s reformers rejected unions through passage of right to work legislation, and promoted Phoenix as low-wage, cheap land, business-friendly, lightly-regulated with great access to western cities and markets. By no means libertarianism, this business coalition used municipal/state governments to develop infrastructure (airport and water)[3] and higher education assets and municipal government in particular was a partner with the private-led economic development attraction strategy.

 

In 1955, a Chamber-inspired business offshoot, the Municipal Industrial Development Corporation was formed. Among its achievements was to bring Sperry-Rand to Phoenix, raising a $650,000 cash inducement privately within seventy-two hours. The MIDC bought the site, paid for site improvements to the airport, as well as providing other assistance. During the fifties, Motorola (actually 1948), General Electric, Goodyear Aircraft, Kaiser Aircraft and Electronics, AiResearch also moved to Phoenix. Phoenix engaged in a competitive rivalry with El Paso as a business location which given the size of the two city’s economic base, Phoenix won. A (1950’s) El Paso businessmen complained that El Paso “does nothing”; he also observed that Phoenix ensured “industrial scouts are met at the plane, entertained, offered free land, tax deals, and an electorate willing to approve millions in business-backed bond issues”.[4]

 

By 1955 manufacturing had become the [metropolitan area’s] number one source of income, with farming and tourism second and third …. Between 1948 and 1960 nearly three hundred manufacturing enterprises opened their door as manufacturing employment in the metropolitan area tripled”. … By the end of 1977, the city had 74.5 percent of the total manufacturing employment in the state, and annual income from manufacturing had increased to $2.5 billion. Electronics and aerospace plants dominated the industrial landscape.[5]

 

The bulk of this expansion occurred in the 1950’s and, most likely was driven by the Cold War and the rise of the technologies sectors rather than 1940’s war production plants. Still, the arrival of war production manufacturing established a manufacturing base where little previously existed.

 

[1] Bradford Luckingham, “Phoenix: the Desert Metropolis”, op. cit., pp. 318.

[2] Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Politics: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Pennsylvania University Press, 2013)

[3] The Salt River Valley Water Users Association provided leadership in water and energy, and Sky Harbor Airport, a department of Phoenix municipal government, purchased in 1935, steadily was enlarged and modernized to be able to accommodate growth.

[4] Bradford Luckingham, “Phoenix: the Desert Metropolis”, op. cit., p. 312.

[5] Bradford Luckingham, “Phoenix: the Desert Metropolis”, op. cit., pp. 310-313.

 

 

End of Policy system cut

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San Francisco

 Our history centers on why San Francisco competed, not only with its southern California neighbor, Los Angeles, but also with Oakland, Portland and Seattle. Essentially, our focus ties to better understand how intra-regional competition among the Pacific Coast’s regional urban hierarchy is affected by our dynamics of ED (population mobility, jurisdictional economic base and political culture).

 

San Francisco founded in 1776) was a sleepy enclave (about 500 in 1846) until spurred by the 1848 gold rush. San Francisco was the only viable seaport and commercial trade center on the Pacific Coast. San Francisco functioned as a transshipment point (gold/commodities processing its principal export) and marine trade flourished between the East Coast, Mexico-Latin America, Hawaii and the Far East (Perry opened up Japan in 1854). San Francisco, literally the only “port” established itself as the financial center of the West Coast. Wells Fargo Bank founded in 1854. After statehood (1850), the city developed the institutions associated with contemporary politics, commerce and finance. A chamber, and several Merchant Exchanges sprang up,

 

Cultural institutions flourished. San Francisco’s chief city builder was William Ralston, President of the Bank of California whose fortune accrued from Nevada’s Comstock silver mines. Other early city leaders included Levi Strauss and Domingo Ghirardelli (Ghirardelli Chocolate Company). The ED engine of early San Francisco was its port facilities. Business firms who controlled the operating facilities realized they needed public services (dredging, lighthouses, and wharves/piers) to keep ports open and ensure dependable profits. So in 1851 the first American “port authority” was created; Governor Leland Stanford signed legislation creating a formal “Board of State Harbor Commissioners for San Francisco” (later renamed San Francisco Port Authority) “to construct wharves at the ends of all streets commencing with the Bay of San Francisco“.

