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This chapter attempts to understand why effective regional action on segregation and resegregation never materialized. Despite improved planning and cross-sectoral cooperation, major interventions that could possibly have changed the direction of the region did not occur. Imagining an effective regional politics capable of solving the regions' segregation and equity problems was considered a political impossibility almost from the beginning, so deep were the divisions even amidst increasing collaboration, so heavy were the ghosts of past failures. The one policy arena where the region was able to overcome its broad fragmentation and political inertia was the one area where it has long been a world leader—environmental protection. In 2016, virtually the entire region, its voters and its leaders, voted in a historic fashion to tax themselves to pay for much-needed wetlands restoration. Overcoming segregation and spatial inequality was another matter.

This chapter focuses on the emergence and spread of various counter-cultures in the 1960s. Counter-cultures began to emerge around 1965 in California's Bay Area, and quickly spread eastward, to New York, reaching London and Amsterdam in 1966, and eventually meeting in the Pacific in Sydney and Auckland. In the short run, the most obvious point was that large numbers of young people — as one aspect of a wider rebellion against conventional society — were breaking away from the churches in which they had been brought up. In the longer term, the more significant fact was that in breaking away they became open to a huge variety of new ideas, many of which were to have a continuing influence in the latter part of the century. Many of these apparently new ideas were actually quite old, but until the 1960s they had not been widely known.

This chapter lays out the case for understanding the transformation of the Bay Area as segregation, and for transforming our understanding of segregation. It begins with a brief introduction to the history of diversity in the Bay Area, one of the first regions to be born as multiracial in what was at that time a very two-tone America. It then turns to the question of segregation, starting with how what became known as the “suburban wall” helped form ideas of segregation. It examines how segregation has changed, moving beyond debates about whether American is still segregated, and instead focusing on what segregation means in the twenty-first century. It argues that the partial erosion of the “suburban wall” does not mean segregation is dead, but simply that it has changed form and geography.

This chapter focuses on Altamont Pass, home of one of the largest wind farms in the world. The Altamont is also a gateway between the valley and the Bay Area, a 741-foot-high pass through the grassy hills that separates two regions and unifies a megaregion simultaneously. The Altamont Pass is not just a line between the traditional, formal Bay Area and the Central Valley, but a key marker of a more troubling frontier—the line between Democrat and Republican, between red and blue. Party affiliation predicts little in terms of whether your city embraced exclusion or unhealthy growth. But the stark political divide between the two sides of the pass is just another barrier working against a more equal fusion of two proud regions. There is also little to report in terms of concerted efforts at making the megaregion work politically or infrastructurally.

Chapter 4 chronicles the author’s return to her home area after five years, now as a professional dancer-choreographer. She establishes her professional reputation in the Bay Area, one that will serve as the foundation of her future work as a regional dance catalyst and cultural activist. As an artist, she develops the artistic theme central to her developing career in The Evolution of Black Dance. She creates and produces several evening-length productions during this three-year period, begins to learn arts administration, and forms Halifu Productions, a company that helped catalyse the mid-70s black dance scene in the Bay Area. She also meets the poet Ntozake Shange and artistically collaborates with her and her poems on a project that will become the famous production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enough. Ntozake Shange gives her an African name, and the author becomes Halifu Osumare.

This introductory chapter explains the book's core arguments. The first core argument is that the profound changes in the race and class geography of the San Francisco Bay Area is fundamentally about segregation. The second core argument is that this new form and map of segregation, and the foreclosure crisis it helped to enable, was produced by the highly specific way in which the politics of space and place during the more recent era reacted to the ghosts of postwar urbanism. What has occurred is not simply some path-dependent aftermath of the postwar era, the result of a postwar model destined to fail. Nor is it simply the result of neoliberalism or bad decisions in the 1980s and beyond. Rather, it is the end result of a “neoliberal era,” that period from the mid-1970s until the foreclosure crisis of 2008, built on the ghosts of the postwar era.

