My brother — who later became a judge — and I grew up in a three-bedroom Edwardian in the Richmond District, purchased with a V.A. loan our father earned through his World War II Coast Guard service. That layout was not a luxury; it was a necessity. One bedroom belonged to my oldest sister and our youngest aunt. My brother and I shared the second, which felt smaller each year as he outgrew the crib. My grandmother — a third-generation Californian — lived in the garden apartment behind the garage. The air in her space was clean enough for her to live there comfortably because my father used the garage to store overflow inventory from his auto-parts shop serving Nihonmachi and “The Moe.” When another aunt would visit us from her home in Hawaii, a surplus G.I. cot in the garage served as a guest bedroom, walled off by boxes of mufflers, carburetors, shock absorbers, sparkplugs, and ignition parts.
Until my sister and aunt left for their dorms at Cal, seven people lived under that roof — a configuration entirely ordinary among Chinese and many other Asian families on the west side.
This history matters because San Francisco is again debating what kinds of families our policies are meant to support. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposed upzoning plan defines “family” so narrowly that it excludes the lived reality of tens of thousands of San Franciscans whose households have never resembled the tidy, postwar nuclear model…