"Urban Renewal" in San Francisco Japantown

The summer going into my junior year of high school I helped to create a youth-led historical walking tour of San Francisco Japantown as part of an internship with the National Japanese American Historical Society (NJAHS). Designing the tour exposed me to many issues that I had previously been unaware of. Most people consider Japantown to be a cultural landmark that gives tourists and locals alike a veritable peek into Japanese- not necessarily Japanese American- culture. But the story of how Japantown transitioned from an ethnic enclave to a commercial district remains relatively unknown. My own interaction with Japantown had mostly been limited to attending the popular Cherry Blossom Festival and despite my family’s active role in the local Japanese American community I had never thought to look beyond the mall façade of Japantown. As I soon learned “Japantown” did not change naturally into the way it currently functions today, nor did its citizens have a voice in deciding that transformative course.

The same urban renewal programs that took place in Los Angeles also devastated San Francisco Japantown. Prior to World War II Japantown was a vibrant community of roughly 30 blocks with more than 200 Japanese and Japanese-American owned businesses in an neighborhood known as the Western Addition. The area was primarily comprised of Victorian houses built in the late 1800’s that served as stores, meeting places and hospitals. These multi-functional houses helped to create a tight-knit ethnic enclave because many families built storefronts out of the street level garages and lived in the residential portions above. As we read in the Kurashige text, all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the west coast were expelled from their homes and put in internment camps throughout WWII. During this time many African-Americans settled in the Western Addition, sometimes in houses that were formally occupied by Japanese and Japanese Americans. Internment of course drastically affected Japantown but ultimately did not change the cityscape as much as the upcoming “redevelopment” of the Western Addition.

Only three years after Japanese and Japanese Americans returned to their homes, the city of San Francisco decided to launch one of the nation’s first large scale urban renewal projects in the Western Addition. Exactly parallel to the stories of redevelopment that Avila chronicled in the “Sutured City” chapter, the Western Addition was chosen because of federal money received for city highways and the “blighted” state of the area. The city chose to flatten dynamic ethnic enclaves in favor building the Geary Expressway to connect a predominantly white, middle class residential neighborhood (the Richmond) to downtown San Francisco. The area chosen for redevelopment was roughly 27 square blocks that included the bulk of Japantown and part of the predominantly African American community surrounding it. The city proceeded to displace 8,000 residents, including 1,500 Nikkei, through eminent domain and after provided little or no compensation or assistance. Most of what they demolished were low-income housing, however, what they chose to build on the reclaimed land were commercial establishments, such as the current landmarks of “Japantown”: the Japan Center Mall, the Kabuki Theater and the Miyako Hotel. The city only built 800 units of low-income housing to compensate for the roughly 6,000 units that they razed. The construction of the Geary Expressway also literally divided the African American and Japanese American communities with six lanes of traffic. Redevelopment hit the Western Addition again in 1962 when the city launched another campaign, this time destroying 5,000 units of affordable housing and only building 181. Japanese Americans and African Americans throughout the Western Addition formed coalitions to attempt to stop the repeated destruction of their neighborhoods but ultimately were unable to make a significant difference.

During our walking tour we would tell this complex story of “urban planning,” discrimination and unfair treatment in front of an old Victorian house on Sutter St in Japantown. I would give all the numbers and facts that I listed above in an attempt to describe how Japantown had been fundamentally transformed and how different it would be had the city not categorically destroyed a thriving community. I would ask the audience how much they thought the house that we stood in front of costs today, keeping in mind that they used to offer both affordable housing and business space to Japanese Americans. The answer, $3-4 million, explains why the damage that the city caused is completely irreversible.