 

Through its debt commission, the San Francisco authority leased wharf space for periods up to ten years. The state port authority (governed by local business) operated these facilities until 1969 when they were merged with City/County of San Francisco (California Burton Act). State management of San Francisco’s harbor was spotty and scandal-prone. Facilities were chronically underinvested—frequently unable to compete with other Pacific ports in attracting trade. Seeing opportunity, Oakland, (1926), established its Port and, for years, lived off trade seeking to avoid San Francisco’s facilities^[i].

 

San Francisco’s fragmented business community imaged their city as the natural leader of the West. In these early years San Francisco adopted same Big City style as Eastern Big Cities–mayor-businessmen and chamber-merchant exchange, and professional elites economic/political leadership prospered. This business community was well-established previous to the railroad’s arrival, but marine/harbor-based business elites, operating through the Port and the Marine Exchange, were a separate force apart from the downtown business community. The San Francisco’s business community differed, in one respect, from its Eastern counterparts—there were few manufacturers, and aside from shipping and marine elites, merchants, real estate, and finance dominated. Even in these early years trade and the service sector, not manufacturing, drove San Francisco growth and was the chief element in its business community.

 

With an early head start San Francisco established commercial primacy over California and the West Coast. The transcontinental railroad (the Overland Route) opened in May 1869. That arrival was a mixed blessing in that while benefiting San Francisco, it also spurred construction of regional railroads into the hinterland. In fairly short order that leveled the playing field for Pacific cities by linking them to each other and to points east. Nevertheless initially San Francisco expanded greatly (by 1880, San Francisco was the nation’s ninth largest city). By the turn of the century, however, its growth rate moderated considerably. It was no longer the “only Pacific port” in a storm, so to speak.

 

San Francisco never was demographically homogeneous. A magnet for fortune-seekers of all sorts, the city attracted a diverse citizenry from the beginning, and that diversity persisted into the twentieth century. Like its Northeastern/Mid-Atlantic Big City counterparts, San Francisco attracted foreign immigration—from China (Asians about 5% of the city’s population); by 1869 Chinatown formed into a neighborhood. As of 1900, 30 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, an additional 40 percent were second generation foreign immigrants (in descending order Irish, German, English, Italian and Jewish). Less than one-half percent were African-American.

 

In the suitcases of ethnic migrants were two items that affected future San Francisco public policy and economic development. First a desire to live together and form ethnic neighborhoods—and, second, a propensity to join unions. Ethnic neighborhoods (Mission Hills, for example) developed throughout the city and upper classes retreated to places like Nob Hill and Pacific Heights. San Francisco became one of the most unionized cities in the United States and labor-management issues soon polarized the local economy and San Francisco politics. The election of the famous Abe Ruef-Schmitz San Francisco machine (1902) was a polarizing dynamic. The machine, composed of ethnic voters, centered upon the Union-Labor party which controlled municipal politics through 1909.

 

Oakland prospered from this turmoil, in the sense that geographically it captured San Francisco’s departing middle class. Suburban-like in its initial settlement, Oakland offered affluent housing and neighborhoods, and quickly acquired an industrial base (canneries, breweries). Oakland aggressively annexed its peripheries (1897-1910), set up its own streetcar system—and invested in port facilities. By 1910 Oakland captured about 30 percent of the freight tonnage passing through the Golden Gate (Blackford, 1993, p. 16). After its Earthquake/fire (1906) many firms relocated from San Francisco. San Francisco by the end of the twentieth century’s first decade faced a home-grown urban competitor in its immediate back yard.

 

San Francisco stumbles on the City Beautiful Walkway

San Francisco is the West’s best candidate for inclusion as a Big City. The San Francisco Merchants Exchange, originally formed in 1866 by forty-seven bankers and merchants, became the city’s leading EDO. Within four years, it had enlisted over 1,000 members; its projects included street cleaning, lighting, and paving, a new public market area and enhanced fire protection. Its agenda mirrored Big City agendas back east. Responsible for municipal water supply infrastructure was the Real Estate Dealers Association (Exchange, 1897). Thirty, business-led, neighborhood improvement associations led the crusade to improve streets, public buildings, sewers, and the water supply (Blackford, 1993, p. 33). Physical upgrading and redevelopment was thought essential for business prosperity—and San Francisco would not be left behind when the Planning Movement and City Beautiful became economic development’s “latest and greatest”.

