Katherine Chen

Pol S 487
8 May 2023
A Brief History of Inequality in the Bay Area

Introduction:
The San Francisco Bay Area, often called
the Bay Area or simply the Bay, is a region in
Northern California. The Bay Area possesses
distinct sub-regions which include the city of San
Francisco (which lies in the center), North Bay,
East Bay (includes cities like Berkeley and
Oakland), the Peninsula (south of San Francisco,
includes SFO airport and Palo Alto), and South
Bay (includes Santa Clara County and its largest
city, San Jose).1

The boundaries of the Bay Area are broad

and contested by the people who live there. The
official definition of the Bay Area includes nine
counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa,
San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano
and Sonoma. Among these nine counties are 101 cities, around 7.756 million people as of 2018,
and about 7,000 square miles.2 In terms of defining boundaries, many people assert that South
Bay should be counted as its own region, the Silicon Valley. Sometimes the Bay Area and Silicon
Valley are grouped together, and sometimes they are talked about separately. In this paper, I will
be including Silicon Valley as part of the Bay Area and will discuss regional issues surrounding
economic inequality.

The San Francisco Bay Area is also very racially and ethnically diverse, influenced by
the influx of people of color moving to the region in the past few decades. Asian and Latinx
immigrants have contributed to a lot of this growth. In 1980, all counties in the Bay Area had
more than or around 50% non-Hispanic White residents, whereas as of 2013 data, all counties
except for Marin county have less than or roughly around 50% non-Hispanic White residents.3

Part I: Sources of Inequality and Resistance

1
“Bay Area (California).” Wikitravel, https://wikitravel.org/en/Bay_Area_(California).
2
Placzek, Jessica. “How Do You Define the 'Bay Area'?” KQED, 6 September 2018,
https://www.kqed.org/news/11689315/how-do-you-define-the-bay-area-2.
3
“Gentrification and Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area: A Comparison of Measurement Approaches.”
MDPI, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16122246.
 Before the Bay Area was colonized, Indigenous groups including the Ohlone
(Costanoan), Coast Miwok, Wappo, Patwin, and Pomo inhabited the land for 10,000 years, since
around 740 AD.4 From the late 1760’s up until 1821, the Spanish colonized California,
establishing 21 missions across California, of which 5 were and still are in the Bay Area:
Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo in Carmel, Old Mission San Juan Bautista in San
Juan Bautista, La Misión de la Exaltación de la Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, Mission Santa Clara
de Asís in Santa Clara, Mission San José de Guadalupe in Fremont, and Mission San Francisco
de Solano in San Francisco.

Under Spanish colonial rule, Indigenous peoples were forced into labor and to become
legal wards of Spanish missionaries. This system also forced Native peoples off of their land that
was then sold and given to soldiers and others. When the US annexed California in 1850, Native
peoples were barred from voting. Around 119 tribes were forced under threat of violence to sign
treaties with the US government giving away a majority of their land in exchange for protection,
education, and covering their basic needs.5 However, the US Senate rejected those treaties,
designating less than 1/60th of the agreed upon land for reservations and denying protection,
leaving Native communities susceptible to violence. During the Gold Rush in the 1850’s, over
100,000 Native Americans were killed across California by privately organized militias.6 As of
2017 data, Native Americans in the US Census living in the Bay Area number around 40,500.7

Asian immigrants and communities were also targets of exploitation and exclusion.
Starting in the late 1840’s, many Chinese immigrants moved to America following the economic
devastation of the Opium Wars in China, many of which built the Transcontinental Railroad.8
The white labor movement greatly opposed Chinese immigration, labeling Chinese workers as
“Coolies” and disparaged their willingness to work for very low wages. In 1877, the San
Francisco Riot (an “anti-Coolie” protest) occurred in which four Chinese people were killed and
$100,000 of Chinese property was destroyed.9 California passed the anti-Coolie Act in 1862, and
the US government passed the 1875 Page Act and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, aimed at
barring Chinese immigrants. Mob violence in the forms of burning Chinatowns and expelling
Chinese people from their homes, happening in San Jose, Antioch, San Pablo, and other Bay

