Ends justify the means

Looks like I’m not going to make it to the first two bibliography pages folks but you can see links for the first two pages here. Today is the SHRC meeting to about the McKay site but I’m not 100% sure that the appeal process that is being followed is 100% correct here, nonetheless, it’s on still on the agenda.

To be honest seeing the SHRC and their support staff in action at the last meeting I didn’t have a lot of hope that anyone was going to stop this nomination train from plowing through. It’s clear that SHPO/SHRC are working with a playbook that is heavily skewed toward getting these nominations approved no matter what and it doesn’t matter rules they bend on the way to getting there. After seeing the emails between the nominating party at SHPO/SHRC staff it feels like it was going to get there eventually given the amount of effort being put in by SHPO/SHRC staff themselves to get it done.

Take for example the designation of St Francis Wood as historic, the SHRC absolved itself of any of the impacts that would happen as a result of this designation because they believe that their decisions should happen in a vacuum and unconnected to what happens after that designation. It’s also disappointing to see this article not even mention the lack of meaningful discussion and the, possibly, incorrect reading of whether AFFH affects how SHRC should make decisions. From the article:

On June 30, this unique San Francisco neighborhood was added to the National Register of Historic Places, representing the culmination of a yearslong campaign by neighborhood residents.

But the decision has been met with dismay by housing activists, who say the historic designation will deter future housing development and preserve a landscape designed to foster racial segregation.

“If you are preserving structures with the requirement that they remain single-family homes forever, when the origin of that single-family home was so Black people and Japanese people and Chinese people could not live there, is that really what you want to preserve?” says Annie Fryman, a housing policy expert who works for the backyard cottage developer Abodu and previously worked as a legislative aide to Senator Scott Wiener in Sacramento. “Historic preservation is known as frequently being used as a convenient and accepted tool of exclusion.”

And that’s how you have staff at agencies like SHPO/SHRC who, in the public lives, make all the right noises about exclusionary zoning, homelessness housing, and espouse “progressive” tendencies but turnaround and lean on a super suspect interpretation of affirmatively furthering fair housing to then push through what matters more to them: historic “preservation.”

While, I’m sure, there are some genuine true believers in the preservation space, they never seem to realize when their passion is being weaponized and taken advantage of by bad actors who understand which special buttons to push. No one ever wants to believe they are being used but, in the case of the McKay site, all these preservations and historians are being manipulated pretty masterfully by someone who was cheering the demolition of these now suddenly sacred buildings in order to make room for open space.

NIMBY applicant for SHRC, Carmen Reid, was seen celebrating the demolition of federal buildings to make way for open space. 4 years later, she's a born-again "preservationist" who wants to block remaining buildings that otherwise will provide housing. @oldcityguardian #alamtg pic.twitter.com/DlG6KGMm18

— Jason Biggs (@Jason___Biggs) April 25, 2022

And in the end all of their progressive musings and hand wringing on social media about the plight of homeless folks is all for show because when they had a change to shut down a pretty naked attempt at using the levers of government to deny vulnerable populations a chance at dignity they went along with it and helped bring it to a place of viability and “respectability.”