The San Francisco Blues

Abstract

This chapter focuses on grassroots urban redevelopment by residents of San Francisco’s Hunters Point neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s, and their efforts to build permanent housing and community infrastructure for Black residents. It shows how Hunters Point housing activists worked to make space for Black life in a market economy dependent on the uneven devaluation of people and place, through an alternatively collaborative and critical relationship with state agencies. The vision of a “new Hunters Point” stems from a branch of the blues epistemology Clyde Woods identified in the Mississippi Delta, as this epistemology was crafted and reworked through the landscape and politics of the US West. Housing activists in Hunters Point aimed to produce a more humane sociospatial arrangement in San Francisco.