SF’s Board of Supervisors is poised to miss a crucial deadline set by state officials tasked with reforming the city’s notoriously byzantine zoning laws — and almost no one is talking about it. Why? Probably because terms like ‘housing element certification’ and ‘builder’s remedy’ tend to glaze eyes and slow pulses. But the outcome of the housing policy power struggle between the state and local officials could have major consequences for the city. Here’s what you need to know:

First, for those just tuning in, San Francisco has one of the slowest housing development approval processes in the country. Applicants typically wait between a year-and-a-half to two years to obtain building permits. (These delays may explain why bribery is so rampant in the Department of Building Inspection.) Permissive appeals rules also allow the objections of even one person to delay or stop construction.

Last year, in an effort to reform this system, Governor Newsom’s administration launched an unprecedented review of the city’s housing approval system — and tasked local officials with developing a new plan (or ‘housing element’) outlining their building goals. In January, the city released a preliminary plan outlining a goal of building 82,000 new housing units over the next eight years. State officials approved the plan, Mayor Breed followed up with an executive order outlining zoning reforms necessary to make the building goal possible, and Supe Preston, in typical form, set to work on legislation allowing nonprofits to sue the city if it didn’t meet the goal.

On October 25, state officials released the “San Francisco Housing Policy and Practice Review,” a set of mandates and timelines for reforming the city’s housing approval process. The first deadline — to pass Mayor Breed’s “constraints reduction” ordinance (which would allow many projects to proceed without a hearing at the (notoriously corrupt) Planning Commission) within 30 days — is this coming Monday, but the Supes have yet to vote on the ordinance in full session, or even in the relevant committee. Instead, they have introduced a resolution (co-sponsored by Supes Peskin and Chan) asking for a deadline extension and criticizing the current plan’s lack of “sufficient measure to address racial equity, fair housing practices, affordability, and displacement.”

What’s at stake here? If the Supes miss the November 27 deadline, state housing officials will send a letter warning the city it is “out of compliance with state housing element laws.” If the city persists in its non-compliance, it risks losing ‘housing element’ certification, which would allow builders to bypass all local planning review and potentially cost the city around $600 million in state funding for “affordable housing projects” (which apparently include things like “permanent supportive housing”). In other words, the city could lose the ability to impose its own (currently insane) housing policy, chaos could reign, and things might actually get built.

Which… sounds awesome, actually?

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City Hall

votes, policy, and more from the city’s executive and legislative branches (and their sprawling army of unelected hall monitors)

• The SF County Transportation Authority recently approved $1 million in funding (drawn from Prop L, a sales tax increase) to build the “Golden Gate Greenway,” a narrow strip of pedestrian-only green space in the Tenderloin. Because the initiative is spearheaded by famously pro-development Supe Dean Preston, “no specific timeline for [its] implementation was given.”

• Speaking of our favorite champagne socialist — Dean’s team is now reportedly sending out campaign emails about the “ultraconservative millionaires” seeking to oust him from office. As ever, it is unclear what Dean means by ‘ultraconservative’ beyond ‘not a card-carrying member of the DSA.’

• Mayor Breed proposed a new safe parking and cabin site in Bayview-Hunters Point that will serve up to 95 homeless people at a given time and cost the city over $2.4 million/year in rent (with 3% annual increases beginning next year) and $6 million in renovation costs. Day-to-day operations at the site will, of course, be outsourced to a nonprofit chosen through a “competitive solicitation process.” (The usual selection criterion seems to be something along the lines of “ability to spend the most and get the least.”)

• Breed also had stern words for reporters who insinuated that last week’s stunning clean-up was for APEC (and, by extension, visiting dictator Xi). “Do you know how long we’ve been working on cleaning up this city?” (Not really, tbh.)

• SFMTA is owed over $200 million in unpaid parking citations, according to a new analysis of city data. Earlier this year, MTA Director Jeffrey Tumlin announced that without increased state funding, Muni would likely have to reduce service by 40%...to which activists predictably responded by calling for the decriminalization of fare evasion across the state. 

• Employees at the Department of Public Works believe the steel planters installed by residents to fend off encampments along Larch Street violate ADA guidelines, according to documents obtained by a city watchdog. Of course, homeless encampments, which block sidewalks, also violate ADA guidelines (along with sanitation and zoning and public health regulations). But who’s counting?

• Supe Hillary Ronen went head-to-head with her constituents over a proposed ban on street vending in the Mission. “I am on your side,” Ronen reportedly yelled, as she insisted (against the wishes of most in attendance) she would not delay the ban.