 

The leader of the turn of the century movement was James D. Phelan, a San Francisco-born son of a “Forty-Niner” who made his fortune in real estate, trade and banking. As Vice-President of California’s World Fair Commission, he managed California’s exhibit in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He returned determined to bring about similar redevelopment in San Francisco. He got elected Mayor and served for three terms, until 1901. In 1898 Phelan obtained approval for a new municipal charter establishing at large elections and providing authority for municipal ownership of water and other utilities. Phelan was San Francisco’s version of a Great Lake social reform mayor.

 

True to form Phelan pressed hard for both infrastructure and neighborhood programs. The essential tool required was issuance of municipal bonds which required a referendum. He sought bonding authority to finance a hospital, sewers, schools, streets, a library, a jail, and playground/parks improvements. Also an opera house civic auditorium, a music conservancy, flower/tree-planting, prohibition of overhead trolley car wires and construction of harbor improvements. The basis for all this stuff, of course, was the comprehensive plan which would “elevate the public taste” and serve as a “great advertisement for our city” (Blackford, 1993, pp. 40-1). Phelan had the support of the Merchants Association and the Public Improvement Central Club (created by the thirty neighborhood improvement clubs). Their objective was to bring the City Beautiful movement to San Francisco.

 

Despite pushing hard for several years to issue bonds, Phelan was unable, however, to secure bond financing. Trouble appeared from the Real Estate Exchange which believed bonds would increase taxes. So City Beautiful bond issues were voided on technicalities and when reapproved in 1904 no banker was willing to buy them. So a “meeting of about twenty gentlemen” set up the Association for the Improvement and the Adornment of San Francisco. AIASF was Progressivism personified; within a year its membership climbed to nearly 400:

 

The main objectives of AIASF are to promote … beautifying of streets, public buildings, parks, squares, and places of San Francisco; to bring to the attention … [to] the best methods for instituting artistic municipal improvements; to stimulate the sentiment of civic pride in the improvement and care of private property; to suggest quasi-public enterprises [utilities], and in short, make San Francisco a more agreeable city in which to live. (Blackford, 1993, p. 40)

 

AIASF, composed of bankers and the Merchants Association, convinced local banks to purchase City Beautiful bonds. Their immediate agenda were civic improvements such as an opera house, civic auditorium, music conservancy, street/boulevard improvements, parks—and a comprehensive plan for San Francisco.

 

Phelan, in 1904 as President of AIASF, had extended an offer to prepare the plan to our old friend Daniel Burnham. AIASF, streetcar companies and railroads would foot the bill. Burnham, completing his Washington DC plan, was mid-stream in Cleveland’s City Beautiful initiatives, but accepted nevertheless. He and his assistant Edward Bennett (who shortly after designed Portland’s comprehensive plan) came to San Francisco. Burnham and Bennett worked off and on through 1905 to write up the Plan, completing it in late 1905.

 

Burnham’s Plan proposed a series of concentric circles—with each circle playing a special role in the city’s social and economic life. A civic center was included. Wide concentric streets, arterials slicing diagonally, the Burnham Plan radically reconfigured San Francisco’s existing pattern.

 

At 5:14 A.M. on April 18, 1906, an earthquake, lasting less than a minute, leveled buildings and ruptured gas pipes and water mains. Fires spread throughout the city, burning for three days, destroying much of San Francisco: “almost five square miles encompassing the financial district, the major retail district, much of the wholesale, factor and entertainment sections of the city…. Burning an area one and one-half times as large as the great Chicago fire of 1871 … Between 500 and 3,000 people died, and another 250000, about three-fifths of the population were left homeless. (Blackford, 1993, p. 32)

 

“Damn the Earthquake and Machine–Full Speed Ahead”

The almost total destruction of the past’s built environment created an opportunity for the plan’s speedy approval and implementation. To the surprise of Burnham/AIASF the plan went nowhere. The city was eventually rebuilt with little correspondence to the outlines or principles of the Burnham plan. Why?