This chapter argues that had political leaders and a broad coalition of interest groups truly wanted to heal both wounds from the postwar era—racialized segregation and environmental destruction—far more could have been done. The utterly broken politics of urbanization and development in the Bay Area became and remain a useful excuse from varying political sides, a way of abdicating responsibility in the face of history. Building a new, more unified politics of development will take time. It will require rethinking who plans and who is a planner, and the very role of urban development in the economy as a whole. It means abandoning some of the normative baggage with which places and housing choices are judged, and ensuring that everyone's place and everyone's home is as secure and risk-free as possible. It will also require a renewed commitment to combating exploitation in all aspects of metropolis-building.

In the period immediately following World War II, the federal government made tremendous investments in urban renewal and highway infrastructure. Many of the city's largest downtown-based corporations formed a lobbying group--the San Francisco Planning and Urban Renewal Association (SPUR)--that succeeded in controlling how and where this money would be spent. The downtown planning regime's priorities were freeways and the eradication of “blight.” The Mission District was slated for three freeways, though officials judged that two of them would cause too much damage to land values and tax revenues. The planning regime also quietly planned two Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) stations for the Mission. Neighborhood groups had little success influencing the process, but planning energies were not moribund. Indeed, the neighborhood planning traditions that dated back to the Progressive Era survived in remarkably similar form.

This chapter focuses primarily on Richmond and Oakland and the military-industrial spaces of the Bay Area, on important African American places that struggled with the long legacy of ghettoized segregation and its geographic relationship to highways and heavy industry. It examines the struggles of downtown development, brownfield redevelopment, and the lost opportunity that has been the redevelopment of the old military bases. It examines the interlinked violence of air pollution and homicide that plagued these communities, part of a set of issues which the fiscally challenged cities were unable to meet. In doing so, it highlights the same mix of local responsibility and collective failure that marked the previous chapters. But it also discusses a profound dilemma particular to these communities.

Visitors to the San Francisco Bay Area often note the lack of a Jewish neighborhood similar to Los Angeles's Fairfax District or Chicago's Devon Avenue. But in earlier days there were four traditional Jewish areas: South of Market, the San Bruno Avenue area, Fillmore-McAllister, and West Oakland. There was also a rural Jewish colony composed of chicken farmers in Petaluma. These communities were filled with East European Jews—not the half Germans from Prussian Poland who had arrived in the decades after the Gold Rush, but Yiddish-speaking immigrants mostly from Russia, Austria-Hungary, or Rumania. In addition to housing a high concentration of Jews, the urban enclaves were home to synagogues and minyanim (worship groups that met in private homes), kosher butchers and bakeries, mutual aid societies, and Hebrew schools. Orthodox abounded, but there were also socialists, communists, Yiddishists, and Zionists. These Jewish neighborhoods added up to something greater than the sum of their parts, and children in these areas—whether they felt nurtured or smothered—grew up with a keen sense of Jewish identity.

Halifu Osumare presents a regional history of African dance in the United States, focusing on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area from the 1960s to the present. Beginning with the first cohort of local Dunham-trained dance instructors in the 1950s and 1960s to more contemporary instructors hailing directly from the African continent. She analyzes how African and African diasporic dance traditions became important fixtures in the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, becoming powerful tools in teaching social justice through various community programs and dance companies that extended from Ghana, the Congo, Senegal, and Liberia into that region. Osumare’s research traces the formation of artistic lineages, while offering insights about the local impact of African dance instruction as a narrative history of how the Bay Area became a regional powerhouse in the African dance field.

This chapter introduces readers to North Indian classical kathak dance as developed and transmitted by Pandit Chitresh Das. After grounding readers in basic concepts relevant to kathak and the related Hindustani music system, the chapter provides an overview of Pandit Das’s career, based in Northern California’s San Francisco Bay Area. In his 1990 choreographic work, Impressions of California Goldrush, the gold rush symbolized his own westward journey, and explored themes of relocation and adaptation central both to Pandit Das’s immigrant experiences and kathak’s broader history. The chapter concludes with a reflexive account of the author’s involvement with this dance community as a student, unofficial disciple, ethnographer, and musician.

