San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco
Redevelopment Areas A-1 and A-2 displaced between 20,000 and 30,000 residents of the Fillmore and Western Addition from the late 1940s through the 1970s, including most of Japantown and the Black wartime migration community.
San Francisco’s Western Addition carried three distinct ethnic communities before the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency cleared most of their buildings. Japanese-American residents built Nihonmachi, or Japantown, from the 1906 earthquake forward. Jewish, Russian, Filipino, and Mexican immigrant families occupied the surrounding blocks. After the federal Executive Order 9066 evacuation removed the Japanese-American population in 1942, African-American workers drawn to the Kaiser shipyards of Richmond and Hunters Point by wartime industrial labor filled the emptied Japantown housing stock. The SFRA declared Redevelopment Area A-1 in 1948 and A-2 in 1964. Combined displacement totaled between 20,000 and 30,000 residents; A-2 alone took 4,522 households, 883 businesses, and approximately 2,500 Victorian-era structures. The Western Addition Community Organization, or WACO, won a rare federal court injunction in 1968 that forced the agency to fund replacement housing. Japantown’s current Cultural Heritage Economic Sustainability Strategy plan and the Geary Boulevard Reconnecting Communities study are the live 2026 continuations.