SF is losin' it

SAN FRANCISCO officials are putting together a task force to develop a strategy to preserve the city's rapidly declining African-American population, and possibly attract new African-American residents. This is a laudable goal, but at this late date -- San Francisco's black population has dropped from about 13.4 percent of the city to 6.5 percent over the last 25 years -- is there anything the city can really do? If so, are other San Franciscans likely to be as enthusiastic as are their officials?

The mere fact that city officials feel the need to put together a "task force" to stem the bleeding of African-American residents to other communities reveals how far this ship has already sailed past the horizon. San Francisco likes to bill itself as a diverse city, but the numbers -- 53 percent white and 33.5 percent Asian, mostly Chinese -- expose its relative homogeneity in comparison with other cities, such as Los Angeles or New York. San Francisco has the lowest proportion of black residents of any large city in the United States -- even lower than Seattle or San Diego. Demographers have also noted that the African Americans who move out of San Francisco tend to be more upwardly mobile -- so that the few black residents who are left constitute a poorer underclass. Certainly the isolation of these residents -- about one-third of San Francisco's African-American population lives in the Bayview district, which is so separate from the rest of the city that it resembles a South African township -- underscores San Francisco's uneasy feelings toward them.