Full City: Gentrification, Hope VI, and the End of Public Housing Communities in San Francisco: 1970-2003

by Lorenzo Gomez

While many blame San Francisco's gentrification solely on forces within the private market, this book examines how it was actually government programs and initiatives, such as Hope VI, that displaced thousands of African American, Latino, Asian, and working class families from San Francisco. The history of this struggle is chronologically detailed, starting with the housing wars that began in the 1970s in the Western Addition. The author concludes that to aide the ongoing gentrification occurring in certain San Francisco neighborhoods in the 1990s, the Hope VI program was implemented to destroy the large public housing communities then existent within them and remove their predominantly low income and minority populations. Although this targeted and depleted the African American community primarily, it also affected other communities such as Latinos in the Mission, Southeast Asians in the Tenderloin, and San Francisco's working class. This book gives an account of this history as well as of these public housing communities' organization in the face of adversity from politicians, the media, and their gentrifying neighborhoods to survive.