San Francisco Board Open To $5-M Each For Reparations

Payments of $5 million to every eligible Black adult, the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, guaranteed annual incomes of at least $97,000 for 250 years and homes in San Francisco for just $1 a family.

Photo Insert: The draft reparations plan is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth.

These were some of the more than 100 recommendations made by a city-appointed reparations committee tasked with the thorny question of how to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism, Janie Har reported for the Associated Press (AP).

And the San Francisco Board of Supervisors hearing the report for the first time Tuesday voiced support for the ideas listed.

Several supervisors said they were surprised to hear pushback from politically liberal San Franciscans unaware that the legacy of slavery and racist policies continues to keep Black Americans on the bottom rungs of health, education, and economic prosperity but overrepresented in prisons and homeless populations.

“Those of my constituents who lost their minds about this proposal, it’s not something we’re doing or we would do for other people. It’s something we would do for our future, for everybody’s collective future,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the heavily LGBTQ Castro neighborhood.

The draft reparations plan is unmatched nationwide in its specificity and breadth. Critics have slammed the plan as financially and politically impossible. An estimate from Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, which leans conservative, has said it would cost each non-Black family in the city at least $600,000.

Under San Francisco’s draft recommendation, a person would have to be at least 18 years old and have identified as “Black/African American” in public documents for at least 10 years.

Eligible people must also meet two of eight other criteria, though the list may change.

Those criteria include being born in or migrating to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and living in the city for at least 13 years; being displaced from the city by urban renewal between 1954 and 1973, or being the descendant of someone who was; attending the city’s public schools before they were fully desegregated; or being a descendant of an enslaved person.

The Chicago suburb of Evanston became the first US city to fund reparations. The city gave money to qualifying people for home repairs, down payments and interest or late penalties due on property. In December, the Boston City Council approved of a reparations study task force.

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