This story aired on the October 14, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
Today, it’s hard to imagine the Mission district without the 16th and 24th Street BART stations. But BART’S facing a budget deficit and cuts to its services. Bay Area voters signed an initiative to put a new sales tax measure on the ballot this November. But in the 1970s, when the city announced it would build these two stations in the Mission, many locals fought against BART.
Click the play button above to listen.
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Story Transcript:
Sound of 16th Street Plaza: music.
ADEN PONCE: How often do I ride BART…probably thrice a week?
AUSTIN T.: I take BART everyday.
WILLIANO GREENE: About 2-3 times a week.
REPORTER: Those are a few of the nearly sixty five hundred riders who board at the 16th and Mission station on an average weekday. That might seem like a lot. But in 2019, it was almost twice that number.
LIZ SCHOYER: I used to ride it every day, until COVID, and then I work remote now, so I only ride it occasionally, on the weekends.
REPORTER: …and BART’s projected to be hundreds of millions of dollars over budget in 2027.
Sound of the 16th Street Plaza escalator scraping along.
REPORTER: Today, like public transportation agencies across the Bay Area, the future of BART may be hanging in the balance. BART warns that, in a doomsday scenario, BART could close 15 of its 50 stations, shut down two of its five lines, and cut train service by 70%.
ADEN: That would mean much more difficulty in getting to the places that matter to me.
AUSTIN: It’d make it harder to get around, I mean I don’t have a car, so…
WILLIANO: I’m pretty sure it would cost a lot more to ride BART, and it would break my pockets.
REPORTER: If I’d been talking to people at 16th and Mission in the 70s, they might have had very different opinions about BART. On November 3, 1973, BART took its first riders into the Mission. And according to a KPFA broadcast, it was quite the debutante.
KPFA RADIO HOST: City Hall went all out to impress the Mission. There were marching bands, circus clowns, floats, Military marching units, cowboys and cowgirls, City Hall and business dignitaries in cars, and of course, the Mayor.
REPORTER: That is, Mayor Joseph Alioto. And when he rode the train into 16th St. Station for the first time…
Sound of 70’s-era BART cars approaching.
REPORTER: …he was met with a protest.
Protestors chanting, “Smash BART! Smash redevelopment!”
MAYOR JOSEPH ALIOTO: Smash you! Particularly you!
REPORTER: Protestors carried signs saying “Bay Area Rabid Transit.” They said BART was being built at the expense of the working-class Mission.
Protestors chanting, “Mission for the workers! Not for the bankers!”
Sound of conversation as I walk into 683 Florida Street.
ROBERTO HERNANDEZ: My abuelita, my grandmother, she worked at a candy factory.
REPORTER: That’s Roberto Hernandez, a longtime community organizer who was born and raised in the Mission.
ROBERTO: I had an uncle that worked at Ben's rice factory, Hamm's Brewery, Kilpatrick's Bakery, Hostess Bakery. There was a Levi's sewing factory on Valencia Street.
REPORTER: Roberto leads the organization Cultura y Arte Nativa de las Americas, or CANA. He runs events like the annual Carnaval celebration. Before BART, he says, people took the city bus. Or, if they were in a hurry—
ROBERTO: There were jitney buses. There were, like, these vans that would swing by to pick up people and, the driver of the van had a rope attached to the door, so he would... The door would open, then with the rope, he would close it, and he'd take off real fast.
REPORTER: The Mission was like a city within a city.
ROBERTO: We had major theaters. We had the clothing shops. We had the pharmaceuticals. We had doctors, dentists, optometrists. I mean, I remember growing up, the pizza parlor, every kind of restaurant. I- we never had to leave the neighborhood because we had everything in the neighborhood, you know.
REPORTER: Including a vibrant political ecosystem.
ROBERTO: Back in the days, there was an organization called the Mission Coalition Organization… and everybody knew it as the MCO.
