St. Francis Square, How a Union Built Integrated, Affordable Housing in San Francisco

by Peter Cole

Peter Cole is a Professor of History at Western Illinois University. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and currently at work on a book entitled Dockworker Power: Race, Technology, and Unionism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In the 1960s, battles over racial equality and “urban renewal” ripped San Francisco apart. Beginning the decade prior, residents of the Fillmore, the only black-majority part of the city, suffered from a “slum clearance” program, labeled “Negro removal” by the legendary writer and activist James Baldwin. In response, a small but powerful labor union—the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, or ILWU[1]— attacked the city’s lack of affordable housing and pervasive residential segregation. In the heart of San Francisco, this union financed an integrated housing development for working-class people. The 299-unit St. Francis Square housing cooperative opened in 1964 to little fanfare, but for the working class and ethnically diverse people who bought into the cooperative, it was a dream. More than fifty years later, St. Francis remains a vibrant, self-consciously diverse community of non-elite homeowners in a city again facing intense gentrification.

Before World War II, very few blacks lived in San Francisco or anywhere else in the Bay Area. African-Americans made up, literally, less than 1 percent of San Franciscans and only about 3 percent of Oaklanders. All that changed during World War II in what Marilynn S. Johnson called the second gold rush for work in shipbuilding. This migration to the Bay Area echoed national trends in which blacks fled the Jim Crow South for cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and, increasingly, the West.

Alas, blacks found California far from the “Promised Land.” Many whites in the Bay Area embraced white supremacy, making the black experience in the San Francisco Bay Area quite difficult. Especially after the war ended and the economy slowed, African-Americans found jobs hard to come by and experienced widespread housing discrimination. Even Willie Mays, the future Hall of Famer of San Francisco’s Giants, could not purchase a house in one affluent area due to restrictive covenants. As in other U.S. cities, blacks became ghettoized: forced to live in overcrowded, low-quality housing in areas suffering from pervasive police brutality and racism in the judicial system, along with underfunded schools and hospitals. In San Francisco, the Fillmore (part of but also sometimes called the Western Addition) became a black ghetto.

After World War II, U.S. cities experienced massive suburbanization as millions of white city dwellers became suburbanites. Kenneth Jackson outlines what drove this shift in Crabgrass Frontier: Americans’ desire for freestanding, single-family houses surrounded by grass lawns; profit-seeking real estate and construction industries; the automobile; government financing of highways and subsidies for home owners. However, “white flight”—the fear of living in diverse cities—played perhaps the most significant role.

In the 1950s and ’60s, white flight caused economic and political elites at both urban and national levels to fear for the future of cities, especially real estate values. They embarked upon an initiative to attack “urban blight” by engaging in “slum clearance,” supposedly to help the downtrodden. In the words of one defender of this establishment liberal viewpoint, “The primary function of urban renewal is to improve the lives of the urban poor.” ...

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