San Francisco’s proposed reparation payments to eligible Black residents could cost the city over $100 billion dollars, the New York Times reported Friday.
San Francisco’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee unveiled its recommendation in January, arguing that the city owed millions of dollars in compensation to Black residents for decades of discrimination.
“The $5 million payments could top $100 billion — many times the $14 billion annual budget in San Francisco — and London Breed, the city’s mayor, has not committed to cash reparations,” the Times said.
A local activist lamented the city’s “urban renewal” period in the 1960s and ’70s was the city’s own “apartheid” against Black residents. San Francisco’s Black population shrank from 13 percent in 1970 to about 5 percent in 2023, “driven first by cycles of redevelopment and then by the gentrifying forces of tech employers,” the Times explained.Â
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However, the high cost is viewed as “unrealistic” for a city already struggling with its budget and a lack of agreement over the issue, the Times said.
The committee’s chair, consultant Eric McDonnell, told The Washington Post the $5 million number came as a result of a “journey” rather than a “math formula.”
“There wasn’t a math formula. It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed,” he said.
McDonnell admitted figuring out how to afford the payments was not the committee’s goal. “Our mission was not a feasibility study,” he said. “It was, assess the harm, assign the value.”
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Another activist who successfully pushed for reparations in Evanston, Illinois told…
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