From a Reader: By Joe Castrovinci

The Sunset is San Francisco’s largest neighborhood, but it’s hard to get lost here. In a neighborhood where streets are numbered or alphabetized, it’s always easy to know where you are, no matter how blinding the sun, dense the fog, strong the wind or dark the night.

Not much more than 100 years ago, it was a very different story. At that time, more than half of San Francisco was covered in sand dunes, and no place was more mysterious, remote or forbidding than what was then known as the “Outer Lands” or “Outside Lands,” an uninhabitable “cold desert.”

It was, in short, a place that could gobble you up and never let you out. And at least in one instance, that’s exactly what it did.

Death in the Dunes

On May 23, 1897, the San Francisco Call reported the story of a woman who decided to visit the cold desert, left a building located roughly where Laguna Honda is today, got lost, and never came back. She died from exhaustion trying to find her way home.

As the Call explained it, she was:

“… caught in a fog and unable to find her way back. Search was made for her, but it was not until the next day that she was found. She was lying dead close to a clump of brush, and footprints in the sand showed that she had wandered round and round in a circle until overcome by exhaustion and cold. From the way the sand was disturbed it was apparent that she had struggled along for hours before being finally overcome.”

If she had taken that walk not in 1897 but a few decades later, she would have been in a vastly different place. And no one had described the area’s transformation better or more fully than Lorri Ungaretti, whose book, “Stories in the Sand: San Francisco’s Sunset District, 1847-1964,” tells that history not just in words but with an enormous number of photos.

Not up for a great read? Check out the talks and courses that Ungaretti occasionally teaches on Sunset history, most recently in January at San Francisco’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (olli.sfsu.edu), which offers courses and activities for people who are 50 plus.

One story Ungaretti tells begins in the 1870s, after a long dispute about who owned the Sunset was resolved in favor of San Francisco. The city imposed today’s grid over the wilderness, and by the early 1900s, the Parkside Realty Company had built many homes in today’s Parkside District.

These first houses varied a lot – some small, others large, some fancy, others plain – but this wave was soon superseded by a large number of Craftsmen homes built in the 1910s, and finally by a tsunami of stucco-clad homes build by Henry Doelger and others from the 1920s to the 1940s.

A Whites-Only Sunset and the Story of Proposition 14

By World War II, the area was solidly working class and home to lots of policemen and firemen, most of them Irish or Italian. Houses built in the 1930s or the ’40s sold for about $5,000, and buying one was a big move up from a small apartment in the eastern part of the City to a much larger home with a yard in the Sunset.

But this American Dream came with one huge and terrible price; it was open only to white people. Although deed restrictions based on race were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, many people ignored the decision.

In 1961, for example, the wife of Willie Brown, a future assemblymember and mayor, but then a young lawyer, was not allowed to see a home in the Forest Knolls development. Brown complained to the press, and this led to one of the first sit-in demonstrations in San Francisco’s history. Brown refused to consider buying the house after the builders would not commit to showing or selling their properties to the most qualified buyers, irrespective of race. He would later admit that he was never really interested in buying the house; it knew it was unjust he could not even look at it.

In 1964, San Francisco was 74% white, and the Sunset was home to the City’s largest concentration of white people: 85.8%. This was the case because most homes came with deed restrictions that forbade selling to anyone who was Black or Asian.

Most Californians strongly supported such restrictions. A 1916 ad in the San Francisco Chronicle listing one development’s advantages boasted that “it contained no Africans or Asiatics.” A city resident expressed his view this way: “We are prepared to move to an all-white area if racial patterns should ever change.”

But, as Bob Dylan noted, the times they were a-changin’.

In 1959, the California state legislature approved a bill banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, ancestry or national origin. In 1963, the legislature passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, which forbade discrimination in housing, except in owner-occupied buildings with four units or less. This law also outlawed discrimination by banks, real estate brokers, mortgage companies and financial institutions.

Life in white areas seemed now to be open to Black, Asian, and Jewish Americans. But, as is so often the case in California, the voters had the final say, at least for a time.

A group of Realtors and developers, outraged by what the state legislature had done, began work on a ballot proposition that allowed whites-only restrictions. Proposition 14, which they placed on the statewide ballot in 1964, said:

“Neither the state nor any subdivision nor agency thereof shall deny, limit or abridge, directly or indirectly, the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.”

Prop. 14 passed with more than 65% of the vote. It won a majority in every California county, including San Francisco, where the vote was about 53% in favor. The vote in the Sunset mirrored that of the state at large: 2-to-1 in favor of legalized discrimination.

This is where the courts stepped in. In 1966, the California Supreme Court ruled that Proposition 14 was unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court concurred in 1967. Discrimination, at least in the form of deed restrictions, was over, and people of all races and religions were now free to own property in the Sunset.

The death of Prop. 14 paved the way for today’s neighborhood, where a largely white neighborhood has become diverse and vibrant and welcomes people from all over the world.

Joe Castrovinci has been a San Francisco resident for more than 50 years. He lives on Twin Peaks.