Part II: Market (Street) Disruption: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fires

By Cole Manley

***This piece is adapted from an essay I wrote for a History course at UC Davis. Part I highlighted the city planners. This part highlights the resistance to their planning.***

The Western Addition

For labor, rapid reconstruction signaled the death of many working-class neighborhoods, and this can be seen most clearly in the Western Addition. Though it survived the earthquake and the fires relatively unscathed, the neighborhood succumbed to a man-made disaster that was enabled by the rapid reconstructionists. With the Mission and the South of Market neighborhoods devastated, working class San Franciscans found few refuges in the urban landscape. The Western Addition was one of the only areas they could go in search of cheap housing.

Capitalists and landlords profited from this scarcity. In the Western Addition, property owners “turned homes into lodging houses, cramming tenants into every available room and basement, and rented space to workshops, stores, and even dangerous industries.” The neighborhood became a massive relief camp for the city’s working poor, but a relief camp which substituted cramped living quarters and unsanitary conditions for actual aid. It is no surprise that, decades later, the Western Addition was a redlined neighborhood where the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) considered real estate “financially unstable,” and where banks denied loans to Western Addition residents. As Roz Murray explains in an essay on “African American Segregation in San Francisco,” the Western Addition was one of several heavily non-white neighborhoods.

San Francisco’s racial segregation can be traced back to the unequal development unleashed in the Western Addition following the 1906 disaster. During the post-World War II period, the racial and class logic of city planners paralleled post-earthquake planners decades earlier. Postwar planners did not reference, nor did they realize, the impact that post-earthquake planning had on unequal and unjust development.

For instance, in 1945, the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association (SFPHA)--a corollary to the Burnham contingency of the 1900s--identified the Western Addition as a prime space for “urban renewal,” explaining in racist language that the neighborhood “is not white. It is gray, brown, and an indeterminate shade of dirty black… it is an unfortunate blot” on the city. The Western Addition then faced another round of “reconstruction,” during which “blighted” areas were destroyed and non-white San Franciscans evicted.

Historically speaking, this was a process that had been kickstarted by the under-development of the Western Addition in the aftermath of 1906. Residents of the Western Addition simply did not have the financial or institutional access to loans or governmental assistance that would have enabled more equal development and social services.

If many working class residents were expelled from the city center, then what took their place? Rozario cites that, as the Western Addition expanded, the city’s financial district swelled in land area by 44 percent, consuming formerly working-class neighborhoods. The imperial financial district hastened the de-industrialization of San Francisco, as industries left for Oakland and other parts of the Bay Area, “[s]urrendering the city center to banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions.”

By the metric of population, San Francisco recovered quickly. Its population had recovered to its pre-disaster level of 400,000 within three years. Yet the spatial, environmental, and physical changes created by the rapid reconstructionists were lasting and significant. Before 1906, most San Franciscans lived near where they worked, and participated more closely in the civic life of the booming city. After, many found themselves in unfamiliar neighborhoods far away from their employment, if they still had a job. Here, in the margins of San Francisco, the working class survivors of the disaster lived out man-made disasters that proceeded over a much longer period of time.

The Case of Chinatown

While the Western Addition suffered most directly from the rapid reconstructionists, Chinatown presented a different case study in working class mobilization and survival. Following the earthquake, city politicians such as Phelan aimed to destroy Chinatown and evict Chinese San Franciscans from their former residences and workplaces. The historian Andrea Rees Davies has found that white reformers attempted to accomplish this through the design of a Chinese relief camp, where Chinese refugees would be separated and segregated from all other refugees. Davies argues that “[t]he Chinese relief camp reconstituted racialized boundaries to promote two distinct goals: segregating the Chinese and excising Chinatown from post-disaster San Francisco.” The camp was first located near North Beach, but Phelan found this too close to lucrative downtown real estate. Upon his objections, the camp was relocated to the Presidio, on the city outskirts.

