San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie quietly signed a questionable bill to create a reparations fund for black residents — but acknowledged the city is too broke to pay, sparking a swift backlash from critics who call the plan blatantly illegal.
The bill, which was passed unanimously by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors earlier this month, creates a fund to accept private or public money for a controversial reparations plan that calls for cash payouts of $5 million each to eligible black residents, debt forgiveness, 250 years of tax abatements, and income subsidies.
“We are not allocating money to this fund — with a historic $1 billion budget deficit, we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner,” said Lurie in a statement.
Still, critics have called the reparations plan unlawful “virtue signaling” even if private dollars are used.
Racial preferences in government programs are banned under the constitution, according to Andrew Quinio, attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation.
“The ordinance has a very explicit racially discriminatory purpose,” he said.
The bill, authored by Supervisor Shamann Walton, states that the fund is intended to “provide restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation to individuals who are black and/or descendants of a chattel enslaved person and have experienced a proven harm in San Francisco.”
Walton previously called for a $50 million Office of Reparations in 2023, but was rebuffed by then-mayor London Breed.
Advocates for the program argue that reparations are needed to support black communities who suffered under discriminatory government projects like a decades-long redevelopment of the city’s Fillmore district that razed homes owned by black families.
A prior effort to aid the city’s black communities under Breed, called the Dream Keeper Initiative, erupted into scandal after its director was accused of pilfering city funds for personal needs, like her son’s UCLA tuition.
The Human Rights Commission, the same department that ran the ill-fated Dream Keeper Initiative, is in charge of the reparations fund, according to the city.
“People are livid. Lurie’s stained his reputation,” said local conservative activist Richie Greenberg.
Other critics piled on after Lurie clandestinely signed the bill just before Christmas.
“Even the San Francisco NAACP called the $5M payout ‘arbitrary’ and warned the plan gave ‘false hope.’ But that didn’t stop city leaders from pushing it forward with virtue-signaling fanfare,” wrote author Gerald Posner, who grew up in San Francisco, on X.
San Francisco is facing a two-year deficit as high as $936 million as spending outpaces revenues in the city of roughly 800,000 people.
