• 140, mostly elderly black Evanston residents will receive $25,000 in reparations
• Chicago committed to $10 million over the next 10 years on local reparations
• Payments can come in either vouchers or cash and are funded by marijuana and real-estate transfer taxes. The program will be a ‘test run for the whole country’

A city in Illinois is expected to pay 140 mostly elderly black residents $25,000 each in reparations by the end of the year in what it is calling a ‘test run for the whole country.’

In 2019, Evanston, a city of 75,000 people north of Chicago, committed to paying $10 million over the next 10 years in local reparations and it has started to deliver on that promise nearly four years later.

First approved in March of 2021, the program will benefit black residents if they, or their ancestors, lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 or if they can show they suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies. 

It comes as black communities across the U.S. have rallied to help compensate for the legacy of slavery and discrimination they believe has become entrenched within society.

Robin Simmons (pictured), the then-city council member representing the fifth ward, paved the road to reparations in 2019 – four years later the city is delivering on its promise

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Louis Weathers – a recipient of the $25,000 – recalled the first experience he faced with racial prejudice. 

The 88-year-old retired postal worker and Korean War veteran claimed the white teacher at his integrated junior high school would make it difficult for black students to show up their white peers.

‘Every time we raised our hand, she wouldn’t call on us, but when we didn’t raise our hands, she would — to make you look like a dummy,’ Weathers said. 

‘We got onto that, though. When we didn’t know the answer, we raised our hands.’

Weathers will be among the first to benefit from the program which seeks to pay residents for discrimination and housing – but also works to address gaps in education and economic development.

The payments, which come in either vouchers or cash, are funded by marijuana and real-estate transfer taxes and are expected to lead the country, according to supporters.

‘I see it as like a test run for the whole country,’ Justin Hansford, a leading advocate for reparations at the federal and local level and head of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University told the outlet.

Apart from his time in junior high, Weathers claims he was discriminated in many aspects of his life.

He recalls being excluded from the YMCA, living most his life in the historically black fifth ward – only being allowed to move to a predominantly white neighborhood in 1969 when the laws changed.

Kenneth Wideman, 77, and his sister Shelia Wideman, 75, were among 16 of the first recipients of the program

And when hoping to purchase a home in a white neighborhood, he was forced to threaten a complaint to the real-estate board if the agent didn’t allow him to purchase the home.

Weathers said that he gave his $25,000 to his son, who put it towards debt reduction and upgrades to his condo.

Last month, a task force in California recommended spending billions on reparations as proposals for the rest of the country sit idle.

Meanwhile, a federal bill introduced every year since 1989 that would establish a similar task force at the national level has never been voted on in the House of Representatives.

Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss told the Wall Street Journal that this hasn’t affected the city’s momentum on the issue.

‘Our job here is just to move forward and to continue being that example, to continue illustrating that a small municipality can make real tangible progress,’ he said.

Robin Simmons, the then-city council member representing the fifth ward, paved the road to reparations. 

The fifth ward has historically faced challenges concerning distribution of resources in the City of Evanston, according to the city’s website.

A majority of the population within the ward identify as people of color, while 12 percent of the population of the city is black. 

Simmons mostly considered reparations a national issue dealing directly with slavery but later realized local policies such as zoning undermined predominantly black neighborhoods like the fifth ward.

‘We’ve done all forms of affirmative action and equity work that has been really good, but we have not repaired the past harm by the municipal government,’ she told the publication. 

The program will benefit black residents if they, or their ancestors, lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 or if they can show they suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies Federal reparations efforts have stalled for decades, but cities, counties, school districts and universities have taken up the cause

In November 2019, the city passed its plan to spend $10 million on reparations with more than 670 residents having applied.

In 2021, 16 people were chosen at random with the use of a bingo cage but it remains unclear when the first payments were made.

Siblings, Kenneth Wideman, 77, and Shelia Wideman, 75, were among the 16 – but while others received their reparations in a timely manner, the Widemans were somewhat left in the lurch – due to program architects’ decision to forgo direct payouts in lieu of grants to address diminished black homeownership at the time.

Since the siblings didn’t own any property, they did not qualify for two of three of the repayment options – to use the $25,000 either on mortgage payments, or home repairs.

The third option was a down payment for a new home – a choice the siblings flouted in favor of cash. 

For months, they besieged members of the committee and city to reconsider their stipulations, leading them to toss them in May. 

Evanston voted to allow the siblings to get cash payments of $25,000, making them the first in the US to receive direct money.

Wideman told the Wall Street Journal ‘we have not received real reparations, the 40 acres and a mule’ that were promised after the Civil War.

‘I wish people behind me would get that and more than what I got.’

Simmons said the new cash option has reduced the amount of staff work need to disburse the funds. 

It has however questioned the affect it may have on recipients ability for other aid programs – an issue the committee are currently working through.

The committee is currently in the process of verifying more than 500 direct descendants of the initial 140 recipients.

Ramona Burton, 74, said she would use her $25,000 voucher for new windows, a new roof, chimney repairs and an updated electric system for her home.

‘I think it’s a good start,’ she said of Evanston’s program. ‘It’s better than a blank.’

Federal reparations efforts have stalled for decades, but cities, counties, school districts and universities have taken up the cause.

An advisory group in San Francisco recommended that qualifying black adults receive a $5 million lump-sum, guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness.

San Francisco supervisors are supposed to take up the proposals later this year. But it is currently battling a separate set of problems, including an exodus of businesses in the downtown area amid crime, homelessness and drug abuse.

New York may soon follow in California by creating a commission to examine the state’s involvement in slavery and consider addressing present-day economic and educational disparities experienced by black people.

An advisory group in San Francisco recommended that qualifying black adults receive a $5 million lump-sum, guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness Earlier this week, Native American groups joined the call for reparations centuries after hundreds of tribes had land taken from them by ‘land-grab universities and colleges’

In California, the state’s Reparations Task Force – which released its 1,100-page final report and recommendations to the public on 29 June – and a University of California, Los Angeles study found that roughly two-thirds of Californians are in favor of some form of reparations, though residents are divided on what they should be. 

Roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose the idea of reparations, according to 2021 polling from the University of Massachusetts.

The Pew Research Center found that more than 80 percent of black respondents support some kind of compensation for the descendants of slaves, while a similar majority of white respondents opposed, 2022 polling found.

Earlier this week, Native American groups joined the call for reparations centuries after hundreds of tribes had land taken from them by ‘land-grab universities and colleges.’