REPORTER: The MCO brought radical neighborhood advocacy groups together in the fight against police violence, housing injustice, and BART. As a seven-year-old attending MCO meetings with his father, Roberto loved the idea of a high-speed train.
ROBERTO: It kinda reminded me of Disneyland, going to Disneyland as a little boy because they had like a BART rail system, right? And so I was like, "Oh, that'll be so cool," you know?
REPORTER: BART really was from the future. Its fully automated train control system and the tunnel under the Bay were the first in the nation. But that didn’t mean much to people who couldn’t take it where they needed to go.
ROBERTO: Well, if you work at Schlage Lock, or the bakery at Hostess—
REPORTER: —Factories that were down on Bryant Street, or in Visitacion Valley—
ROBERTO: Well, BART didn't go there.
REPORTER: Roberto remembers that small business owners feared BART construction would dig them out of Mission Street.
ROBERTO: A funeral parlor that was on Mission Street between 25th and 26th, right, had to shut down because you know, somebody dies, I mean, it's like there was no parking, you know.
REPORTER: Mostly, people felt like BART wasn’t for the community that already existed in the Mission. The MCO saw BART as an engine for redevelopment. And in San Francisco, redevelopment was a dirty word.
Listen to this.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: They talk about the South. The South is not half as bad as San Francisco.
REPORTER: In 1964, James Baldwin and a KQED camera crew rode through neighborhoods that had majority Black populations at the time— Hunters Point, Western Addition, and the Fillmore. The homes in these areas supported thriving cultural centers. But they were older, and showed decades of neglect.
The city called these areas “slums.” It decided to “clean up” the Fillmore and Western Addition, and to expand Geary Boulevard into a major thoroughfare. So, it completely demolished many of the buildings.
JAMES BALDWIN: This is the San Francisco Americans pretend does not exist. They think I'm making it up.
REPORTER: In 1948, the city had begun a 50-year process of redevelopment.
JAMES BALDWIN: What do you mean, you say "redevelopment," meaning…
ORVILLE LUSTER: Removal of Negroes.
JAMES: Uh-huh. Yes. That's what I thought you meant…And they think San Francisco is reclaiming this property...to build it up, which means Negroes have to go.
REPORTER: The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, or SFRA, ultimately displaced more than ten thousand people, and cleared hundreds of buildings in the Fillmore and Western Addition. James Baldwin talked to young Black residents who saw their communities destroyed, and felt stark racial disparities in a city that called itself liberal. Cosmopolitan. Better than Alabama.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You'll tear down your own homes. It's a job, temporarily. And then what you gonna do? Where you gonna live? You're not gonna live anywhere. They not even in the process of trying to tell you where you gonna live.
REPORTER: Roberto Hernandez says, Mission residents paid attention as African Americans were pushed out of their neighborhoods by the thousands.
ROBERTO: And they were never brought back to the city, you know?
REPORTER: So in the late 60’s, when SFRA made plans to clear about ten blocks near the Mission BART stations to make room for towering shopping centers, it made people suspicious.
ROBERTO: And learning lesson for us in the Mission, was that BART was being planned to change the character of the neighborhood.
Sound of microfilm machine.
REPORTER: El Tecolote is a Spanish-English newspaper that’s specialized in the character of the Mission since the 70s. Looking through the Tecolote archives, I read stories of police harassment of Latino youth, boycotts in support of farmworkers, the Mission Coalition Organization convention, and BART in the Mission. One opinion piece I read in the November 1973 issue was called, “BART Comiensa Para Enriquecer Los Ricos—BART Enriches the Rich.”
Sound of reporter walking up to The Guardsman’s bungalow.
Sound of reporter opening the door to the bungalow.
REPORTER: “Hello, Juan?”
REPORTER: I went to City College to meet Juan Gonzales. He started El Tecolote in 1970…
JUAN GONZALES: ...at the ripe old age of 22.