As early as 1853, white San Francisco political and business leaders had tried to expel Chinese people from the city. That year, there was a proposal in the Alta California newspaper to relocate Chinese people elsewhere. Joanna Dyl adds that the idea “periodically resurfaced over subsequent decades.” During this period, Chinatown was continually described in the language of the time as a den of vice, and as a neighborhood unfit for modern San Francisco.

Following the earthquake, Chinese refugees resisted their expulsion from the city by relying upon mutual aid organizations, pre-existing family and kinship ties, and connections to Chinese immigrants in other American cities. In particular, Chinese refugees organized food shipments through the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations (CCBAs), organizations of Chinese immigrants in cities across the country. The CCBAs represented a critical source of financial capital and humanitarian aid for Chinese refugees, who received little aid from city government. The CCBAs also used their financial leverage to lobby city politicians against the destruction of Chinatown. Davies cites that “[t]he CCBA’s threat to relocate San Francisco’s lucrative Chinatown to another city was taken seriously and civic leaders agreed to Chinatown’s return to the city.”

The resiliency of Chinatown was particularly impressive given that most Chinese people in the city did not own property, but instead rented from white landlords. In her Ph.D. thesis, Erica Ying Zi Pan determined that in 1905 just thirty of 505 Chinatown property owners were Chinese. How did Chinese renters mobilize so effectively? Partly, they benefited from the race tax they had to pay in order to rent in Chinatown in the first place. In his study of race, public health, and epidemics in San Francisco, the historian Nayan Shah found that white landlords profited from Chinese tenants because they exacted a race tax in charging Chinese tenants more than if they had rented the same properties to white people. Shah concludes that white landlords were “fearful of losing Chinese tenants who paid premium rents.”

In the isolated case of Chinatown, refugees showcased their ability to resist white political and business leaders by leveraging relief networks that were independent from city oversight. While the disaster of 1906 resulted in creative destruction in many parts of the city center, the survival of Chinatown was a consequence of the united power of an organized network of renters. To this day, Chinatown remains an enclave for working class communities, albeit communities increasingly threatened by the rising prices of real estate.

Conclusions

The case of Chinatown illustrates that processes of urban development in San Francisco have long been hotly contested along lines of race and class. San Francisco’s social and political landscapes were not tabula rasa for the capitalist dreams of upper class planners such as Burnham, Phelan, or Manson. While they marshalled significant financial and political power, these planners recognized that their power faced many limits, from political infighting to the threat of a united labor movement in the city. Even as grandiose a planner as Burnham was relatively circumspect in estimating that his plan for beautification would have to proceed in stages, and would likely last some 50 years.

Going forward, scholarship must continue to probe the urban and political development of San Francisco by drawing upon the theoretical tools of racial capitalism and creative destruction. In American Babylon, Robert Self investigated in detail the historical processes by which Oakland was under-developed and its suburbs over-developed. Similar studies need to be written about San Francisco and the development of its neighborhoods, such as the Western Addition. In this work, it is useful to recall Self’s argument that “[w]e cannot separate historical actors from their spatial relationships. Class and race are lived through the fabric of urban life and space.”

In the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake and fires, San Francisco’s built environment was a battleground. It was a battleground that saw the forces of capital united against labor and against immigrant communities in the city. The spatial politics of San Francisco today bear some connection to the processes of unequal development and destruction that the 1906 disaster unleashed. In thinking about housing justice today, it may well be fruitful to take an historical approach to San Francisco, and to focus on the post-earthquake period. In doing so, there will very likely be insights into the racial, class, and political traditions that continue to shape the city.

Appendix A: San Francisco’s Racial Segregation as of 2010

In the above map, you can see how neighborhoods in San Francisco remain racially segregated. Chinatown persists, and it is shown above as the area of bright red in the northeast corner of the city. The map uses 2010 census data. See: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=File:Racial-distribution-map-2010-san-francisco.jpg

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