An estimated 10.7 million acres of land was taken from 250 tribes following the signing of the Morrill Act by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862.

This law converted tribal lands into initial sites for land-grant higher education institutions in many states.

Now, as several states and cities consider reparations for black Americans, the movement is serving as the impetus for Native American tribes who also believe they also deserve payment for the stolen land. 

The post Chicago suburb to pay $25,000 every in reparations to 140 aged black residents appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

CNN
 — 

As a child, Robin Rue Simmons didn’t know the Evanston neighborhood she called home was an area where Black families were once forced to live.

Rue Simmons grew up just north of Chicago in Evanston’s 5th Ward, where banks refused to give mortgage loans to Black families until 1969.

In Evanston, Black people were restricted to a certain portion of the 5th Ward and excluded from other parts of the city.

The area “was disinvested in, stripped of a neighborhood school and access to health care,” Rue Simmons told CNN.

“There were specific anti-black zoning laws and housing practices that are responsible for our racial segregation – not only our physical segregation, but our wealth gaps and home ownership gaps and all other racial gaps that we have here in Evanston,” she said.

Those discriminatory housing policies led Rue Simmons, a former alderwoman, to push for reparations. Under Rue Simmons’ leadership, Evanston became the first city in the United States to pass a reparations resolution in 2019 for Black residents who qualified.

“It is a $25,000 direct benefit to build wealth through home equity,” Rue Simmons said. “Black Residents that lived in Evanston during the period of harm, which was 1919 – 1969, or their direct descendants are eligible.”

In March 2021, officials voted to release the first batch of funds in that program, and the first recipients were awarded grants in 2022.

Initially, the grants of up to $25,000 were restricted to mortgage assistance, renovations or a down payment on a home. Earlier this month, the Reparations Committee unanimously recommended the inclusion of a fourth option for beneficiaries receiving payment through the housing program: a direct cash payment to beneficiaries.

On Monday night, Evanston’s city council approved a cash option to its Housing Restorative Program. The meeting lasted three hours and it took the council three seconds to approve the cash option. Now, the program includes direct cash benefits for those who qualify.

There was no discussion because it was listed on the consent agenda. Council member Devon Reid told CNN by phone after the vote, “the items on the consent agenda are non-controversial items.”

At the end of the meeting, Reid appeared via Zoom with his camera off and spoke about the change.

“I just want to highlight how special Evanston is. Tonight, we passed what I believe is a historic amendment to our reparations program. It was just on the consent agenda and there’s no fuss, no folks coming out, you know protesting. No dissent amongst the council,” Reid said.

He added this will allow Evanston to move forward swiftly.

“This will allow us to get funding to our ancestors in a much more expedient fashion. We will be able to get that money out to folks and be able to provide some repair to our Black community and to the harmed community who has suffered from uh housing discrimination,” Reid said.

So far, the city has only spent $326,836 of the $10 million promised.

Tasheik Kerr, an assistant to the city manager, told CNN 124 people are still on a waiting list to receive money. Six who were eligible died before receiving payment.

Overall, Kerr said 650 residents have applied. The city is still sorting through applications and at least six people who qualified have died while waiting for their grant.

“We have stalled because of complications,” Rue Simmons said. “It has taken longer than we expected. And some of those challenges have been really underestimating, operationally, the work.”

From Asheville, North Carolina, to Detroit, Michigan, cities across the country are trying to repair harms caused by institutional racism. In San Francisco, a reparations committee is seeking payments proposed of $5 million to every eligible Black resident. A final report that includes board feedback is due in June, according to the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

The complications Evanston has seen with funding and distributing funds will come up across the US, Rue Simmons said. “We’ve had challenges, but we have found solutions,” she said. Those struggles were highlighted in the 2023 documentary “The Big Payback,” by Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow.

Funding for a repair of this magnitude is a tough hurdle to clear, Rue Simmons said. While she and her team worked on reparations in Evanston, the state of Illinois approved recreational marijuana, which went into effect in 2020 – and that provided the initial funding for Evanston’s reparations initiative.

“It is one thing to identify a harm and prescribe a remedy,” Rue Simmons said. “In the case of Evanston …we have been led to understand and appreciate that home rule taxes are our most viable way to fund reparations being that they’re within our purview.”

Ramona Burton is among the 14 people who have received the $25,000 grant so far. The 74-year-old woman has lived in Evanston her entire life but was born in Chicago. Back then, the city didn’t allow “the birth of Black” babies in certain hospitals, she said.

Burton said she used the money to purchase a new roof, install eight new windows and a privacy fence, as well as repair her chimney.

“I wasn’t planning on buying a new home at my age and my home is paid off. So, I used it for renovations,” the 74-year-old told CNN. “I was so excited when I found out. We didn’t get the money in our hands. We never see the money. The city paid the contractors for the work.”

That’s what 88-year-old Louis Weathers, another grant recipient, said he wants to remain in place. He is not in favor of the cash option the council approved Monday.

“I don’t think they should do that. They should have some stipulations that will help the city in housing. Something that will help the value of my property stay stable or go up,” he said. “Giving people cash isn’t a good idea unless you put it in a trust, and you can only get so much each year.”

Kimberly Holmes-Ross is among 124 approved residents but is still waiting to begin her project.

Her father, she said, migrated to Evanston from the South following the Korean War. Like Rue Simmons, she was raised in the 5th Ward with her parents but has since moved to the city’s 2nd Ward.

“My parents weren’t even shown houses in this ward in 1962 – everything was over in the 5th Ward. That is what they were shown and allowed to buy,” she said, standing in the neat yard of her home. “We’re looking to either build another house or add on to our garage.”

Holmes-Ross expressed some hesitation about the cash option and said there must be checks and balances.

“I hope it doesn’t stray too far from the original plan, where they could prove the harm. The harm was in housing and in redlining,” she said.

The post Evanston Metropolis Council votes in favor of increasing its reparations program to restore housing discrimination appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Last month, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, with the support of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, submitted a nearly 400-page plan to repair harms allegedly inflicted by the city on its Black residents. San Francisco’s government invested considerable resources in the plan, which comes after a two-year investigation into what a 2021 report from the reparations committee called “city-sanctioned discrimination” against Black San Franciscans. The centerpiece of the plan, which seeks to reshape the city’s laws and economy to the tune of more than $100 billion, is a proposal to pay out $5 million to every eligible Black resident of the city.

