Lots going on these summery spring days. (Who turned up the heat?) So today’s column will have to do some multitasking.

Item No. 1: After watching “Citizen Jane” — the excellent new documentary about writer-activist Jane Jacobs and her titanic struggles with New York urban planning czar Robert Moses, who preferred high-rises and highways to human beings — I got to thinking about San Francisco’s own Moses, Justin Herman.

Back in the late 1950s and ’60s, when Herman ruled over the city as executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, he was responsible for razing much of the Fillmore district and disappearing thousands of its black residents in the name of urban renewal — or “Negro removal,” as James Baldwin mordantly put it.

Once known as the Harlem of the West, with its vibrant nightlife and street scene, the Fillmore became a bleak moonscape of vacant lots and dreary street corners after Herman’s wrecking balls began their destructive work. Herman became so loathed in San Francisco’s eviscerated African American community that one irate citizen lunged at him during a heated Redevelopment Agency meeting and nearly throttled him. The powerful bureaucrat died shortly after of a heart attack in summer 1971.

Tom Fleming, editor of the Sun-Reporter, an African American newspaper, summed up Herman’s sorry legacy this way: “Negroes and the other victims of a low income (fate) generally regard him as the arch villain in the black depopulation of the city.”

So why was this man honored by having his name attached to the Embarcadero plaza that is the gateway to San Francisco?

As cities across America re-evaluate their histories, taking down monuments and renaming streets that celebrate dishonorable men, it’s time for San Francisco to do the same. We need to rename Justin Herman Plaza.

There have been earlier efforts to do this, but they went nowhere. In 2001, Supervisor Chris Daly introduced a resolution to strip Herman’s name from the plaza, but it never even got a board hearing. In 2015, Brett Harris-Anderson, who grew up in the Western Addition, and his wife, Michelle, started a petition to rename the plaza after the late poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou, who was San Francisco’s first black female streetcar operator and began her performing career here. Unfortunately, their campaign didn’t catch fire, but it’s time to reignite it.

“I would welcome a public conversation about changing the name of Justin Herman Plaza,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin told me. The plaza is located in his district, so he’s the right one to start that conversation. “Herman’s name evokes memories of a dark time in San Francisco history that we’re still grappling with today. It’s a legacy of displacement, of removing people of color and low-income people. That’s not something we should be honoring.”

Speaking of Peskin, California Assemblyman Phil Ting should be applauded for taking up his campaign in Sacramento to give San Francisco the legal authority to implement a local income tax. San Francisco is already the poster city for the nation’s obscene wealth gap — and that divide between the super rich and the rest of us will only widen if President Trump succeeds in pushing through his tax giveaway to himself and his fellow plutocrats. Meanwhile, San Francisco is facing massive cuts in federal subsidies for housing and social services under Trump that will make the city even more Dickensian.

So it’s time for San Francisco’s super rich to give back to their city — the “gold mountain” that helped make their fortunes.

Ting admits that he has an “uphill battle” to win state approval for a San Francisco income tax. No localities in California currently have this authority. And his bill, which is still in the writing stage, has no hope without Gov. Jerry Brown’s support, said Ting.

But desperate times call for creative measures. “Trump is trying to bully us by using the club of federal funding cutbacks,” the assemblyman from San Francisco told me. “Either we give in, or we learn to live with much less, or we find a way to become self-sufficient as a city by raising our own revenue.”

While Ting is showing leadership with his tax-the-rich plan, District Nine Supervisor Hillary Ronen is sticking her neck out on an even hotter local issue, the homeless crisis, by pushing for a Navigation Center in her district, which covers the Mission and Bernal Heights. On Thursday at 6 p.m. at John O’Connell High School, Ronen will host what is certain to be another contentious community meeting on the planned Navigation Center.

Some of those who attended Ronen’s last community meeting demanded to know why other supervisors aren’t doing as much to build Navigation Centers in their districts. It’s a good question.

One official in the mayor’s homeless program points to Districts Five and Eight as areas that urgently need such shelters, but says that Supervisor London Breed, in District Five, has resisted such efforts and newly appointed Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, of District Eight, has shown little interest or initiative. In an emailed statement, Breed denied opposing a Navigation Center in her district, but added, “As a city, we have to think strategically about where to place (them) to best serve the people they aim to reach. I don’t think that means automatically putting Navigation Centers in … every district.” Sheehy, for his part, declined to comment for this column, explaining he would have more to say to The Chronicle at a later date.

Sheehy better hurry. Rafael Mandelman, a progressive activist with high visibility, just announced he will challenge Mayor Ed Lee’s hand-picked man in next June’s election. And Mandelman told me that he’ll be making the homeless crisis a centerpiece of his campaign. “I want to be the supervisor who cracks the code on homelessness. I share the deep sense of shame and frustration that other San Franciscans feel about this human tragedy.”

San Francisco Chronicle Columnist David Talbot appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email: dtalbot@sfchronicle.com