Why did San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie, whose campaign platform emphasized sensible fiscal policy, sign legislation shortly before Christmas to create a “reparations fund” for black residents of the city? The measure was initially drafted during the tenure of Lurie’s predecessor, London Breed, at the request of the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee (AARAC), a small group of activists convened soon after the George Floyd riots to propose remedies for past injustices against the local black community. The committee’s almost 400-page list of final recommendations included financing “comprehensive debt forgiveness,” $500,000 down payment loan assistance grants, and—most notoriously—a reparations fund offering a “one-time, lump-sum payment of $5 million” for every qualifying black resident of the city.
In a press release, Lurie emphasized that the legislation did not actually allocate any money to the fund and said he was signing the bill merely “in recognition” of AARAC’s work and of the Board of Supervisors’ unanimous vote in support of the fund. The statement suggested that he was unaware of the broader context of cronyism from which the reparations push emerged. Yet in fact, on the campaign trail, Lurie levied multiple bracing attacks on then-mayor Breed for enabling “blatant corruption” through precisely this kind of identity-based grant program.
The point Lurie made back then stands. As I reported at the time, the Breed administration funneled nearly $100 million a year to a handful of activist-staffed departments that functioned largely as make-work and vote-buying schemes. I called it the city’s “DEI-industrial complex.” These city-funded fiefdoms included AARAC, but also the city’s Human Rights Commission, Department on the Status of Women, Office of Transgender Initiatives, and Office of Racial Equity. Under Breed, these departments ran programs offering thousands of dollars in monthly “guaranteed income” payments for select people who identify as black or transgender, with plans to expand to other groups, such as women with criminal records.