These days, many Americans see San Francisco as a grim warning about urban decay. Scenes of rampant homelessness, public drug use, and brazen property crimes are routinely spread across newsfeeds, alongside headlines like this doozy from the Aug. 11 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Crime is so bad near S.F. Federal building employees are told to work from home, officials said.” But ideas and policies tested out in California tend to spread to other parts of the country. “As California goes, so goes the nation.” That is especially true given that Gavin Newson, the former mayor of San Francisco who now serves as California’s governor, is widely seen as a potential presidential nominee for the Democrats. This is why the reparation plan needs to be examined closely—it could be the model for more widespread efforts to push similar measures as the new baseline of the racial equity agenda.

As the plan acknowledges, chattel slavery did not exist in San Francisco or California. The plan therefore tries to make the case that the “tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy” were codified in San Francisco’s urban renewal policies of 1948. Those policies included the creation of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), California’s first redevelopment agency, which sought the rehabilitation of slums across the city. The agency was formed under California’s Community Redevelopment Act of 1945, California’s response to the Housing Act of 1937 passed by FDR. The Housing Act provided subsidies to municipal housing agencies with the goal of improving living conditions for poor Americans nationwide.

This is how the reparations committee describes the alleged harms of 20th-century urban renewal projects:

Of particular focus in this plan is the era of Urban Renewal, perhaps the most significant example of how the City and County of San Francisco as an institution played a role in undermining Black wealth opportunities and actively displacing the city’s Black population. As San Francisco’s African American population grew between 1940 and 1963, public and private entities facilitated the conditions that created near-exclusive Black communities within the city, while simultaneously limiting political participation and representation, disinvesting from academic and cultural institutions, and intentionally displacing Black communities from San Francisco through targeted, sometimes violent actions.

But the plan’s characterization of this history is incomplete and inaccurate, leaving out crucial details about the causes of these problems and the ways they have been addressed. The plan also privileges Black displacement while rendering the forced removal of the city’s Japanese and poor white residents invisible.

San Francisco’s urban renewal concentrated most of its efforts in the Western Addition district of the city—an area that many African Americans moved to following World War II. The Western Addition had previously been home to a large population of Japanese residents since the early 20th century—with nearly 600 Japanese businesses operating between South Park and the Western Addition by 1909.

The Western Addition’s Japantown, established in 1906 after the destructive San Francisco earthquake, had the world’s largest and oldest Japanese population living outside of Japan by 1940. But over 5,000 of those residents were forcibly removed after FDR’s executive order to intern Japanese families on the West Coast. This paved the way for Black San Franciscans to move in and turn the neighborhood into a cultural base. The Western Addition’s famous Fillmore district subsequently became known as the Harlem of the West, famous for its jazz and other clubs.

Following the internment of Japanese residents, urban renewal displaced nearly 5,000 more families in the 1950s and 1960s, around 40% of whom were white. The Reparations Committee does not call for reparations for these white families displaced by urban renewal, nor mention them in its plan. The plan also does not mention the displacement of Japanese families which made the historic Fillmore district possible, or call for reparations for these families. The plan does deign to mention that San Francisco compensated the small number of Japanese city employees for income losses during internment, as a supporting example of what the city could and should do for its Black residents.

The legal history of urban renewal also offers a different perspective than the one presented in the reparations plan. Residents of San Francisco’s Western Addition successfully won representation in the SFRA’s decision-making process through a suit filed against its actions in the area. In the ’70s, residents of the South of Market area successfully halted progress on the large-scale Yerba Buena Center project, which raised concerns among community members over dislocation of residents and negative environmental impacts.

These lawsuits and various others led to the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Act of 1970 (URA), which settled an until-then unresolved Fifth Amendment issue. The Fifth Amendment guarantees compensation for citizens whose property has been seized by the United States government, but does not guarantee compensation for the expenses associated with relocating. The URA, which uniformly provides benefits to forcefully relocated residents and businesses, was seen as a landmark civil rights victory, coming just two years after Johnson’s transformative Fair Housing Act of 1968. The resolution of community complaints through successful legal challenges goes unmentioned in San Francisco’s current reparations plan.

Some estimates of the cost of the committee’s recommendations sit somewhere north of $100 billion—which is more than a third of the state’s entire tax budget.

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In addition to offering an incomplete or even revisionist history of the city’s urban reforms, the plan also offers a blueprint for who should receive the benefits of this reparations plan. According to the committee’s latest report, these are the main requirements for receipt of reparations:

• Being an African American descendent of an enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person prior to the beginning of the 20th century, or who has “identified as Black/African American on public documents for at least 10 years”
• 18 years or older
• Born in SF or moved to the city before 2006

The plan goes on to state that, in addition to providing proof of the above eligibility requirements, proof of being harmed by the city of San Francisco must be provided. An example of the kinds of possible harm one could have experienced include being charged for a drug-related offense. “An individual, or direct descendant of someone, who was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and/or sentenced in San Francisco for a drug-related crime and/or served a jail or probation sentence for a drug-related crime in San Francisco during the failed War on Drugs (June 1971 to present), including individuals who received offenses, or served, as juveniles.”

In addition to the $5 million lump sum payment the plan proposes for each eligible Black resident, the plan presents a host of other ideas in its “Economic Empowerment” section:

• Pay lower-income Black families the equivalent of San Francisco’s median income, currently $97,000, annually for the next 250 years
• Create a publicly funded banking institution to grant loans, credit, and financing to those who fall outside the requirements of private banking
• Create a publicly funded and comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears all Black residents of student loans, personal loans, credit card debt, and all other debts
• Grant Black individuals tax abatement on sales taxes for the next 250 years
• Publicly funded home, rental, and commercial insurance guaranteed for eligible Black residents
• Remove credit score ratings from public banking institutions
• All government buildings being leased or sold in the city must pay a minimum 50% of their gross receipts into an SF Reparations Fund
• Reparations are exempt from all state and municipal taxation
• Convert public housing units into condos to sell to Black residents for $1
• Make all residential properties vacant for over three months “immediately available” to all Section 8 voucher holders and reparations recipients

While it is currently unknown what the total cost of a full implementation of the committee’s recommendations might be, an economist is not needed to figure out that the city would likely face immediate insolvency with the implementation of these proposals. Some estimates of the cost of the Committee’s recommendations for $5 million payouts sit north of $100 billion—which is more than a third of the state’s entire tax budget. San Francisco’s $14 billion budget, meanwhile, is around seven times less than the price tag of the $5 million payout goal of the reparations agenda.

