On February 17, 1953, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency submitted a report to the Board of Supervisors recommending a large section of South of Market—an irregular area stretching between 2nd and 9th streets, Mission and Brannan streets—be officially designated as blighted and subject to urban renewal.
But there was a problem. To qualify for federal financial assistance, a redevelopment project area needed to be predominantly residential at its inception or at its completion. The South of Market zone was primarily light industrial. And real estate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, and other city power brokers did not want housing in a redeveloped South of Market, but instead a new landscape of office towers, shopping centers, a convention center, and maybe a sports stadium.
Hotelier, philanthropist, and local political influencer Ben Swig presented this vision as the “San Francisco Prosperity Plan” in 1955 and offered a solution on the financing problem.
If the city and Redevelopment Agency would expand the blighted boundaries to a more economically attractive zone—Mission, Folsom, 3rd and 5th streets—he would raise the capital to create “a Rockefeller Center type of development,” with a 16,000-car garage, 20-story office building, shopping mall, moving sidewalks, theater, hotel, and more. Swig would even pay for studies to help Redevelopment find a way to reclassify his six preferred blocks as blighted.
The Redevelopment Agency would have the power to acquire and clear the blocks. The investors, in Swig’s own words, “would make a lot of money out it.” On December 27, 1955, the Board of Supervisors, against the recommendation of the City’s Planning director, re-drew Area D to include the new blocks.
It wasn’t until 1964, with M. Justin Herman as executive director of the Redevelopment Agency, that the Yerba Buena Center project was officially announced. Area D was redrawn once more, perversely omitting the original designated blighted blocks to focus on the more attractive area closer to Market and 3rd streets. Swig was no longer a partner, but the updated plan meant to attract $100 million in private investments very closely followed his original proposal: convention center, shopping mall, office towers.
In the project area were almost 50 residential hotels predominately occupied by single men: seasonal and local workers, former union men retired on a pension, long-term tenants and people recently displaced or traveling. These residents and their homes were portrayed by the Redevelopment Agency and the city’s major media as comprising San Francisco’s “skid row,” a hopeless zone of derelict flophouses, alcoholism, and societal ills.
Those struggling with addictions, mental illness, or the effects of severe poverty are always more visible in neighborhoods of single-room housing, as the sidewalks and stores outside serve as front yard, social hall, and recreation area. While some South of Market property owners acted as true slum lords who shamefully neglected their properties, many residential hotels were well-run with long-standing tenants and a high degree of social cohesion. There were also 200+ families in the neighborhood, the majority of which were of Filipino and/or Latinx origins.
The 87-acre Yerba Buena Center project was not about better lives for these residents, but to remake the neighborhood for business interests, primarily members of the San Francisco Convention & Business Bureau. “Blight” was a designation of economic liability, meant to describe areas where property values returned less in taxes than they cost in public services. Redevelopment’s priorities were commercial prosperity and an increased city tax base. Cultural amenities and better housing were included in its plans, but secondary in importance.
Director Herman promised some rehabilitation of residential hotels and retention of industrial jobs. He said there would be only some “spot clearance.” In truth, the Redevelopment Agency initially meant to preserve only 50 of the 404 buildings within the project site. Herman and the city also repeatedly promised to find suitable housing for the evicted, but planned only 176 units of new housing in the Yerba Buena Center while displacing 3,050 single persons and 250 families.
Hotels and lodging houses purchased by redevelopment were allowed to deteriorate to almost unlivable standards before replacement housing was identified. Tenants were pressured to take a $5 relocation grant (families received $200) to move rather than wait for reassigned units. Redevelopment tried to count on new public housing across the city as landing spots. But the projects were slow to complete, offered inadequate capacity, and already had thousands of displaced residents of the Western Addition on their waiting lists.
Residents received as little as 30 days’ notice before demolitions, then nothing new would be built on sites for years. The first Yerba Buena Center building didn’t begin construction at 55 Hawthorne until 1969. In June of that year the Redevelopment Agency promised 1973 as the completion date of the entire project with convention center, hotel, and sports arena. Instead, the area remained a mostly empty concrete landscape, used as parking lots, until the early 1980s.
The inclusion of local voices and resident participation in the project did finally come through legal action. Years-long resistance by Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR) secured 2,000 low-rent replacement units in the redevelopment zone. Buildings indistinguishable from pricey condo towers of the same vintage went up on Howard and Folsom streets beginning in 1979. (TOOR evolved into TODCO, which continues to be an affordable housing developer South of Market and beyond.)
San Francisco Heritage fought hard for the preservation of the red-brick Jessie Street substation, which had been renovated by famed architect Willis Polk, and the Williams Building on the corner of 3rd and Mission streets. Both were saved, with the substation used for the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
It was in the 1980s that Yerba Buena Center really began taking shape. Moscone Center opened in 1981 and hosted the 1984 Democratic National Convention. Marriott’s post-modern “jukebox” hotel opened in 1989. Cultural institutions—SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, the Museum of the African Diaspora—arrived in the 1990s, as did high-end hotel and condo towers. The creation and 1993 dedication of the Yerba Buena Gardens, especially the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, was almost universally hailed.
A lot of focus is still given to Yerba Buena Center by city leaders and the media. The 1990s vision for the center has had to adjust to new economic realities. Cultural institutions have closed or paused operations. The glitzy and ambitious Metreon is now a mall struggling for identity beyond a Target store. Convention facilities were expanded over the years with Moscone North (1992) and West (2003), but the declining number and frequency of large conventions (and the booked hotel rooms to which they correlate) are a closely reported and perhaps misleading measure of the city’s overall health.
From a historical and preservation perspective, what was retained in the Yerba Buena Center plan feels only more precious: St. Patrick’s Church, the stately Aronson and Williams Buildings at 3rd and Mission street, the 1906 Planters Hotel building at 282 2nd Street, where legacy business The Fly Trap now operates.
More strangely, within a decade we will have 1980s buildings that qualify for assessment of historical significance. Will the Marriott Marquis “jukebox” be embraced as the once controversial Transamerica Building is today?
In October 2025 San Francisco Heritage is spotlight the South of Market for its Heritage in the Neighborhoods program.
