SF Chronicle: How San Francisco’s Black population changed, block by block over 50 years
From left to right: Theo Ellington and his wife Seray Ellington have story time with their sons: four-year twins Maxwell and Hendrix, and 7-year-old Lennox inside their Bayview home. Yalonda M. James / S.F. Chronicle
When Theo Ellington was growing up, the Bayview could be rough and violent. But the family home on Palou Avenue was a haven for him and his cousins. Ellington’s grandfather purchased the place in the late ’90s, using his earnings from a city job fixing streets and doing repair work on the Golden Gate Bridge.
His family knew their neighbors, a close community of working families.
“We didn't feel rich or poor, we just were able to live,” Ellington said. “We were surrounded in a community of people who looked like us, people who worked hard.”
Jobs at the nearby Hunters Point Shipyard had attracted workers to the area from across the country after the Navy purchased it at the outset of World War II. Homeownership had soared and solid Navy wages meant stable, middle-class lives for thousands of workers, many of whom were Black.
But when the shipyard stopped operating in 1974, more than 5,000 people lost their jobs overnight. By the 1990s, the naval base had closed entirely, and the area fell on hard times.
“A lot of the jobs and the economic vitality went with it,” said Ellington, a community organizer and nonprofit executive who still lives in the neighborhood. He is now campaigning to represent it on the Board of Supervisors and is raising three children there.
“It’s the last vestige in San Francisco for Black folks, middle-class families,” Ellington said.
Bayview-Hunters Point went from nearly 70% Black in 1970 to 25% in 2020 — still the highest share of any neighborhood in San Francisco.
Over the last 50 years, the neighborhood has become more diverse in other ways as the Black population dwindled and other racial groups moved in. Similar dynamics are at work citywide. The numbers of white, Asian and Latino people in San Francisco have all climbed since 1980, while the number of Black residents dropped.
Ellington’s own family reflects that change. Of the 10 or so relatives with whom he shared the house on Palou growing up, only his mother and brother still live in San Francisco. The rest have decamped to what Ellington calls “the hinterlands”: Richmond, Antioch, Pittsburg.
The same story is playing out across the Bayview and all over San Francisco. Some families, like Ellington’s, have been here for generations. Others arrived more recently but are already watching their children get priced out.
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