This exorbitant proposal comes as the city is suffering a host of ills that are driving off its tax base, with businesses and residents fleeing for cheaper, safer, and cleaner regions of the state and country. A recent survey by the U.S Census Bureau found that nearly 8% of San Francisco’s residents plan on moving away from the city within a year. Besides Seattle, no other major metro area surveyed in the U.S. had as many residents saying they intended to move. The plan’s implementation would also likely face significant legal challenges for violating United States Civil Rights Law, including violation of the California Civil Rights Initiative, a 1996 proposition barring government agencies from granting preferential treatment in “public employment, public education, or public contracting” on the basis of race or any other discrete characteristic.

The reparations plan presents another substantive attempt to transform the city from one of San Francisco’s key power blocs—its activist base, which has suffered sizable criticism for its radical progressive agenda in other areas of San Francisco policy. Some recent examples include the San Francisco School Board voting unanimously in 2019 to destroy Victor Arnautoff’s “Life of Washington” mural at George Washington High School. In 2021, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo blocked the destruction of the mural, implying that the School Board’s plans amounted to “parochial political agendas.” In January 2021, the School Board approved a plan to change the names of 44 schools whose names they said were associated with European colonization. The board voted to reverse the renaming effort following lawsuits in April of the same year.

The next San Francisco mayoral election presents a bifurcation of destiny for one of the nation’s most important cities: will San Francisco residents support someone who uses their executive authority to pursue more moderate policies and take on the city’s crime wave, fentanyl crisis, and rampant homelessness, or are San Franciscans as crazy as the news makes them seem? We’ll have to wait and see.

The post San Francisco’s Radical Reparations Plan appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Evanston’s city council approved a cash option to its Housing Restorative Program. (Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP/Getty Images / File via CNN)

(CNN) — As a child, Robin Rue Simmons didn’t know the Evanston neighborhood she called home was an area where Black families were once forced to live.

Rue Simmons grew up just north of Chicago in Evanston’s 5th Ward, where banks refused to give mortgage loans to Black families until 1969.

In Evanston, Black people were restricted to a certain portion of the 5th Ward and excluded from other parts of the city.

The area “was disinvested in, stripped of a neighborhood school and access to health care,” Rue Simmons told CNN.

“There were specific anti-black zoning laws and housing practices that are responsible for our racial segregation — not only our physical segregation, but our wealth gaps and home ownership gaps and all other racial gaps that we have here in Evanston,” she said.

Those discriminatory housing policies led Rue Simmons, a former alderwoman, to push for reparations. Under Rue Simmons’ leadership, Evanston became the first city in the United States to pass a reparations resolution in 2019 for Black residents who qualified.

“It is a $25,000 direct benefit to build wealth through home equity,” Rue Simmons said. “Black Residents that lived in Evanston during the period of harm, which was 1919-1969, or their direct descendants are eligible.”

In March 2021, officials voted to release the first batch of funds in that program, and the first recipients were awarded grants in 2022.

Initially, the grants of up to $25,000 were restricted to mortgage assistance, renovations or a down payment on a home. Earlier this month, the Reparations Committee unanimously recommended the inclusion of a fourth option for beneficiaries receiving payment through the housing program: a direct cash payment to beneficiaries.

On Monday night, the Evanston City Council approved a cash option to its Housing Restorative Program. The meeting lasted three hours and it took the council three seconds to approve the cash option. Now, the program includes direct cash benefits for those who qualify.

There was no discussion because it was listed on the consent agenda. Council member Devon Reid told CNN by phone after the vote, “the items on the consent agenda are non-controversial items.”

At the end of the meeting, Reid appeared via Zoom with his camera off and spoke about the change.

“I just want to highlight how special Evanston is. Tonight, we passed what I believe is a historic amendment to our reparations program. It was just on the consent agenda and there’s no fuss, no folks coming out, you know protesting. No dissent amongst the council,” Reid said.

He added this will allow Evanston to move forward swiftly.

“This will allow us to get funding to our ancestors in a much more expedient fashion. We will be able to get that money out to folks and be able to provide some repair to our Black community and to the harmed community who has suffered from uh housing discrimination,” Reid said.

So far, the city has only spent $326,836 of the $10 million promised.

Tasheik Kerr, an assistant to the city manager, told CNN 124 people are still on a waiting list to receive money. Six who were eligible died before receiving payment.

Overall, Kerr said 650 residents have applied. The city is still sorting through applications and at least six people who qualified have died while waiting for their grant.

“We have stalled because of complications,” Rue Simmons said. “It has taken longer than we expected. And some of those challenges have been really underestimating, operationally, the work.”

From Asheville, North Carolina, to Detroit, Michigan, cities across the country are trying to repair harms caused by institutional racism. In San Francisco, a reparations committee is seeking payments proposed of $5 million to every eligible Black resident. A final report that includes board feedback is due in June, according to the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

The complications Evanston has seen with funding and distributing funds will come up across the US, Rue Simmons said. “We’ve had challenges, but we have found solutions,” she said. Those struggles were highlighted in the 2023 documentary “The Big Payback,” by Erika Alexander and Whitney Dow.

Funding for a repair of this magnitude is a tough hurdle to clear, Rue Simmons said. While she and her team worked on reparations in Evanston, the state of Illinois approved recreational marijuana, which went into effect in 2020 — and that provided the initial funding for Evanston’s reparations initiative.

“It is one thing to identify a harm and prescribe a remedy,” Rue Simmons said. “In the case of Evanston …we have been led to understand and appreciate that home rule taxes are our most viable way to fund reparations being that they’re within our purview.”

Some recipients hesitant about cash option

Ramona Burton is among the 14 people who have received the $25,000 grant so far. The 74-year-old woman has lived in Evanston her entire life but was born in Chicago. Back then, the city didn’t allow “the birth of Black” babies in certain hospitals, she said.

Burton said she used the money to purchase a new roof, install eight new windows and a privacy fence, as well as repair her chimney.

“I wasn’t planning on buying a new home at my age and my home is paid off. So, I used it for renovations,” the 74-year-old told CNN. “I was so excited when I found out. We didn’t get the money in our hands. We never see the money. The city paid the contractors for the work.”

That’s what 88-year-old Louis Weathers, another grant recipient, said he wants to remain in place. He is not in favor of the cash option the council approved Monday.

