The New Geometry of San Francisco
A line was drawn around a neighborhood. A deed contained a racial covenant. A bank refused a mortgage. A zoning rule protected one district while concentrating burdens in another. The message, whether written openly or disguised through policy, was unmistakable:
You may not live here.
Many of those legal barriers have been dismantled. The red ink has faded from the official map. Racially restrictive covenants are unenforceable. Fair-housing laws prohibit many forms of discrimination that earlier generations accepted or institutionalized.
Yet removing a discriminatory line from a document does not necessarily remove exclusion from the city.
Sometimes the line simply changes its language.
Today, one of San Francisco's most powerful boundaries is increasingly written not in racial terminology but in price.
The apartment may be legally available to everyone. The condominium may carry no racial restriction. The neighborhood entrance has no gate. Yet when rent requires an income unavailable to most working families, or homeownership requires wealth accumulated across generations, another boundary emerges.
The old map said:
You cannot enter because of who you are.
The new map can say:
You are free to enter—provided you can afford the price.
That distinction matters legally. It should not be erased. Contemporary housing markets are not simply identical to historic redlining, and high prices alone do not prove discriminatory intent.
But the human consequences can sometimes trace remarkably familiar geography.
Teachers travel farther from the children they teach. Restaurant workers prepare meals in neighborhoods where they cannot afford dinner and rent. Caregivers tend elderly residents in houses they could never purchase. Artists help create the cultural identity that makes a neighborhood desirable, only to discover that desirability has raised the cost of remaining there.
And families who have lived in a community for decades may watch the value of everything around them rise while their own security declines.
This is the strange arithmetic of displacement:
The neighborhood becomes more valuable precisely when belonging to it becomes less attainable.
> The New Geometry
San Francisco is now confronting another transformation. Greater housing density is spreading beyond the neighborhoods that historically absorbed much of the city's growth. Taller buildings, transit-oriented development, state housing mandates, density bonuses, and rezoning increasingly challenge an older geography in which some districts grew dramatically while others remained comparatively insulated.
This transformation offers enormous opportunity.
A scarce city must create more homes. A city that refuses to build eventually turns scarcity itself into privilege. When only a limited number of households can enter, those possessing the greatest purchasing power usually prevail.
But building more cannot be the end of the conversation.
We must ask what kind of city the new buildings are constructing socially.
If towers rise throughout San Francisco but teachers, service workers, seniors, immigrants, young families, artists, and low-income residents continue disappearing, we will have solved the geometry of height without solving the geometry of belonging.
We may even create a new form of segregation:
vertical exclusion.
People of radically different economic circumstances may occupy the same geographic neighborhood while living in almost separate cities—luxury apartments beside subsidized housing, multimillion-dollar condominiums overlooking SROs, extraordinary private wealth existing only blocks from homelessness.
The boundary is no longer necessarily between east and west.
Sometimes it runs between floors.
Sometimes between buildings.
Sometimes between two doors on the same street.
And sometimes it exists invisibly inside a number printed beside the word Rent.
Let Development Carry a Social Covenant
This is why every major expansion of development capacity should carry a larger civic question.
When public policy increases what can be built on a parcel, enormous private value may be created. That value does not arise from land alone. It also arises from public decisions, transportation networks, utilities, schools, streets, parks, safety systems, cultural institutions, and generations of residents who made the surrounding neighborhood desirable.
Therefore, some portion of progress should return to the community that made progress possible.
Affordable housing matters.
Tenant stability matters.
Community land ownership matters.
Small businesses matter.
Public transportation matters.
Cultural institutions matter.
And the ability of ordinary people to remain near their work, families, schools, churches, friendships, and memories matters.
A city is not merely an investment platform built upon expensive soil.
It is a human inheritance.
The challenge before San Francisco, therefore, is not to choose between preservation and construction, or between neighborhood and density.
The greater challenge is to build a city in which growth itself becomes a means of widening belonging.
Build the housing.
Raise the towers.
Open the zoning.
Use the land more generously.
But as the old red lines disappear and new price lines emerge, remember what history has already taught us:
Exclusion does not cease to be exclusion simply because the line becomes invisible.
The map may no longer say who belongs.
The market increasingly does.
Our task is therefore not merely to erase yesterday's lines, but to prevent tomorrow's lines from reproducing yesterday's separations.
Where the red line once said, “You cannot live here,”
let the future say, “There is room for you here.”
That would be more than housing policy.
That would be a new geometry of belonging.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
August 26, 2026
*The 1937 HOLC Grading System: The HOLC deployed examiners to grade San Francisco neighborhoods from A to D based on their perceived lending risk:Grade A (Green - "Best"): Wealthy, racially homogenous, and white areas like Pacific Heights and the Marina.Grade B (Blue - "Still Desirable"): Stable, middle-class neighborhoods like the Sunset and Outer Richmond.Grade C (Yellow - "Definitely Declining"): Aging neighborhoods with a "threat of infiltration" of minority populations, including Telegraph Hill and Noe Valley.Grade D (Red - "Hazardous"): Neighborhoods containing Black, Asian, or immigrant populations. These areas were completely cut off from federally backed.
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