An advisory committee's recommendation that San Francisco pay out hefty reparations to longtime black residents could cost the city at least $110 billion, at even a conservative estimate.

The advisory committee released a draft report last month proposing the city make a lump sum payment of $5 million to black residents who are at least 18 and have identified as black or African American on public documents for at least ten years. Residents must also meet at least two of eight other requirements. Among those requirements is that the resident is "personally, or the direct descendant of someone, incarcerated by the failed War on Drugs" or is a "Descendant of someone enslaved through US chattel slavery before 1865."

"A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy," the committee said.

The group is set to submit its final proposal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in June.

If even just 50 percent of the city's nearly 45,000 black residents met the requirements for the proposed payments, the city would be staring down a $112.5 billion bill. For comparison, San Francisco’s entire budget for fiscal year 2022–2023 is just $14 billion. The budget for the entire state is $308 billion.

And that's without considering some of the other proposals included in the report, such as that the city supplement lower-earning recipients' incomes to meet the area median income (AMI) of about $97,000, for at least 250 years. Another recommendation was to create "a comprehensive debt forgiveness program" for black residents to cancel student loans, housing loans, and credit-card debt in an effort to give "Black households an opportunity to build wealth."

If every black resident qualified for the $5 million payment, the city would be on the hook for $223 billion — a cost of $263,000 for every non-black person in San Francisco, according to Steven F. Hayward, a resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

“Who’s going to stay in San Francisco if you actually try to impose that kind of cost on people, whether through direct taxation or through debt? Everyone would leave,” Hayward told National Review. “So I can’t believe that they’re actually serious with this, and what they thought they were really going to accomplish, other than making an opening bargaining position — put out a really big number and hope that maybe you’ll get something more modest but still, in their mind, significant.”

The San Francisco report came on the heels of a statewide proposal for reparations for black citizens. Advocates have called on the Golden State to offer direct payments to black Californians of $350,000 to $800,000 at a cost of $784 billion to $1.8 trillion to the state.

Hayward said he doesn’t see reparations happening on a citywide or statewide level; the payments would be nearly without precedent. The most apt comparison is when Congress offered $20,000 per person in reparations for Japanese Americans who had been interned in camps during World War II. As he notes, however, these recipients were people who were still alive and not their descendants.

Yet that figure, even adjusted for inflation, would be unlikely to satisfy the reparations advocates.

Additionally, neither proposal is particularly politically expedient and both would likely inflame racial tensions.

“While blacks are the only group held in slavery, you have lots of other ethnic groups who suffered serious discrimination in American history,” he said, pointing to Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans.

“This is an invitation to open ethnic conflict in the country,” he said. “I think that’s why, for example, Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the bill setting up the state commission to look into this, has said nothing about it that I can find. I think they know that this is political dynamite and they’re hoping it just goes away.”

Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center, echoed these concerns, telling National Review that — without even addressing the impossible financial implications of the proposal — officials would need to consider other ethnicities and races who have “legitimate grievances against California.”

“Slavery has not really had an impact on California directly — it’s not to say it wasn’t a terrible problem in American history, but to say that California uniquely has responsibility to cover those costs, just to me is, it’s not that prudent, it’s not thoughtful, it’s not commonsensical,” he added.

The San Francisco committee acknowledged this in its report, writing, "While neither San Francisco, nor California, formally adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the values of segregation, white supremacy and systematic repression and exclusion of Black people were legally codified and enforced."

California was a place where a lot of black people went to “retreat from the problems of the South and post–Civil War problems,” Christensen noted, adding that “in a lot of areas, it’s actually been an economic boon for black people.”

“San Francisco has generally been a pretty open place for a lot of people of different ethnicities,” he said. “Are you really going to have a tax for everyone else that benefits just one race? I can’t see that happening. That’d be a very difficult and challenging conversation to have.”

No California officials appear to have come forward against either reparations proposal. None of the members of the city's board of supervisors responded to National Review’s requests for comment.

“Who wants to speak out against reparations? I mean, politically, it’s just not a wise thing to do,” Christensen said.

There’s also a strong chance that people would take their $5 million payments and flee the city, he said, meaning the hefty payments would not be likely to work their way back into the city’s economy. And even without paying out billions of dollars in reparations payments, the city’s economy could be headed for trouble. San Francisco is heavily reliant on property and business taxes, which make up nearly a third of all revenues. Mass layoffs in the tech industry could slash jobs that provide a significant portion of the city’s tax base at a time when many other businesses are already closing.

“If we want to have a real, honest conversation about reparations, we should have that,” Christensen said. “But in the end, there’s a lot of people that have not thought this all the way through. I think something like this would devastate the city and it would bring irreparable harm for generations to come.”