“I don’t think they should do that. They should have some stipulations that will help the city in housing. Something that will help the value of my property stay stable or go up,” he said. “Giving people cash isn’t a good idea unless you put it in a trust, and you can only get so much each year.”

Kimberly Holmes-Ross is among 124 approved residents but is still waiting to begin her project.

Her father, she said, migrated to Evanston from the South following the Korean War. Like Rue Simmons, she was raised in the 5th Ward with her parents but has since moved to the city’s 2nd Ward.

“My parents weren’t even shown houses in this ward in 1962 — everything was over in the 5th Ward. That is what they were shown and allowed to buy,” she said, standing in the neat yard of her home. “We’re looking to either build another house or add on to our garage.”

Holmes-Ross expressed some hesitation about the cash option and said there must be checks and balances.

“I hope it doesn’t stray too far from the original plan, where they could prove the harm. The harm was in housing and in redlining,” she said.

The-CNN-Wire & © 2023 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

The post Evanston Metropolis Council Votes to Develop Reparations Program to Embody Direct Money Funds | Chicago Information appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

News

From Snejana Farbov

March 16, 2023 | 8:59 a.m

A former Black Lives Matter activist has slammed San Francisco’s “unrealistic” reparation plan, saying it’s a way to “gas it on” black Americans – and accused lawmakers of “focusing more on slavery” than the homelessness that plagues the city.

Xaviaer DuRousseau, a former BLM supporter who now works for PragerU, an advocacy group that creates videos promoting conservative ideas, said Tuesday the costly handouts perpetuate “fraudulent narratives about systemic racism.”

“These are 111 ways to make black Americans feel like we need to depend on a handout system to be successful,” said DuRousseau, who is black, while appearing on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle.

San Francisco’s board of directors on Tuesday fully endorsed 111 recommendations from a city-appointed reparations committee, including $5 million in lump sum payments to every eligible black citizen, guaranteed incomes of $97,000 a year for 250 years, elimination of personal debt and tax burdens, and homes for as little as $1.

Xavier DuRousseau, a former BLM supporter, said in The Ingraham Angle that San Francisco’s reparations plan is “disgusting” and a way to pressure black Americans. FoxNews

The sweeping proposal, presented without a cost analysis, aims to eradicate centuries of slavery and systemic racism, which supporters of the plan say have deprived generations of black citizens of opportunity in most areas of life.

According to one estimate, the reparations program could cost the city, which has a budget of just $14 billion for 2022-2023, about $50 billion.

According to a calculation by Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, each non-black family in the city would have to raise at least $600,000 to make amends possible.

The plan, approved by the San Francisco board of directors, calls for $5 million in payments, $97,000 in annual income, debt reduction and $1 homes. AP

“It’s so unrealistic to think that the average family in San Francisco will be able to pay $600,000 more per person,” DuRousseau told Ingraham.

DuRousseau hinted that what the Reparations Committee is proposing “will never really happen” as San Francisco already faces a large deficit and lacks the resources to spend billions of dollars.

But beyond questioning the plan’s economic feasibility, DuRousseau accused San Francisco’s liberal politicians of being more concerned about historical injustices than a current crisis unfolding in their city.

Supporters of the proposal see it as a way to undo centuries of slavery and systemic racism. AP

“It’s abhorrent to me that our focus is more on slavery that ended in 1865 than on veterans homeless on the streets of San Francisco begging for loose change in 2023,” he said. “That’s where they need to start sending their money.”

Until the publication of its final report in June, the Supervisory Board will not make any decisions on redress. The board can then vote to change, accept or reject any or all of the 111 recommendations.

The exact number of black San Franciscans who would be entitled to redress is not yet known.

In San Francisco, black residents make up less than 6% of the city’s population—that’s fewer than 50,000 people.

To be eligible, applicants must be at least 18 years old and have identified as Black on public documents for at least a decade.

They must also prove that they meet two of eight additional standards — including being born or immigrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996, and proof of residency for at least 13 years, being personal or a direct descendant of an individual imprisoned in the “failed war on drugs,” or being a descendant of an individual enslaved before 1865.

John Dennis, leader of the San Francisco Republican Party, said the discussion about reparations was “frivolous”.

“They just threw up a number, there’s no analysis,” he said. “It seems ridiculous, and it also seems like this is the only city where it could possibly happen.”

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OPINION:

US Attorney David Weiss of Delaware is accused of intentionally letting the statute of limitations expire because Hunter Biden failed to pay his taxes in full for 2014 and 2015. If true, it is further evidence of significant corruption in the Justice Department.

The belief that action by prosecutors or others who might be entitled to redress against those accused of having committed an illegal act must be taken within a certain period of time dates back at least to the ancient Greeks.

The Romans codified statutes of limitations, among other things, and many of these Roman laws were incorporated into English common law. In the centuries after 1600, the British built their empire on the basis of their common law, used in part by perhaps half the world’s population and serving as the legal basis for much of global civil society.

Individual jurisdictions—countries, states, and localities—have established statutes of limitations for both misdemeanors and felonies. There are some exceptions, such as murder. When it comes to tax violations, there are often relatively short periods of time in which the authorities can bring charges, reflecting the problems of dwindling memory, record keeping and the ever-changing complexity of tax laws.

Unlike in some communist countries, crimes that “reaches beyond the grave” are not prosecuted with good reason. That the sins of the father should not be passed on to the son is a belief that most civilized societies have practiced for thousands of years.

From time to time the movement for “redress” for wrongs done to a particular group is revived, as is happening in California and the city of San Francisco. The argument is that some Americans whose ancestors were slaves continued to suffer from this legacy even though slaves were freed in America some 160 years ago.

While this argument has merit, there are persistent problems in determining which living Americans are the real victims and who among living Americans bears responsibility for the actions of their ancestors or the ancestors of others.

At the start of the Civil War, there were fewer than four million slaves and 31 million white Americans, only a tiny minority of whom were slave owners. There are currently approximately 335 million Americans, of whom 45 million identify as Black, 250 million are White, and the remainder identify as Asian, Native American, or mixed race.

The vast majority of white, black, and mixed-race Americans have ancestors who came after the abolition of slavery, and there is no practical way to determine how much “slave blood” or “slave owner blood” an American has—so who should receive reparation and who should pay is intractable.

The legacy of former President Barack Obama illustrates the problem. Some of his white mother’s ancestors are said to have been slave owners, and some of his African father’s ancestors are said to have been black slave owners.

