Opinion: Don’t take away the homes we built

Our families have lived on San Francisco’s westside for generations. Our families worked long hours - running restaurants, cleaning offices, driving taxis, sewing in garment shops - to save enough to buy modest homes. These houses are not luxuries. They are the foundation of our security, our children’s inheritance, and the hard-earned generational wealth that we fought to build after decades of exclusion and discrimination.

Now City Hall wants to take that away

Mayor Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Joel Engardio, and the YIMBY activists who back them insist that “upzoning” the westside is about racial equity and creating affordability. But we know better. This plan would destabilize immigrant families like ours, pushing us out of the very neighborhoods we sacrificed to build.

The state has already stacked the deck against us. Proposition 19 stripped away the ability to pass down property tax protections, making it harder for children to hold onto the homes their parents worked a lifetime to buy. Rising assessments, state mandates that force rezonings, and now the City’s push to comply and upzone our neighborhoods all compound the pressure on families who just want to stay put.

Equity should never mean erasure

Developers don’t build affordable homes just because zoning changes. They build where profits make sense. Rezoning will bring luxury projects, speculation, and more traffic - not affordability.

Meanwhile, our families will be left with overcrowded schools, strained infrastructure, and declining neighborhood livability. And when property values drop or costs soar, it will be our children - not the planners, not the activists - who pay the price.

We’ve seen this before. After the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco leaders tried to push Chinatown out. During Redevelopment, entire communities of color were bulldozed, scattering families who never recovered. Today, City Hall is repeating the same mistake. Calling it “equity” doesn’t change the outcome: displacement.

Let’s be clear: the westside did not create redlining. We didn’t design failed housing programs. We didn’t mismanage schools. Those were government failures. Yet the bill for “fixing history” is being handed to working homeowners who already keep the city afloat - paying taxes, supporting schools, and caring for multiple generations under one roof.

We say no

Real equity would mean investing in the neighborhoods that have been neglected: strengthening schools, improving public safety, building better transit, and funding real subsidies for affordable housing. That would create opportunities without destabilizing the communities immigrants worked generations to build.

Our homes are not just houses. They are the promise we made to our children and the sacrifices of our parents. To erase that under the banner of planning is not justice. It is displacement by another name.

San Francisco owes its Chinese American families better.

*Co-authors of the opinion piece are Elaine Trang, Fatima Lau, Grace Lai, and Winnie Fung who are westside residents in the City of San Francisco.