Reparations Task Force To Discuss Remedies

African-Americans experience debilitating economic, educational, and health due to the legacy of slavery and racial discrimination in California, according to a task force created by Assembly Bill 3121 to study the issue and recommend remedies.

The nine-member reparations task force, which will meet March 3-4 in Sacramento, has preliminarily recommended more than 115 actions.

One is to establish a cabinet-level secretary position over an African American/ Freedmen Affairs Agency tasked with implementing the recommendations, to identify past harms, prevent future harm, suggest policies to the Governor and the Legislature designed to compensate for the harms caused by the legacy of anti-Black discrimination, and “work to eliminate systemic racism that has developed as a result of the enslavement of African Americans in the United States.”

The daylong meetings start at 9 a.m. at California Environmental Protection Agency’s Byron Sher Auditorium, 1001 I St., Sacramento, are open to the public and will be live-streamed. Comments can be made by phone.

The agenda includes five key questions:

1. What are the damage time frames? This becomes even more important for the prioritization of African American descendants of persons enslaved in the United States. 1865-1960.

2. Will there be a California residency requirement? If yes, how will it be determined?

3. What year determines the beginning of harm? Are there different starting points and end points for each atrocity category?

4. Will direct victims and/or all African American descendants of U.S. slavery in California (who meet the residency requirement) be compensated?

5. How will reparations be paid and measured to ensure the form of payment aligns with the estimate of damages? The interim report made these findings in a heavily footnoted report:

In the census of 1860, the last census taken before the Civil War, of the about 12 million people living in the 15 slaveholding states, almost four million were enslaved. 25 In order to terrorize and force this enormous population to work without pay, the colonial and American governments created a different type of slavery.

Despite California entering the Union in 1850 as a free state, its early state government supported slavery. Proslavery white southerners held a great deal of power in the state legislature, the court system, and among California’s representatives in the U.S. Congress.

Some scholars estimate that up to 1,500 enslaved African Americans lived in California in 1852.

Enslaved people trafficked to California often worked under dangerous conditions, lived in unclean environments, and faced brutal violence.

In 1852, California passed and enforced a fugitive slave law that was harsher than the federal fugitive slave law, and this made California a more proslavery state than most other free states.

California also outlawed nonwhite people from testifying in any court case involving white people.

California did not ratify the Fourteenth Amendment until 1959, which protected the equal rights of all citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying a person’s right to vote on the basis of race, until 1962.

Violence

Supported by their government, ordinary citizens also terrorized and murdered Black Californians.

The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) established local chapters all over the state in the 1920s. 56 During that time, California sometimes even held more KKK events than Mississippi or Louisiana.

Many of California’s KKK members were prominent individuals who held positions in civil leadership and police departments.

For example, in 1920s Los Angeles, prominent and numerous city government officials were KKK members or had KKK ties, including the mayor, district attorneys, and police officers.

Violence against African Americans peaked in the 1940s, as more Black Californians tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods.

Today, police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California in the same manner as they do in the rest of the

Political Power

California also passed and enforced laws to prevent Black Californians from accumulating political power. California passed a law prohibiting non-white witnesses from testifying against white Californians.

This law shielded white defendants from justice.

The California Supreme Court explained that any non-white person to testify “would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls,” a prospect that the court viewed as an “actual and present danger.”

California did not allow Black men to vote until 1879.

The state also passed many of the voter suppression laws that were used in the South. California prohibited individuals convicted of felonies from voting, added a poll tax, and put in place a literacy test

In California, the federal, state, and local government created segregation through redlining, zoning ordinances, decisions on where to build schools and highways and discriminatory federal mortgage policies.

Housing

California “sundown towns,” (a term derived from municipal signs announcing that African Americans must leave by dusk) like most of the suburbs of Los Angeles and San Francisco, prohibited African Americans from living in entire cities throughout the state.

The federal government financed many whites only neighborhoods throughout the state.

The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps used in redlining described many Californian neighborhoods in racially discriminatory terms. For example, in San Diego there were “servant’s areas” of La Jolla and several areas “restricted to the Caucasian race.”

During World War II, the federal government paid to build segregated housing for defense workers in Northern California.

Housing for white workers generally better constructed and permanent. While white workers lived in rooms paid for by the federal government, Black wartime workers lived in cardboard shacks, barns, tents, or open fields.

Racial Covenants

Racially-restrictive covenants, which were clauses in property deeds that usually allowed only white residents to live on the property described in the deed, were commonplace and California courts enforced them well into the 1940s. Numerous neighborhoods around the state rezoned Black neighborhoods for industrial use to steer white residents towards better neighborhoods or adopted zoning ordinances to ban apartment buildings to try and keep out prospective Black residents.

Blight

State agencies demolished thriving Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal and park construction.

Operating under state law for urban redevelopment, the City of San Francisco declared the Western Addition blighted, and destroyed the Fillmore, San Francisco’s most prominent Black neighborhood and business district.

“Reparations” page 22

“Remote Work” from page 10

As people reportedly flocked south, Yelp data shows increases in the share of search locations in Texas cities, compared to 2019, particularly San Antonio (up 29%) and Austin (up 18%).

Dozens of popular Florida cities also saw large increases, including Tallahassee (up 56%), St. Petersburg (up 23%), West Palm Beach (up 12%) and Tampa (up 10%).

Impact for Yelp

The trend of individuals relocating away from traditional business hubs during the pandemic is also reflected internally at Yelp, as we saw many of our U.S. employees moving away from office-centric locations as the company leaned into remote work.