Slavery was the world norm from well before antiquity until about 300 years ago. It was practiced everywhere – in China, India, Africa, Europe and among the Indians of the Americas. The Portuguese began taking black Africans as slaves to their new, far-flung colonies, including Brazil. For the most part, it was African slave owners who sold their slaves to white Europeans. Nobody was pure in this shabby business.

It was Britain, after centuries of the slave trade, that experienced the moral awakening that slavery was wrong in the mid-18th century, and it was the first major nation to outlaw the slave trade in 1807 and freed slaves in their colonies in 1838.

Some argue the change in attitudes was due to Enlightenment philosophers, the rise of Protestant sects with an emphasis on individual responsibility, and new technologies such as the steam engine that reduced the need for unskilled manual labor. All of them probably played a role.

When George Washington was a young man, slavery was the world norm – and like almost everyone in his and previous generations, he accepted it. From his own letters we know that, like many of his contemporaries, he changed his mind and, towards the end of his life, focused both on freeing his own slaves and ending the institution, which he increasingly saw as morally wrong and economically destructive.

There are those who judge the actions of past leaders by today’s standards, but fail to recognize how quickly “accepted” attitudes and practices can change. It has only been a century since most women gained the right to vote, and same-sex marriage has only been widely accepted in the last decade.

The constitutional scholar Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School wrote in a 2004 article:

“Efforts to prioritize reparations ignore that time has shifted the focus of our current concerns to a new set of problems that cannot be resolved by reliving the horrors of an early generation in any collective or official capacity.” We must live life into the future. We cannot collectively right the wrongs suffered in the past. But we can cause new and unnecessary hurt by trying to right past wrongs. A divisive campaign for redress will undermine the efforts we all aspire to create a stronger, more vital, productive and caring nation.”

• Richard W. Rahn is Chair of the Institute for Global Economic Growth and MCon LLC.

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At US$5 million (£4.04 million) per eligible person, it is the largest slavery redress since the end of the American Civil War.

A city-appointed committee in San Francisco is recommending that tens of thousands of people receive that amount as a grant to offset the legacy of “maintaining and expanding the legacy of slavery.”

A 60-page report by the committee said that while California never formally instituted slavery, city policies had for decades “codified the systematic oppression and marginalization of black people.”

San Francisco’s board of directors must vote this summer on whether to accept the proposals in part or in full. But the trial is already proving to be a major test for San Francisco’s notoriously liberal citizens, who have recently swung to the right in response to rising crime and homelessness.

Eric McDonnell, chair of the African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC), said I Amends were a way of telling black San Franciscans that “we know we have debts that we will make every effort to pay.”

He said, “This is a pivotal, substantial moment for San Francisco to consciously and consciously embrace its history, thereby creating the opportunity for real, substantial healing for all.”

The 15-member AARAC was formed in late 2020 after the death of George Floyd sparked a nationwide vote on race issues in America.

In the case of San Francisco, the report says that it was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold and that during the “urban renewal” era of the 1950s, black residents were barred from buying houses.

Black people were effectively barred from urban jobs for decades, and entire black neighborhoods were devastated. The effects have been reflected across generations and are particularly galling in one of the country’s wealthiest cities.

Although more than 60 billionaires live in San Francisco, there are 7,000 homeless people, around 40 percent of whom are black, although African Americans make up only 5 percent of the population.

Black people used to make up about 15 percent of the city, but they have been driven out by the factors that the indemnity seeks to make up for.

The last attempt of this magnitude came during the Restoration in the 1860s with Abraham Lincoln’s promise to give 100 acres of land to formerly enslaved people—a promise rescinded by his successor as President, Andrew Jackson.

Mr McDonnell said: “Now we are generations behind and the majority of black people live in poverty because the path that would have led them elsewhere has never been restored.”

The committee came up with the $5 million figure in a way that “was less scientific than it might suggest,” McDonnell said.

“In a very simple business environment, you need capital to rebuild. We did some rough calculations on housing, access to health care and your basic needs… We landed on this number. There have been discussions about making it higher. We agreed on $5 million no matter how hard we have to fight for it,” he said.

Other measures include increasing the income of black people from lower-income households for 250 years until they reach the region’s median income, which stood at $97,000 in 2021.

The report also proposes debt relief aimed at paying off “all educational, personal, credit card and short-term loan debt” and an expansion of black-run banks.

There should also be sweeping reforms of the education system, health care system and criminal justice system, including a bursary for those “at risk of being involved in the judiciary”.

To qualify, residents must be at least 18 years old and have identified themselves as Black or African American on public documents for 10 years.

You must also have been born or immigrated to San Francisco between 1940 and 1996 and have lived in the city for the past 13 years. Another way to qualify is to be a direct descendant of someone imprisoned by what the report called the “failed war on drugs.”

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San Francisco has a widespread homelessness problem that is exacerbated by the high cost of living in the area (Photo: Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty)

It sounds transformative, but as Mr. McDonnell admits, the first question to answer is who will pay for it?

San Francisco is expected to face a $728 million budget deficit over the next two fiscal years as the city struggles to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. But Mr McDonnell says it is for the political leaders, not the committee, to find out.

He said, “As victims, we shouldn’t take on the responsibility of helping those who caused the damage find out.” We don’t see that as our primary responsibility.

“There are tax implications, there are incentives for companies to invest in these communities and the reallocation of existing resources. There are many levers to pull and we need to have the political will to do it.”

The committee’s report comes at a time when other states, like New York, are considering making amends as well. California has set up its own reparations committee, but it has not yet made any formal recommendations.

Members said they are considering recommending that black Californians receive $569 billion in housing discrimination compensation between 1933 and 1977, or $223,200 per person.

Mr McDonnell sees San Francisco as a groundbreaking place for other countries grappling with their own legacy of colonialism, including the UK, which has faced its own racial issue following the death of George Floyd.

Ediberto Roman, a law professor at Florida International University College of Law and a longtime proponent of redress, said California could lead to change in Britain.

He said efforts like the one in San Francisco “may lead to a healing that is long overdue.”

However, not everyone is convinced of San Francisco’s plan. John Dennis, leader of the San Francisco Republican Party, said that if just 10,000 people received $5 million each, the cost would be $50 billion.

That would be three and a half times the city’s annual budget of about $14 billion, Mr. Dennis said.

He said: “It seems to me that this is a publicity stunt to divert attention from liberal policies that are harming black residents.”