 

City Beautiful, however, had triggered an eruption from the unions (teamsters and waterfront) and ethnic voters who viewed City Beautiful initiatives as serving the interests of affluent business elites. A two month strike ensued, forcing Phelan to intervene—costing him the next election. That election brought to power the Union-Labor Party, headed by Eugene Schmitz. From then on, behind the scenes, Abe “Boss” Ruef ran city politics. San Francisco enjoyed machine government for the better part of a decade to follow. City Beautiful seemed still-born.

 

Relations between the machine and AIASF deteriorated further. Business elites, the core of AIASF, sparked investigations that led to indictments/trials–which threatened to end the machine and throw its bosses into jail. Suffice it to say, trust on both sides was lacking—and the Plan/funding went nowhere fast. A Committee was formed to review the plan and make recommendations. The review process extended for some time and broke down. “Street construction proved to be a particularly contentious issue, for until the locations of streets were fixed and the streets rebuilt, businesses could not fully resume operations. Merchants and other businessmen who had long supported planning now broke from it in the interest of getting back in business as soon as possible. Another divisive matter was the proposed extension of new strict ordinances governing the building of fireproof structures … to make San Francisco more secure against future blazes. The attempt led to vociferous opposition from small business owners … as too expensive. (Blackford, 1993, p. 49) The Merchants Exchange had second thoughts if the Plan could not be rapidly implemented. Time was money.

 

A third issue–building the civic center—proved contentious. Some businessmen thought it too expensive–San Francisco could not afford such a luxury—the City had burned down after all. This tapped an underlying fear of all business owners that Burnham’s Plan would play havoc with the city’s tax base, resulting in huge tax increases. Those opposed to the Plan continued to see it as serving business and upper class tastes while doing nothing concrete to address the needs of non-elites—affordable housing, for example, was totally left out of the Plan. The San Francisco Chronicle expressed it best. “Every individual in the city is practicing economy. So must the City itself…. There must be the strictest economy in government. We all desire the city beautiful just as we desire the home beautiful, but the business man who at this juncture should attempt to borrow money to decorate his home would knock in vain on the doors of any bank in America”. (Blackford, 1993, pp. 49-50) The City Beautiful had run into the crosshairs of the City Practical.

 

The trials of Schmitz and Ruef drew blood; both would go to jail. But in its wake, the city’s business leaders were hopelessly divided and conflicted. Construction and rebuilding commenced without Plan approval and seldom came close to following the Plan. Many in the business community, however, believed for a decade following city beautiful physical improvements, and beautification in general, was essential to “the commercial supremacy [of San Francisco] on the Pacific Coast”. The divisions among business, and the gulf between the business community, the unions, and ethnic workers lingered on for decades after—getting something done in San Francisco was going to be difficult indeed.

 

To facilitate business support for the City Beautiful, the San Francisco Chamber merged with the Merchants Exchange and Downtown Association (1912-13). The goal was to secure public approval of municipal bonds for desired infrastructure and the Burnham proposed civic center (city hall, auditorium and library). The civic center was defended as a link between ‘art and commerce’, without which San Francisco would not be considered as a “great city” to outsiders and unlikely able to compete in attracting external investment. The civic center was likened to Pericles’ Athenian Parthenon, which no doubt, increased its attractiveness to ethnic voters (sarcasm again). Anyway, the Chamber President stressing that “We’d better … take a few lessons in civic pride and patriotism from our sister cities on the coast, and get busy” (Blackford, 1993, p. 57) to install infrastructure. The campaign finally worked, bonds were approved, and construction began two years later.

 

San Francisco than focused on its 1915 World’s Fair (the Panama-Pacific International Exposition) to demonstrate San Francisco had indeed overcome the devastating Earthquake and to asset regional leadership over its coastal competitors. Four years later the city held the Balboan Exposition to follow up on the 1915 World’s Fair success. Public improvements again became the targeted focus. By this time, the machine had been ousted and business leadership once again had returned to City Hall. Civic improvement associations formed to support and to create “a new, clean city. Business prosperity, industrial peace, and increased commerce”. The critical infrastructure after the civic center success was to “call the attention of the world to this powerful western empire and its chief city and glorious harbor” (Vice-President of Chamber) (Blackford, 1993, pp. 59, 61) Discussion on the harbor will be picked up later in the chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

[i] San Francisco port centered on a state-operated immigrant center (300,000 Chinese 1850-1882). Chinese immigration was legal (the Burlingame Treaty) although limited (non-citizenship).