REPORTER: I met Juan as he was packing up his office, retiring after more than 40 years as the chair of journalism here. The bungalow is stacked with boxes of newspapers going back years. He remembers the early resistance to the city’s plans to build BART.
JUAN: They got more negative publicity than they'd ever realized they would get. They thought it was gonna be a shoo-in.
REPORTER: El Tecolote covered meetings of community groups who were challenging city planners.
JUAN: Maybe best interest of the business sector downtown and whatnot, or the city as a whole, but in terms of the neighborhood, we could have done without having a stop off point in 24th and 16th.
REPORTER: BART, like redevelopment in the Western Addition and other areas, was part of a new vision of San Francisco. As BART was built underground, the city built 29 new skyscrapers up above. Business leaders worked with the city to foster a new class of white collar workers who would live in neighborhoods like the Mission and commute downtown for work.
Kind of like the Google buses of the 70’s.
JUAN: And I think this was probably the only neighborhood that really challenged BART at the time.
REPORTER: Outside San Francisco, residents of Rockridge in North Oakland fought rezoning that would allow higher density in their affluent hamlet. West Oakland residents joined together to resist evictions when elevated BART s sliced through their neighborhood. San Mateo County opted out completely, until decades later. Opting out wasn’t an option for the Mission.
Here’s Mayor Alioto celebrating on that opening day.
JOSEPH ALIOTO: I'm telling you, that BART is going to be generally, the thing that’s going to bring the Mission back to be the very, very best neighborhood and the most interesting neighborhood in San Francisco.
Sound of booing and applause from the crowd.
REPORTER: Looking back, Juan Gonzales wonders, why did the Mayor pick the Mission for his parade?
JUAN: My feeling was that he did it because he knew that was where he got the most resistance, and this is a way of showing that the city won.
REPORTER: …That, despite the resistance, the city got BART built.
The Mission Coalition Organization did get the city to downzone the area. So those 13-story towers never got built. But, BART’s first year was the MCO’s last.
JUAN:I think we wrote about that as well, and how the city was effective in the demise of the MCO.
REPORTER: Juan says the mighty MCO fractured when the city government poached its leadership.
JUAN: They hired them to be whatever, director of this or director of that. And so you drained the real leadership there by paying them big bucks to be that…But they certainly were not available to lead the organization because they're now all working for the city.
REPORTER: Activists worried that BART would turn the Mission into a white collar haven. And the demographics of the neighborhood have changed over the decades. But it’s hard to blame it all on BART. Roberto Hernandez has seen the city through three distinct generations of tech booms.
First, the Dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Then, Twitter’s takeover of downtown in 2011.
ROBERTO: All of a sudden it's like that house that was, went from $500 to $1,500…Man, the house next door to me rented for $6,000 to a Google employee.
REPORTER: Now, in 2026, AI startups seem to be sprouting up overnight. And with them, another wave of real estate speculation. Juan Gonzales worries the Mission he wrote about for so many decades, might not make it.
JUAN: And before you know it, generations will not even know that that sector of the city was the predominantly Latino neighborhood. It was really colorful, and it was really bubbling with a lot of energy, a lot of information, a lot of, you know, music and whatnot.
REPORTER: The plazas at 16th and 24th aren’t just openings to the underground. They’re a rare example of public space in the dense urban neighborhood.
JUAN: It's there. It's there. We use it as we need to use it, you know? Or if you wanna do something public, get petitions to sign up petitions, okay, we know there's some space there until the cops come in and move us out.
REPORTER: BART got people together at the plazas to fight displacement. And that resistance has endured.
Sound of protest against ICE in 2025.
REPORTER: In the decades since that protest at 16th Street in 1973, community groups have organized against luxury condos, crackdowns on street vendors, and heavy police presence.
A lot of people didn’t want to see BART run through the Mission. But today, it’s essential to so many people in the neighborhood. And it's theirs to fight for.
Sound of music and conversation at the 16th Street Plaza.