“The majority of the homeless are black men, which is an example of how the city has failed the black community.

“For $50 billion, we could build mansions for every homeless person in San Francisco. I’m not even exaggerating. There’s about 5,000 per homeless person here, so that’s $10 million per home.

“This idea is an amazing insult to our intelligence.

“We have companies migrating in droves, the commercial real estate market is in free fall, which is affecting the tax base. The city has historically had a massive deficit, housing prices are falling at the fastest rate I’ve seen, and we have problems with robbery and violent crime here.”

As a comparison to the Reparations Committee’s recommendations, the San Francisco board of directors apologized to its 900,000-strong Chinese community last February.

The resolution deplored “systemic and structural discrimination,” including restrictions on Chinese laundries and the use of traditional Chinese tools — but there were no efforts to make reparations to those affected.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Lynette Mackey stood on the steps of her childhood home — a sleek but stately Victorian house shaded by an evergreen pear tree — and evoked a photo of a family reunion from nearly 50 years ago. The men wore suits and the women wore skirts. Ms. Mackey, a teenager in red bell bottoms, stretched her arms wide and smiled brightly.

Soon after, in the 1960s and 1970s, Ms. Mackey watched the slow erasure of black culture from the Fillmore District, once hailed as the “Harlem of the West.” The jazz clubs that drew artists like Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington disappeared, and so did the soul food restaurants.

By the mid-1970s, many of her friends had also disappeared, driven out by city officials who were confiscating homes in the name of so-called “urban renewal.” Then her family eventually lost the house she bought in the 1940s after migrating from Texas. In many cases the old Victorian houses were demolished and replaced by housing projects, but the town kept the stock of Mrs Mackey’s house and has since been converted into government subsidized housing.

Her grandfather suffered a heart attack while fighting to save their home. “He died saying, ‘I’m not going to sell this house,'” she said.

Today, against this backdrop of loss and displacement, San Francisco is considering reparations that would compensate black residents for policies that displaced them and impacted their economic opportunities. Cities across the country are considering similar refunds, but none have been as ambitious as San Francisco, whose 15-person task force issued 111 recommendations in a preliminary report to city leaders.

To close the racial wealth gap that has long been a central argument for redress, the task force has declared a moonshot: a one-time payment of $5 million to all beneficiaries. By comparison, the California State’s Reparations Task Force has recommended a staggering rate that’s around $1.2 million for older black residents.

The amount of cash has made headlines but is widely considered unrealistic in a city facing mounting budgetary problems and a lack of political consensus on the issue. The $5 million payments could exceed $100 billion — multiples of San Francisco’s annual budget of $14 billion — and London Breed, the city’s mayor, has not committed to any cash compensation.

Ms. Mackey, 63, who stayed in the city, is working on a more likely way to incentivize other former black residents and their descendants to return to San Francisco. One idea is for the city to give them housing grants, access to affordable housing, and relocation grants.

San Francisco’s black population has shrunk from 13 percent in 1970 to about 5 percent today, due first to cycles of redevelopment and then to the gentrifying forces of tech employers. Black residents were pushed into remote Bay Area suburbs with cheaper housing and long commutes, if not into other cities and states.

When thousands of black migrants arrived to work the shipyards in the 1940s, housing conditions confined them to either the Fillmore District or Bayview-Hunters Point, a blustery southeast corner of San Francisco. The center of black cultural life in Fillmore no longer exists and today most of San Francisco’s black population resides in Bayview-Hunters Point. But even in that neighborhood, about 30 percent are black today, compared to more than 75 percent in 1980.

“There aren’t too many people who were born here and are still here,” said Oscar James, 77, who has lived in Bayview-Hunters Point all his life and bought a house in 1978. “Many people have either died or been moved away.”

When the city confiscated homes in Fillmore, it issued certificates to families that enabled them to move into public housing. Since then, the documents “have not been prosecuted and have rarely been recognized,” the Reparations Task Force wrote. The story of the black expulsion was the subject of the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, in which the main character mourns the loss of his family’s Victorian home.

Ms Mackey, who now rents a subsidized apartment at the Fillmore, recently joined a city program that uses a private investigator to track down people who lost their homes to redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s and advise them of their housing rights elucidate social benefits for housing.

“Everyone knows the effects of slavery,” said Majeid Crawford, whose nonprofit New Community Leadership Foundation works with the city to locate former residents. “But we also had our own apartheid, which took place in San Francisco through urban renewal.”

Aliciea Walker was forced to leave San Francisco as a child when her family’s three-story Victorian building at the Fillmore was lost to redevelopment. She finished her schooling in nearby Half Moon Bay and eventually settled in Sacramento.

Walker, now 63, said she hadn’t paid much attention to the reparations debate but hoped San Francisco would make it easier for former black residents to return.

“My bags are ready to go back to San Francisco because this is my children’s childhood and this is my childhood,” said Ms. Walker, who lived part of her adulthood in a San Francisco rental apartment where she raised young children.

Beyond the remediation effort, the reparations task force cited several factors that have left black residents behind, from a statewide ban on affirmative action to discriminatory barriers that have led to poorer access to health care. So how can a city compensate them for the loss?

Task force members believed the $5 million would “fix decades of damage,” said Eric McDonnell, a management consultant and longtime San Francisco resident who chairs the panel.

“Our mission was not a proof of concept,” he said. “It was about assessing the damage and assigning the value.”

The big question, however, is what is feasible. Each member of the oversight panel who will deliberate on the legislation later this year after receiving the task force’s final report has expressed support for some form of redress, although not all are convinced it must come in the form of cash payments .

Mayor Breed, who would be entitled to redress as a black resident who grew up in the city, was noncommittal and said she would evaluate the task force’s final report. Jeff Cretan, her spokesman, said the mayor is focused on her Dream Keeper initiative, a grant program launched in 2020 that he says is “making money available to the African American community right now.” Last month, Ms Breed said she has no plans to support a proposal to spend $50 million on a city reparations office.

Rev. Amos Brown, who has led the Third Baptist Church at Fillmore since 1976, has faced similar discussions over the decades. Sitting in a conference room at his church, Mr Brown referenced the rich history of his neighborhood — Maya Angelou worked in a record store, the Black Panthers distributed books and food — and the many commissions to black San Francisco’s demise he’s been a part of over the years of that.

Though previous promises have not been kept, he said he is “very, very cautiously optimistic” that the city will make some form of redress, though he fears the $5 million idea will give black residents false hope could.