This chapter describes craigslist's transformation from an e-mail list to a massively popular online marketplace. It starts with the role of the San Francisco Bay Area in the development of craigslist's purpose and ideology. During this early phase of the tech industry, democratic values of openness and access held sway, values that have shaped craigslist's look and feel ever since. Using interviews and textual analysis of craigslist's public-facing blog, the chapter describes the site's basic features and rules, as well as the company's values and policies. The goal here is to explain how the San Francisco tech scene shaped craigslist's ideas about online publics and politics.

This chapter illuminates how the production of vulnerability proceeds through—and is supported by—interconnected economic development and resource use activities across city and regional scales. It explores the connection between lucrative resource extraction, realty speculation, reforestation, and home construction activities in the Tunnel Fire area. These Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire activities and resulting forms of vulnerability are linked to the development of the San Francisco Bay Area. The historically resource-rich Oakland Hills “countryside” played a crucial role in shaping and facilitating San Francisco's post-Gold Rush economic ascendance. These resource-provisioning activities generated roadways that several decades later fell under the speculative eye of housing developers in search of suburban homes and vacation retreats for the region's new elite. This transition from resource extraction to real estate speculation was instantiated in the landscape, as several logging paths in Oakland became arterial roads populated by municipal infrastructure, flammable tree cover, and eventually a vast collection of new home developments in high fire risk areas.

Shilts settles on concept that gay bathhouses in San Francisco are breeding ground for the emerging AIDS crisis and should be closed. Shilts’s reporting draws fire from gay community leaders who view bathhouses as key component to sexual freedom of homosexuals. Shilts admits to coordinated effort to time his AIDS-related stories for highest impact, including forthcoming 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Shilts breaks Chronicle story that Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro will be first woman nominated for Vice President. Troubled relationship develops between Shilts and Dr. Mervin Silverman, the county health officer and Harry Britt, openly gay supervisor who succeeded Milk. Letters to the gay press cast Shilts as “uncle Tom” and sell-out. Bathhouse owners accuse Shilts of “advocacy reporting.”

This chapter discusses the methods and positionality used in this ethnographic study on the processes by which Chinese American and white adoptive parents negotiate Chineseness and Chinese culture within the context of racial and class politics. Drawing primarily on interviews combined with participant observation and focus group discussions involving more than seventy-five individuals, the chapter explores the views of adoptive parents in St. Louis, Missouri, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, regarding adoption as well as issues of Chinese and Chinese American culture. The chapter provides an overview of the adoptive families in the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area, along with transnational and transracial adoption.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of the civic engagement of Filipino migrants through religion by showing how the Filipino migrant faithful Filipinize elements of the cultural, political, and economic arenas within the San Francisco Bay Area cities and towns in which they have settled. The book provides a contrarian case to the prevailing assumption that religion and spirituality are diminishing in the rich developed countries of the world and flourishing only in poor developing countries. The empirical evidence gathered during the research for this book suggests that religion and spirituality in rich developed countries, like the United States, are being boosted by new migrant faithful from poor developing countries, like the Philippines. The remainder of the chapter discusses why the Filipino migrant religious experience is important to America; where religion is situated in the life of a Filipino migrant; and how Filipinization should be understood in San Francisco history.

This chapter examines the introduction of Mario Savio to the civil rights movement and the roots of the Fee Speech Movement (FSM). It discusses Savio's participation in the Mississippi Summer Project in April 1964 and describes a series of demonstrations that rocked the San Francisco Bay Area from October 1963 through to the summer of 1964 led by Martin Luther King Jr. It explains that these protests broke the ground for the FSM by sensitizing students to civil rights and providing a model for action.

By the mid 1970s radical gay men were building a gay left and forging alliances with lesbians. They sharpened their politics through socialist feminism and Chilean solidarity, confronted police brutality, and challenged racism in gay men's life. The organization Bay Area Gay Liberation built grassroots power while the Third World Gay Caucus networked gay and lesbian people of color. While gay and lesbian leftists pursued anti-imperialism over liberal reform, by the late 1970s they also joined strategic left-liberal coalitions against the New Right. Radicals played key roles in defeating the Briggs Initiative's attack on gay and lesbian teachers, and though unable to stop a death penalty measure, evidenced resistance to state violence in the White Night Riots.