From Sura Wood’s article for The Bay Area Reporter:

“Janet Delaney: South of Market,” now on show at the de Young Museum, is a photographic essay that documents the city’s brush with redevelopment, gentrification, the wages of progress, and their casualties in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

While not exactly paradise, the lively, diverse neighborhood of South of Market depicted in Delaney’s pictures, which was deemed a slum by opportunistic city officials and developers, was once home to an eclectic mix of artists, gays, small-business proprietors and Filipino families. Today, though, that’s a mirage, a distant memory of an area that bears little relationship to the teeming, more homogeneous, higher-end district that replaced it.

Growing up in her hometown of Compton, CA, Delaney had watched as the tight-knit community she had known since childhood dispersed and departed for the suburbs due to a combination of sleazy real-estate speculation, racism and the panic that followed the riots in the 1960s.

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Browse all of Janet Delaney’s work at ClampArt