4
Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).
5
Moore, E., Montojo, N., & Mauri, N. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place: A History of Racially Exclusionary Housing in
the San Francisco Bay Area. UC Berkeley: Othering & Belonging Institute. Retrieved from
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2j08r197
6
Ibid. 23
7
US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2017 (5-Year Estimates), Table B02001. Race
8
Choy, C. C. (2022). Asian American Histories of the United States. Beacon Press.
9
Dowd, Katie. “140 years ago, San Francisco was set ablaze during the city's deadliest race riots.” SFGATE, 23 July
2017, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/1877-san-francisco-anti-chinese-race-riots-11302710.php. Accessed
16 May 2023.
Area cities.10 Alien Land Laws in 1913 and 1920, prohibited “aliens ineligible for citizenship”,
which applied to Asian immigrants — especially Japanese immigrants — from purchasing land
and restricted leases to 3 years, because the time it took to farm and begin to make a piece of
land profitable was around 3 years.11 Finally, the Immigration Act of 1924 would bar all
immigration from the entirety of Asia until repealed by the 1965 Immigration Act (excluding the
Philippines, as it was a US territory under colonial rule at the time).12 Filipino and Latinx people
were recruited to work on plantations and farms to fill in the labor shortage after the repeated
exclusion of Asian migrant workers. Protesting horrible labor conditions, many Filipino activists
(such as Larry Itliong) and Latinx activists (such as Cesar Chavez) formed labor unions in
California and coordinated successful strikes, such as the Delano Grape Strike from 1965-70.13

The US government incarcerated all people of Japanese descent with Executive Order
9066, signed by FDR in 1942 during WWII.14 They categorized people of Japanese descent using
blood quantum, i.e. if a person was 1/16th Japanese, they were incarcerated in concentration
camps. Japanese who were incarcerated lost much of their property and belongings after being
forced to relocate, the unadjusted for inflation estimate of economic loss nationally is $1-3
billion.15

Simultaneously, the second wave of the Great Migration occurred from the 1940s-70s in
which more than 5 million African-Americans fled the Jim Crow South for better opportunity.
Many Black migrants landed in the Bay Area and established vibrant communities in Oakland
and San Francisco. By 1970, 35% of Oakland’s population was Black compared to 3% in 1940.16
This wave of Black migration was met with white racist backlash both through police and
state-sanctioned violence as well as extralegal violence in the forms of arsons and lynchings.

Housing inequality greatly impacted economic inequality in the Bay Area. Redlining
maps were created in 1937 for the Bay Area cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland,
Berkeley, Albany, Alameda, Emeryville, Piedmont, and San Leandro.17 Racial housing covenants
have been present in the Bay Area since the 1890’s while barring Chinese residents from certain
parts of San Francisco, but even after the Supreme Court ruled racially restrictive covenants
unenforceable, these covenants remained in use as late as the 1990s and 2000s in the cases of
Lakeside in San Francisco and Cuesta La Honda in San Mateo County.18
10
Choy, C. C. (2022).
11
Moore, E., Montojo, N., & Mauri, N. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place
12
Choy, C. C. (2022).
13
Larry Itliong - Biography, Achievements & Legacy, 29 October 2021
https://www.history.com/topics/stories/larry-itliong.
14
Choy, C. C. (2022).
15
Moore, E., Montojo, N., & Mauri, N. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place
16
“Black Oakland's Story — A Changing Oakland - Documentary Series.” A Changing Oakland - Documentary
Series, https://oaklandherenow.com/blackoakland.
17
Moore, E., Montojo, N., & Mauri, N. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place
18
Moore, E., Montojo, N., & Mauri, N. (2019). Roots, Race, & Place
 Black-led resistance to racism is rich in the Bay Area; the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense (1966) was founded in Oakland. They armed themselves and patrolled the streets to
protect against police brutality and also started the free breakfast program for kids, starting in
Oakland and expanding nationwide to 45 programs and thousands of children. State-sanctioned
and vigilante efforts to break apart the programs succeeded, but the legacy of the Black Panther
Party led to the US government adopting a breakfast program that feeds over 14.57 million
children today.19 A similar organization modeled off of the Black Panther Party was founded by
Chinese Americans called the Red Guard Party also formed in 1969, which among other things,
provided free meals for elderly in Chinatown.