San Francisco: the Weberian Ideal Type

San Francisco is an ideal “ideal type” for the culture/system change that characterized western cities. San Francisco (like Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Santa Monica) was an “extreme”, an outlier—not typical of Sunbelt cultures—but contained most of the elements found to some extent in Sunbelt cities.

 

San Francisco’s pre-1970 policy system reflected old-style, city efficient structural progressivism. The city council retained considerable power, at large and nonpartisan elections weakened political parties, allowing mavericks to gain power, but also favored traditional business elites and CBD economic development. Boomers contested this pressing for district/ward elections that fostered decentralized neighborhood level policy-making. In the West especially, they used initiative and referendum to affect state and municipal policy-making. San Francisco (DeLeon, 1992) developed a “hyper pluralism” that resulted from (1) a powerful neighborhood movement, (2) crumbling of the downtown business-dominated progrowth coalition, (3) weakness of labor unions, and (4) the rise of ethnic, racial and sexual identity politics. Fewer in number, however, post-1970 African-American migrants were more skilled/involved in political mobilization and able to elect representatives to all levels of government. Initially, blacks exercised superior access to Sunbelt local policy-making, but that “primacy” was increasingly challenged by other ethnics and identity groups. Sunbelt immigrants were more likely to be Hispanic/Latinos or Asian.

 

Latinos, many of whom were noncitizens and marginally English language literate, did not aggressively participate in local politics in these early years. But where they did, in San Antonio, for example, they demonstrated their ability to exercise influence over the community policy system. A prime example, Miami Cubans have become an important element in the city’s political life. Asians, unevenly spread out throughout the Sunbelt, participated in San Francisco and urban Pacific Coast politics. Although Chinese have traditionally been the largest Asian ethnic group, during this period a large number of Southeast Asian, and East Asian immigrants also established residence. A third identity grouping, Gay and Lesbian groups, also rose in prominence during these years.(in 1990 they constituted an estimated 16% of the San Francisco electorate). Cohesive and intensely involved in political life and policy-making Gay and Lesbian groups exercised considerable clout in San Francisco especially.

 

Recourse to initiatives and referendum create a vehicle for political change as evident in the page-turning “1986 Proposition M”. While America was turning “to the right” with Proposition 78 and former California Governor Reagan, San Francisco moved in a decidedly progressive direction under Mayors Moscone, Milk and Feinstein. Their progressivist policy thrust stressed

 

Consumption rather than production, residence more than workplace, meaning more than materialism, community empowerment more than class struggle. Its first priority … protection of the city’s environment, architectural heritage, neighborhoods, diversity and overall quality of life … politicized and democratized the planning process, … spurned the dictates of investor [business] prerogative, severely restricted business use … [replaced] the progrowth coalition of downtown business elites, labor unions and city hall officials that [had] controlled the city’s economic and physical development for a quarter of a century. (DeLeon 2)

 

 

The variety and power of these ethnic and sexual identity groups produced San Francisco’s hyper-pluralism, an almost chaotic, issue by issue, election by election, referendum-prone policy-making. Whatever else may be said, this hyper-pluralism demonstrated how radically political culture could be reconfigured through population mobility.

 

Hyper pluralism is not typical of Sunbelt cities—it is an extreme decentralization of urban policy-making to neighborhoods combined with the entry of new policy actors challenged, and changed the old pre-1970 CBD-business “growth” policy system. Sunbelt ethnic/identity politics exhibiting a distinctive evolution through 1990 that distinguished these cities from former hegemonic Big Cities whose politics were mostly driven by an African-American electorate. San Francisco’s policy system, increasingly dominated by its ethnic and sexual identity groups, lost, to some degree, the environmental/quality of life motif that played a more pronounced role in ED policy in most Sunbelt cities where ethnic and sexual groups were less impactful.

 

Such environmental, quality of life, ethnic/racial and identity groups were rooted in “Big Sort” neighborhoods. Big Sort neighborhoods made their presence felt in municipal policy systems and economic/community development policies and strategies.

 

San Francisco

Fainstein Unopposed clearance, pp216-219,