In 2022, U.S.-based Yelp employees lived in 1,304 unique cities — a 50% increase from 2019 (871 unique cities).

From 2019 to 2022, Yelp saw the share of employees living near our office locations decrease, including San Francisco (down 70%); New York (down 67%); Washington, D.C. (down 67%); Chicago (down 67%) and Phoenix (down 33%).

During this same time period, Yelp saw a 300% increase in the share of employees residing in Florida and Texas.

After observing how employees thrived during the company’s remote-first pilot period in 2021, Yelp announced it would fully embrace remote work in June of 2022, closing the company’s most consistently underutilized offices, including New York; Chicago and Washington, D.C.; as well as reducing its footprint in Phoenix.

Combined, the three offices Yelp closed saw a weekly average use of less than 2% of the available workspaces. Yelp had previously reevaluated its real estate needs to better accommodate its remote-first workforce, reducing its footprint in San Francisco in September 2021.

New Business Growth

To understand how the reshuffling impacted new business growth in 2022 compared to 2019, Yelp examined the average new business growth in the states that experienced both an increase and decrease in share of searches.

Yelp data show that states with an increase in share of searches showed a higher average increase in new business openings across nearly all categories — demonstrating the positive economic impact and opportunity remote work has had on local businesses across the U.S.

New home and local services businesses have shown to be the backbone of local economies as new business openings surpass pre-pandemic levels, with notable average increases in both states with an increase in share of searches (up 57% and 47%, respectively) and states with a decrease in share of searches (up 31% and 19%).

Meanwhile, shopping, bars and nightlife, active life and restaurant businesses have not yet fully bounced back to pre-pandemic levels with each seeing a decrease in new business openings in both states that saw an increase and decrease in share of searches.

Narrowing in on the five states with the highest increases in share of searches — South Dakota, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming and Mississippi — these states saw a significant average increase in new local services (up 78%), home services (up 76%) and beauty services (up 52%) businesses, compared to 2019.

Local services drove the most growth in these states, ranking in the top three categories of the top five states with the highest increase in share of searches. Yelp data show that home services and beauty services are major drivers of business growth in these top states, as new residents start home improvement projects or search for self-care treatments in their new neighborhoods.

Yelp also analyzed the impact to new business growth within the states that saw the most significant drops in search locations during the pandemic — in order of greatest decrease: Washington, D.C.; New York; California; Nevada and Oregon.

These states, including D.C., saw decreases in new business openings in shopping (down 22%), active life (down 19%), bars and nightlife (down 9%), arts and entertainment (down 8%) and restaurants (down 7%). Shopping businesses ranked in the top three categories with the greatest decrease of new openings for each of the states, including Washington, D.C., which saw the largest drop (down 35%).

States known for their variety of arts and entertainment experiences (California, New York and Nevada) all saw decreases in new business openings within this category, down 21%, 16%, 12%, respectively.

Larger Applicant Pool

Though the initial shift to remote work was seen by many organizations as a temporary change, thousands of individuals have found remote work has improved their overall quality of life, increasing their ability to spend time on new hobbies or with family and friends.

Yelp reviewed its own employee listening data since the company went remote in March 2020 and saw both recruitment and employee satisfaction positively impacted by its remote work stance.

The company also shared that 2022 was Yelp’s best year yet – reporting record revenue of $1.2 billion — a 16% growth rate, demonstrating employee productivity in a remote work environment.

Yelp’s commitment to remote work has allowed the company to access a vastly larger talent pool across the U.S. and internationally.

Compared to 2019, Yelp found an overall increase in the average number of applicants per job posting in 2022, most notably in Yelp’s general and administrative (up 200%) and sales roles (up 25%).

Yelp also saw a shortened hiring process for these roles, with the average time to hire reduced by six days in 2022 — a 23% decrease since 2019.

Able to Meet Goals

While many companies called employees back to the office, with some indicating collaboration as one of the main reasons, a 2022 Distributed Work Survey of Yelp employees found that 85% of employees feel connected to their teams and informed while working in a distributed environment.

The survey also showed that 87% of employees felt favorably about working remotely.

Yelp found no significant change in the percentage of new employees who felt connected to their teams in the first 30 days of their employment in 2022 (94%), compared to 2019 (95%).

A February 2022 survey of Yelp’s employees found that 86% of respondents preferred to work remotely most or all of the time, 87% report that working remotely has made them more effective at work and 93% of employees and their managers report they can meet their goals remotely.

In a separate employee survey focused on benefits, 74% ranked “physical and mental wellbeing” as one of their two most important employee benefits in a remote setting.

This led Yelp to increase its wellness stipend amount by 33% in 2023.

New Hobbies

As remote workers gain back the time they would have otherwise spent commuting to the office, Yelp user data shows consumer interest in a wide range of hobbies — from active sports to arts and leisure activities — has increased in 2022 when compared to both 2019 and 2021.

Interest in pickleball jumped 275% compared to 2019, axe throwing 68%, glass blowing 33%, cheese tasting 18% and fitness instruction 9%.

As flexible work arrangements become the norm for many U.S. industries, we anticipate people will continue to settle down in states and cities that provide more affordable cost of living and less population congestion – ultimately driving new opportunities for local businesses and entrepreneurs.

Yelp will continue to assess how these shifts are reshaping local economies and impacting business growth across the U.S. At Yelp, the company plans to continue its intentional and deliberate approach to employee listening, taking action on feedback to continue meeting employee needs in a remote-first environment. n