Part II: Current Inequality Levels (Post-Tech Boom)

Gentrification is defined as the process in which lower income neighborhoods experience

capital investment, business development and an increase in wealthier residents. These measures,
such as new investments and an increase in tax base can lead to improvements in neighborhoods
with histories of disinvestment, but at the expense of long-time residents and businesses who are
forced to move as the cost of living rises and their neighborhoods become unaffordable. San
Francisco Bay Area counties have experienced rapid gentrification since the 2000s. To measure
gentrification levels by neighborhood, neighborhoods are defined using census tracts, which are
geographic areas designed for census taking that can fit the limits of cities, towns, and other
administrative areas. Several tracts often exist within a county. A study done on gentrification
levels in the Bay Area using 2000-2013 found that within the Bay Area, “1580 tracts correspond
to 7,257,501 people in the nine counties. Across these tracts, the median household income was
$79,671, the mean percentage of the population living below poverty across tracts was 11.5%,
and the mean racial composition was 43.4% white, 6.7% Black, 22.7% Asian, 22.6% Hispanic,
and 4.6% other or multi-race.”20

The study also used different measurements of gentrification, such as the Freeman
method and the UDP method. The Freeman measure of gentrification identifies gentrified tracts
as at or below the median income for its respective metropolitan area, having the percentage of
housing stock within the tract built in the prior twenty years at or below the median for all census
tracts in the metropolitan area, and having at least 50% of the census blocks within the tract were
defined as urban.21 The “metropolitan area” used to compare against specific tracts was the San
Jose—San Francisco—Oakland Combined Statistical Area or CSA. The findings using the

19
Blakemore, Erin. How the Black Panthers' Breakfast Program Both Inspired and Threatened the Government, 6
February 2018, https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party.
20
“Gentrification and Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area: A Comparison of Measurement Approaches.”
21
Ibid.
Freeman method showed that there was a 1.5% prevalence of gentrification in San Francisco,
3.6% in San Jose, and 21.2% in Oakland.22

Another measure of gentrification used was the UDP or Urban Displacement Project
method, which characterizes low income tracts (defined as tracts with greater than 39%
low-income households) into four typologies: “(a) not losing low-income households or at the
very early stages of gentrification, (b) at risk of displacement, (c) undergoing displacement, or
(d) advanced stages of gentrification”. UDP defined moderate-to-high income tracts as less than
39% low-income households, and they were categorized as: “(a) not losing low-income
households or very early stages of gentrification, (b) at risk of displacement, (c) undergoing
displacement, or (d) advanced exclusion.”23 UDP characterized 19.9% of the Bay Area’s
neighborhoods as undergoing or in the advanced stages of gentrification and displacement. The
UDP method also provided an alarming estimate that an additional 26.8% of census tracts are at
risk of gentrification or displacement. Thus, based on UDP, 46.7% of neighborhoods in the Bay
Area were either at risk of, undergoing, or experiencing advanced stages of gentrification and
displacement as of 2013.24

In San Francisco specifically, the city has experienced two significant waves of evictions,
one in the late 1990’s and 2000, during what is now called the first tech-boom or the “dot com
boom”, and again in 2013 and 2014, both brought by a strong increase in capital through
companies of the tech industry in Silicon Valley, evictions, buyouts and tenants harassment.25
Many places in San Francisco like the Mission (large Latinx population) and Chinatown are
majority — 60 to 70% — renter occupied with low-income residents.26 This means they are
especially vulnerable to gentrification amid the influx of young, white, single entrepreneurs with
no children workers. In the 1990’s during the dot com boom, the number of rental evictions
increased from 965 evictions in 1993 to 2,370 evictions in 2000, and the median rent in SF
increased from $800 to $1245.27 This led to the displacement of thousands of Latinx families in
Mission District.

