San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
S.F. urban planner fought redevelopment
When urban planner Chester Hartman was moving back to San Francisco after 30 years on the East Coast, he wandered into the Noe Valley branch library and there was his book, “City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco,” on display as a young librarian’s pick.
It dawned on Hartman that his once-radical ideas on city planning, redevelopment and rent control were still relevant as he finalized his move back to the Elizabeth Street Victorian he’d hung onto for all these years. On a typewriter at the kitchen table, he’d tapped out “Yerba Buena: Land Grab and Community Resistance in San Francisco,” published in 1974, “Displacement: How to Fight It,” published in 1982, and a half-dozen other academic treatises in-between.
Hartman returned to San Francisco full time in 2017 and spent his remaining years climbing the hills and walking the flats of the city to see whether his analysis of housing trends and tenants rights had held true. Hartman — who believed urban planning must protect the individuals whose homes and neighborhoods are at risk of being bulldozed in the name of economic progress — died in his Noe Valley home on May 9, said his wife, Amy Fine, a retired health policy consultant. The cause of death was complications of dementia, a condition he had fought to co-edit his final book, an anthology titled “From Foreclosure to Fair Lending,” published in 2013. Hartman was 87.
“Since the 1960s, no one played a greater role in promoting progressive urban planning and housing policy than Chester,” Peter Dreier, a professor of urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, wrote in a tribute titled “A Mensch With a Mission,” which was published in the newsletter Progressive City.
“For five decades, Chester was
on the front lines of the key battles: fighting top-down urban renewal, challenging displacement from gentrification, organizing for rent control, pushing for decent affordable housing, advocating for racial justice.”
He helped devise legal strategies for resisting the demolition of single-room-occupancy residences, most prominently the International Hotel. In the late 1970s, he co-chaired San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, a broad coalition that put a rent control measure on the ballot. It failed, but it set the stage for the rent control law that was finally approved by voters. From the same kitchen table where he wrote his books, he started the Planners Network, an advocacy group that served as a counterweight to conventional planning and is now a national organization with chapters across the
country.
“Chet was full of energy and cared deeply about social justice and people not being forced out of their neighborhoods,” said Fine, who met her future husband when they had adjacent offices in Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley, where Hartman taught graduate courses in the Department of City and Regional Planning. “He came of age during the time of urban renewal, and he saw the devastating impact it had on already-marginalized communities.”
Chester Warren Hartman was born April 12, 1936, in the Bronx, N.Y., where he grew up. His extended family grew up in the same apartment building, and the elder generation only spoke Yiddish. His father, Irving Hartman, was an importer of straw hats and baskets.
When he reached school age,
Chester was enrolled at Walden School, a private school with a progressive philosophy and he rode the subway down to Manhattan in the company of his older sister. Walden took him all the way through high school, which he graduated in 1953.
He enrolled directly in Harvard University and studied Germanic languages and literature. Steered toward urban planning by a family connection, he went directly to the doctorate program in urban planning and would have sailed through if he hadn’t been drafted into the Army during the Berlin missile crisis. This necessitated six months of active duty, followed by five years in the Army Reserve as a combat engineer.
Even in uniform he was a soft touch for a radical cause. As Dreier noted in his eulogy, Hartman
was once on leave in Memphis when he came upon a group protesting segregation of a Woolworth lunch counter. He grabbed a picket and joined the march in his Army uniform.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on displacement in the impoverished West End of Boston, and after receiving his doctorate in 1967 he accepted a teaching position in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. Hartman was also active in the antiwar and tenant rights movements, beliefs that bled into his teaching. This apparently irritated the pro-development administration because he was denied reappointment in 1969. In response, there were editorials in the Harvard Crimson on his behalf and buttons that stated simply “Chester,” as if he were running for office.
“All of the student activists were up in arms,” said John Mollenkopf, who was in the Harvard doctoral program in political science at the time. “Chester had a thorough and wellgrounded critique of urban planning as being technocratic and in service of market forces and not people.”
When he was bounced out of Harvard, Hartman was working on Urban Planning Aid, which he had co-founded as one of the first community-based advocacy planning organizations in the country, according to Mollenkopf, now a distinguished professor of political science and sociology at City University of New York.
One organization influenced by Urban Planning Aid was the National Housing Law Project, which was affiliated with the law school at UC Berkeley, which Hartman joined as a senior researcher when he moved west in 1970.
Hartman was “full immersion in everything he did,” said his wife, and this included the regular pickup basketball game where he was known as Chet the Jet. The games were coed, but
that did not dampen his competitiveness.
“Chet was not tall, but he was quick and had an accurate shot,” recalled Mollenkopf, who played in the games. “The players were all people who cared about neighborhood activism, and Chester was universally admired.”
Hartman often aired his views on planning and development in Common Sense, a socialist newspaper published in San Francisco.
“The way Chester thought about urban planning South of Market and on the Embarcadero was really amazing,” said Rachelle Resnick, a Common Sense photographer who became
a library administrator in Alameda. “He was an original thinker in many ways.”
In 1981, Hartman was recruited to be a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina. It was only supposed to be a one year deal so they rented the house on Elizabeth Street and moved to Chapel Hill en route to Washington, D.C., where one year turned into 37.
For 25 years he served as founding executive director, or research director at the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, an independent civil rights law and policy organization. They found a block in the Chevy Chase neighborhood that was just like Elizabeth Street, and their sons Jeremy and Ben grew up there. Hartman also wrote his memoir, “Between Eminence and Notoriety: Four Decades
of Radical Urban Planning,” while in Washington.
It was published in 2002, the same year he published “City for Sale,” an updated edition of “The Transformation of San Francisco.” This was the book he found on display in the Noe Valley library 15 years later. He also found its cover image of the Transamerica Pyramid memorialized in the Clarion Alley Mural Project, on one of his city walks with his wife, Amy Fine.
“Of course, he was pleased to see his book there,” she said, “but even more than that he was excited to see public artwork that tells the story of the people living in that community.”
A memorial service is pending.