San Francisco’s budget troubles highlight the absurdity of its reparations plans
Zachary Faria
San Francisco’s potential reparations plan is terrible in many ways, but it is particularly disastrous when you consider the city’s financial troubles.
As our editorial on the subject noted, the proposal put forward by the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee is sloppy, to put it mildly. The proposal only requires you to be black, at least 18 years old, and then fit two other categories that may not even require you to have lived in the city. Hit those marks (such as having a prison record for dealing drugs) and you can collect $5 million, if the plan is ultimately approved.
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It’s an absurd plan for many reasons, including that California was not a slave state and San Francisco wasn’t in the Jim Crow South. Worse, the financials don’t even remotely add up, either. The budget forecast for the city of San Francisco projects a $728 million deficit over the next two fiscal years for the city’s general fund. The budget deficit for the 2027-28 fiscal year alone is projected to be $1.22 billion.
This is because San Francisco has been bleeding residents, which is hardly a surprise. The city is a dump thanks to its commitment to ignoring quality-of-life crimes, to the point that residents carry tasers or bats to protect themselves from drug-addled homeless residents. San Francisco is the most popular destination that residents want to leave, and they are doing so. In 2021, 116,000 people moved out, around 2.5% of the city’s population.
As a result, the city is losing out on millions in tax revenue. Projections for the fiscal year 2023-24 show a reduction in revenue from the city’s property tax (nearly $70 million), business tax ($78.5 million), and transfer tax ($179 million).
Even if the city tightened up its reparations plan to ensure it only went to current San Francisco residents, the numbers are dire. Roughly 5% of the city’s 815,201 residents are black. That amounts to roughly 40,760 black residents. Even if the city paid only 1% of those residents, it would be looking at a price tag of over $2 billion.
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Oh, and the committee also proposes supplementing the income of low-income recipients for the next 250 years. This is the same city that was prepared to spend $1.7 million to build a single public toilet. You can only imagine how much a 250-year payment plan would balloon to.
If San Francisco really wanted to help its black residents, perhaps it could focus on bringing down the cost of living and cleaning up the city’s streets. Or maybe it could even put money towards helping them move somewhere more affordable, where they wouldn’t have to step over homeless people or feces to go to work. That would cost far less than $5 million per person, but then woke city leaders wouldn’t feel like they were racial justice heroes.