For more than a century commentators have referred to San Francisco's Mission District as a “city within a city.” This book demonstrates that it was no accident that the neighborhood came to be thought of this way. In the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Mission residents (“Missionites,” as they proudly referred to themselves) organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood. Mission-based groups mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong identity, one that was explicitly white. Organizations like the Mission Promotion Association wielded decis ... More

For more than a century commentators have referred to San Francisco's Mission District as a “city within a city.” This book demonstrates that it was no accident that the neighborhood came to be thought of this way. In the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, Mission residents (“Missionites,” as they proudly referred to themselves) organized to claim the right to plan their own neighborhood. Mission-based groups mobilized a politics of place and ethnicity to create a strong identity, one that was explicitly white. Organizations like the Mission Promotion Association wielded decisive influence in planning debates through the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Local power waned through the New Deal and immediate post-World War II period, but institutions like the Mission Merchants' Association and the Catholic parish church of St. Peter's carried on the neighborhood planning tradition. In the 1960s, the federal urban renewal program and Great Society programs, particularly Model Cities, would give neighborhood residents the impetus to organize anew. The resulting groups, like the Mission Coalition Organization and the Mission Model Neighborhood Corporation, mobilized a politics of multiethnicity and again asserted the right of the neighborhood to plan for itself. The book concludes with the dissolution of the Mission Coalition Organization in 1973. But it also demonstrates that the neighborhood's recent anti-gentrification organizing cannot be explained without reference to the Mission's longstanding tradition of community-based planning, a tradition that dates back at least as early as the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.