Slice of Blight
Eric Fischer pointed me to this 1948 SF Department of City Planning map showing where they felt “blight” existed. WordPress width slice below, full map here.
The yellow sections indicate neighborhoods. Note that the Mission is nearly 100% blight! Hooray, let’s built a giant highway through the middle!
(Interesting Noe and North Beach also got the blight map, especially since all three neighborhoods really haven’t changed all that much in the past 60 years.)
Of course, being blight-free was no guarantee of not getting Tom Petty’d. Here we see a rather flabbergasting interchange planned for the Sunset at Irving and 6th Ave:
Click the image for a larger mosaic showing convenient freeway access to Kesar Stadium and the feed in to the highway running down Oak St. Thank the transport gods for the freeway revolt.
As always, more on Eric Fischer‘s Flickr stream.
Burrito Justice 
“blight” was a code word if there ever was one…it was used to justify a lot of really bad land use decisions…people back then thought they were really doing some good but would anyone suggest the Fillmore is better off now than after the total destruction of it by the SF Redevelopment Agency and the freeway? No, but back then they really thought they were doing the city a favor.
That freeway in the Sunset is just awful…I can see my apartment on that one…there’d be no fun inner sunset business district if they did that, to say nothing of the ruining of the park!
Now it wouldn’t be called blight. It would be called “vibrant.”