Many policies have been enacted to aid gentrification and the growth of the tech industry
in the Bay Area. In 1985, California enacted a state law called the Ellis Act, which allows
landlords to evict tenants in rent-controlled units if the landlords are planning to “go out of
business”. The excuse for the law was that it would protect small “mom and pop” landlords who

22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. “Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Are...”
OpenEdition Journals, https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11322.
26
Nancy Raquel Mirabal; Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and The Politics of Gentrification
in San Francisco's Mission District. The Public Historian1 May 2009; 31 (2): 7–31. doi:
https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2009.31.2.7
27
Ibid.
wanted to retire. In practice, it is used almost exclusively by corporate landlords and developers
to flip buildings and tenants out of rent-controlled buildings. Developers demolish those
buildings, convert them into condos or boutique hotels, or list vacated units on Airbnb illegally,
all which allow them to be exempted from rent control.28 Landlords often avoid the required
relocation payments by threatening tenants with Ellis Act filings and harassment.

Another policy decision made to further gentrification happened in 2011 when Mayor
Ellis Lee and Board of Supervisors of San Francisco approved a huge Twitter tax-break,
exempting Twitter from paying roughly 22 million dollars of payroll tax over six years on the
condition that the corporation settled its office space in Mid-Market, a neighborhood in San
Francisco. As a result, the Mid-Market and the SOMA districts experienced dramatic changes.29
Buyouts also occur to capitalize on the Ellis loophole, because harassing a tenant into a buyout
means renters can avoid Ellis Act re-rental restrictions and then re-rent the apartment at an
inflated price.

Gentrification is often hard to quantify because developers use a myriad of different

methods as mentioned above. They don’t “plunge into the heart of slum opportunity, but tend to
take it piece by piece”, aware strategists for the bleaching or whitening of cities.30 “Cleaner and
whiter, cleaner because whiter, whiter therefore cleaner, bleaching designates the fact that urban
renewal [is] connected to the preservation of whiteness. When it comes to gentrification,
whiteness holds currency. Creating spaces where white bodies and desires and, most importantly,
consumption, dominate and shape the neighborhood.”31

According to census data for 2016 to 2020, Black households had among the lowest
median incomes in San Francisco at just below “$39,000 compared to white and Asian
households, who earned around $151,000 and $102,000, respectively.”32 In terms of Asian
income, there are still disparities between white and Asian households, as well as disparities
between various Asian ethnic groups. A Bay Area Equity Atlas report says 11 of the Bay Area’s
census tracts contain segregated low-income Asian American and Pacific Islander neighborhoods
and are all located in San Francisco, Alameda and Santa Clara counties.33 And in light of the
28
“Ellis Act Evictions - Los Angeles Tenants Union.” LA Tenants Union,
https://latenantsunion.org/en/ellis-act-evictions/.
29
Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. “Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Are...”
30
Smith, The New Urban Frontier, 23.
http://rohcavamaintenant.free.fr/USB%20KEY%20Fahriye/k%C4%B1tap%20Neil%20Smith__The_New_Urban_F
rontier__Gentrification_and_the_Revanchist_City.pdf
31
Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. “Resisting the Politics of Displacement in the San Francisco Bay Are...”
32
Rezal, Adriana. “Even the richest San Franciscans think economic inequality is out of control. Here's how bad it
is.” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 September 2022,
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/income-inequality-San-Francisco-17462495.php.
33
Russell, Kiley. “Census study finds several segregated low-income Asian American/Pacific Islander
neighborhoods.” Local News Matters, 24 August 2022,
https://localnewsmatters.org/2022/08/24/census-study-finds-several-segregated-low-income-asian-american-pacific-
islander-neighborhoods/.
COVID pandemic, there is also a noticeable income gap between lower-income and
higher-income households that is widening in the Bay Area. “In October 2022, 26% of people of
color in the Bay Area reported a loss of income due to job loss or a reduction in hours or wages,
while just 8% of white people reported a similar loss of income.” This gap has widened between
the start of the pandemic and two years by 23 percent.34

34
Russell, Kiley. “Data shows low-income residents, communities of color in the Bay Area struggle in a
post-COVID economy.” | Palo Alto Online |, 2 April 2023,
https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2023/04/02/data-shows-low-income-residents-communities-of-color-in-the-bay-are
a-are-struggle-in-a-post-covid-economy.