“You could set up a reparations fund from all these billionaires in San Francisco,” he said.

Reparations for black Americans have been discussed since the end of the Civil War. In recent years, the idea gained traction as influential voices spoke out in favor of redress, and momentum picked up during the 2020 racial justice protests following the police killing of George Floyd.

The movement has spread to a number of local governments. Modest programs offering compensation to black residents have been established in Evanston, Illinois, Providence, Rhode Island, and Asheville, NC

In San Francisco, the task force focused particularly on redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s, when authorities declared entire city blocks “derelict” and used significant tracts of land for business and home purchases. The panel called it the “most significant example of how the city and county of San Francisco as an institution has helped erode black wealth and actively displace the city’s black population.”

Ms. Mackey is now speaking to people who left San Francisco several decades ago to track down housing certificate holders in Hawaii, Alaska and elsewhere. Often they are still angry about the eviction, she said. Many of the original certificate holders have died, and their descendants are often unaware of their family’s history of loss in San Francisco.

She dreams of a black renewal in her city. Housing reparations may persuade some to return, but she knows how difficult that dream is today.

“Almost everyone says the same thing,” she said. “That they can’t afford to live in San Francisco.”

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An African American couple embracing and walking down a suburban street at sunset, shot from behind

Young black couple walking down the street.

California is pressing ahead with its plan to make amends to black Californians for the countless harms they have been inflicted on. However, some lawmakers warn black residents not to expect a massive payout.

Last week, the California Reparations Task Force voted to accept a set of reparations recommendations. The task force called on the state to formally apologize to black residents for a range of harms, including redlining, mass incarceration and the state’s complicity in slavery. (For those wondering, you must be a descendant of an enslaved person or a free black person who lived in the United States before the 19th century.) The panel also recommended direct cash payments to black residents, but did not recommend a specific dollar amount.

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California lawmakers will vote on the plan on July 1. But MPs on the Reparations Panel warn against starting plans for a large payout. At least not in the foreseeable future. Democratic Sen. Steven Bradford of Los Angeles is the primary reason he’s throwing cold water at the redemption celebrations.

“I don’t want to create people’s expectations and hopes that they’ll get seven-figure checks,” Bradford said, according to the AP. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Other members of the state parliament expressed more reluctance when asked whether they think large cash payments are possible. “We have absolutely no idea right now what will and won’t be approved,” Democratic Assembly Representative Reggie Jones-Sawyer said, according to the AP. Jones-Sawyer also serves on the task force.

California Gov. Gavin Newsome has not spoken out in favor of the cash payments. And the state’s massive budget deficit plays a major role in the reparations talks. Still, the fact that California has come this far gives those who have spent the past decade fighting for redress a measure of hope, especially as the San Francisco redress effort is proceeding along a different path.

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LLater this year, San Francisco regulators will consider an ambitious plan to bring reparations to black residents to compensate them for the lingering effects of slavery and recent discriminatory public policies. While other Cato scholars have commented more generally on national and San Francisco reparations, here I will focus on the fiscal implications and the local economic impact.

An analysis of the plan by the Hoover Institute estimates its cost at $200 billion, with most of the cost attributable to the recommended $5 million cash payment to each eligible person. Since the recommendations have not yet been fully finalized, Hoover’s estimate is necessarily speculative, but appears to be the best available. The San Francisco Reparations Committee has yet to produce a financial analysis, stating that “it is not its job to determine how San Francisco’s atonement and repairs are to be funded.”

Assuming the cost is around $200 billion, can the city and county governments fund the reparations plan? This is only possible through a combination of large-scale borrowing and tax increases.

In 2022-23, San Francisco’s overall fund budget is $6.8 billion. The rest of the government’s total $14 billion fiscal footprint comes from self-sustaining businesses like San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and the municipal water system. There may be an opportunity to increase user fees to fund these businesses, but a large increase could hamper the competitiveness of services (like SFO) that have alternatives (like nearby airports).

Much of San Francisco’s general fund income comes from non-tax income, primarily from state and federal aid. Tax revenue accounts for just $4.4 billion of the fund’s general income. Funding a $200 billion reparations program in one year would result in a more than forty-fold increase in taxes.

A more realistic approach would be to issue bonds to cover the cost of reparations spread over 30 years. However, such borrowing faces two major obstacles. First, general promissory notes issued by the city and county must be approved by two-thirds of local voters. Second, the California Constitution limits the purpose of such bonds to the “acquisition and improvement of real estate.” simple majority.

If reparations advocates could overcome these hurdles. The San Francisco government could then fund the program and pay the debt service by imposing an additional $285 billion property tax on San Francisco taxable property. Assuming the bonds mature over 30 years and pay a coupon of 4%, and assuming that the appraised values ​​increase by 4% per year, the additional tax burden should be around 2.4% of the appraised value.

This additional levy would roughly triple ad valorem property taxes citywide. It is reasonable to expect that this higher tax rate would put significant downward pressure on property values, potentially breaking the assumption made above of a 4% compound annual property appreciation rate. In this case, the tax rate would have to rise even further.

In fact, the effect of such a large tax increase could be to send the city’s economy into a “fate loop” recently described in the San Francisco Chronicle as follows:

Connected forces catch the city in economic freefall: workers mostly stay away; offices are empty; company roller shutter; Mass transit is severely restricted or even bankrupt, making it even more difficult for low- and middle-wage workers who enable restaurants and small businesses to operate, resulting in large budget shortfalls from falling tax revenues that jeopardize numerous city services and trigger mass layoffs of city workers and rip apart the social safety net, causing more people to leave.

In the week after the Chronicle mentioned the possibility of a Doom loop, the risk of that scenario seemed to increase with the assassination of a high-profile tech executive downtown, the bludgeoning of a former fire commissioner in the Marina district, and the news about the city The commercial property vacancy rate had reached a record 29.5%.

A big tax hike could be the last straw. While there has been much talk of Californians moving to other states, there has also been a lot of movement within the state. Bay Area residents have moved to the Sacramento area to lower their cost of living, while San Francisco residents are moving to suburbs with more space and better schools.

Even those who like California’s liberal politics and are willing to pay higher income and sales taxes to live in the Golden State have options. And since San Francisco covers just 47 square miles, residents and businesses wouldn’t have to move far to avoid reparations policies and the additional property taxes that would be required.

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This article originally appeared on the Cato at Liberty blog and is reprinted with permission from the Cato Institute.

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