• Amidst an ongoing budget crisis in the city’s public schools, teachers in SFUSD told Mission Local their paychecks have been bouncing. 

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Rose Alert

notes from san francisco’s beloved class of crazy local activists

• Last Friday, we published the story of the “Dream Keeper Initiative,” a $60 million/year make-work program for activists created with money partially funneled from the SFPD budget in 2020. One commenter provided intriguing context about the progressive in-fighting provoked by DKI. “The actual activists hated this,” said a Dean Preston/DSA affiliate on Twitter/X. “I recall being told [DKI] was a PR move that didn’t actually relocate money from the police budget, let alone toward housing or other material priorities.”

• Around 80 protesters calling for a cease-fire in Gaza were arrested for blocking traffic on the Bay Bridge last Thursday, though it remains unclear what (if any) crimes they were charged with. (Given that the protesters reportedly delayed the delivery of organs for transplant surgery, one would think ‘reckless endangerment’ might be on the docket.) Similar protests disrupted the California Democratic Party convention on Saturday night.

• An internal medicine doctor at UCSF (and founder of a nonprofit dedicated to “healing the wounds of colonialism”) circulated a chart explaining decolonization to the uninitiated:

• Everyone’s favorite SF Chronicle columnist Soleil Ho took aim at Michael Shellenberger in a bizarrely flattering op-ed in which Ho both plugged Shellenberger’s books and suggested he was peddling “conspiratorial trans ideology stuff.” (For those interested, Ho, who id’s as non-binary, also has their own Wikipedia page — a fascinating read.)

• Activists at a rally in front of City Hall proposed a “poor and indigenous-people led solution to homelessness”: let the ‘unhoused’ take over empty SF office buildings. What could go wrong?

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Memo Sacramento

a brief, essential spotlight on the state of california

• A new report in City Journal suggests that the Los Angeles Fire Department spends a whopping $427 million of its $857 million annual budget on “homeless-related fires.” 

• Speaking of which, the 10 freeway in LA reopened on Monday after a weeklong closure caused by what government officials are now calling a “pallet fire” (which certainly had nothing to do with a massive nearby encampment.)

• Environmentalists are suing the National Park Service to prevent them from replanting the giant sequoias that burned in wildfires in the southern Sierra Nevada. Why would environmentalists oppose efforts to replant climate-threatened trees? Because “wilderness is for natural processes and natural selection…[not] tree plantations.” Huh.

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Around Town

stories from the neighborhood you should know about

• A new article out of the SF Standard details the logistics behind last week’s APEC clean-up. Apparently city officials coordinated for months, delaying clearing encampments until the week before the summit, and deploying extra sanitation and public works employees to problem areas like Van Ness Avenue. 

• On Sunday, nearly a month after the company’s license to operate in San Francisco was suspended by the California DMV, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigned. On Monday, co-founder and chief product office Dan Kan also resigned.

• Crowds of (apparently Chinese government-paid) flag-waving supporters greeted Chairman Xi’s motorcade as it drove through the city last Tuesday.

• The Coalition on Homelessness (run by Prop C architect Jen Friedenbach) announced it will run a “community webinar” on homeless encampments on December 7 to discuss “proven solutions that work.” (i.e. giving them more no-strings-attached grant money.)

• Beloved deep-dish pizzeria Little Star Pizza will close its original Divisadero Street location after almost two decades. 

• The rainforest exhibit at Golden Gate park has reopened after a three-month closure. 

• A Superior Court judge declared a mistrial in the case against Jose Corvera, a 52-year-old man arrested for shooting a realistic imitation gun at police in August 2022. The jury could not reach a consensus on the charges of resisting arrest and threatening police, though they found Corvera guilty on one count of brandishing an imitation firearm. 

• The owner of Horn BBQ, a popular restaurant in West Oakland, excoriated graffitists who defaced his storefront and called on restaurateurs affected by crime to “confront these acts of cowardice with a resolve as unyielding as steel.” Yesterday, two days after the owner made his comments, a massive fire caused “significant damage” to his storefront. 

• The Chronicle has announced it will ban comments on most of its stories, citing an abundance of “material that too often does not meet [their] standards for fairness and accuracy.” A sad day for democracy. Fortunately, though, the Dolores Park comment section is still wide open and (generally) unmoderated — so fire away.

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Dolores Park. Share it, tell us what you’d like to see more of below, and send tips and stories to sanjana@piratewires.com.