I was in Chinatown on Christmas Eve, walking around and looking at murals depicting community leaders and struggles, including the battle to save the I-Hotel. And as I hear about all the people affiliated with the Yimbys and the billionaires talk about how San Francisco has to change, and can’t be “preserved in amber,” I have been thinking about the 1970s and 1980s, and the I-Hotel, and redevelopment, when “progress” was a watchword and some of the same arguments echoed in the news media.
And I looked at those murals of people and causes we now revere, and I thought:
All those years, consistently, the progressives, the people on the left, the ones who fought uncontrolled growth and development and what was called “progress,” and who tried to preserve existing affordable housing even when it made no “financial sense” and was in the way of a “better” city …. they were right.
They were right, and now we look at them and celebrate their work—although at the time, the city leaders, including then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein and a majority of the supervisors, dismissed them as obstructionists.
The I-Hotel, a residential hotel with low-cost rooms, was the heart of Manilatown, the center of Filipino life in San Francisco. It also housed Chinese seniors.
Walter Shorenstein, a greedy developer who later became enough of a philanthropist that some people respected him, bought the I-Hotel and moved to demolish it to build a parking garage. The left and the local community fought him. Then he sold it to a liquor baron from Thailand operating as Four Seas Investment Company, who wanted to demolish it for market-rate housing—and again, a huge campaign fought against him.
But in the end, it was Feinstein and a majority of the supervisors who approved the demolition—and for almost ten years, the place stayed empty, a hold in the ground, before Four Seas gave up and sold it to the Catholic Church, which eventually turned it into affordable housing.
Today, we all seem to agree: Shorenstein was wrong. Feinstein was wrong. The community, including (yes) some hard-core leftists, was right.
After 40 years as a reporter here, I can look back on so many examples.
The opponents of redevelopment in the Western Addition and Soma were right. The opponents of freeway expansion were right. At the time, they were dismissed as opponents of progress.
The neighborhood folks who added demolition controls for housing after developers demolished vintage Victorians in the Richmond for multi-unit housing that was not affordable were demonized as Nimbys. Today, everyone I talk to in the Planning Department says they were right, that it should be hard to demolish existing housing.
Feinstein and the landlords told the activists who fought for rent control that it would stop developers from building new housing and cause disinvestment and blight. Feinstein and the landlords were wrong; the tenants were right.
Feinstein, the Chamber of Commerce, and many others fought against plans to limit office growth, saying any restrictions would ruin the economy. They were wrong. The progressive and neighborhood folks who put Prop. M on the ballot in 1986, who resisted highrise office construction (in part because developers built no housing for the new workers) were right.
Proposition M saved San Francisco from the overbuilding that almost bankrupted cities like Houston.
(At the time, Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of Savings and Loans and accelerated depreciation rules poured a massive amount of speculative capital into highrise office construction; many of those buildings were never occupied, and the S&Ls crashed, leading to a massive taxpayer bailout.)
The developers and the Chron dismissed supporters of an Office Housing Production Program, which would have mandated office developers to build housing for their workers, saying it would slow office construction and hurt the economy. The developers, who created the housing crisis by bringing tens of thousands of new workers to the city while not building housing for them (because it wasn’t profitable enough) were wrong. The progressives were right.
(In the 1970s and 1980s, the progressives were the ones demanding more housing. The developers made more money building offices, so that’s what was built. The much-maligned neighborhood downzoning of 1978 was Feinstein’s way of undermining the 1979 measure Prop. O, which would have limited downtown office development. Progressives opposed offices, not housing; The downzoning plan was sold as a way to protect neighborhoods from office creep, which was a very real fear back then.)
The mainstream at City Hall, and the major news media, said people who supported public power and said PG&E was an illegal monopoly that charged too much for bad service were crazy. The powers that be dismissed the Bay Guardian—a leading voice for public power—and tried to marginalize that paper as much as possible. Most of the city establishment (including at least one former PG&E lobbyist) now agrees public power advocates were, and are, right.
You look at San Francisco history over the past half century, and there’s a pattern: Over and over, everyone supported by PG&E and big business and the developers and the real-estate industry was wrong. The people who organized the neighborhoods, and the people on the economic left, were right. Today, we celebrate their victories.
As we enter 2026, I have to wonder: Ten, 20, 25 years from now, what will we say about the likes of Scott Wiener and the Yimbys—and what will we say about the progressives who have a different vision for San Francisco?
