SF politics

SF politics

The Board of Supes Budget and Finance Committee Wednesday sent forward without recommendation a plan to give a private developer $40 million for a hotel project that appears to be a direct violation of the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance. Supporters of the plan, including Mayor Daniel Lurie and Sup. Matt Dorsey, say that turning an old, historic office building on Third Street into a modern hotel would help revitalize downtown.

Mission District street food vendors say new regulations drafted by the Department of Public Health could run them out of business. "Our community is already living with so much uncertainty, costs have risen and our stability is fragile," said Rosi Villanueva, in Spanish. Villanueva was one of two dozen street food vendors who gathered on Tuesday for a rally at the 24th Street BART station.

For 50 years, the non-profit MCCLA at 25th and Mission has run arts programming from the four-story building it leased from the city for a dollar a year. The Arts Commission has also given them funding, with the expectation that they will raise more funds from donors, classes and events. This month, however, the Mission Cultural Center ran out of money and on Jan. 26 it closed indefinitely.

In an attempt to assuage concerns that the proposed four-story building to replace the shuttered Western Plywood warehouse at 2600 Harrison Street in the Mission is incompatible with the "design, scale and mass" of the neighborhood, Kerman Morris Architects has redesigned the project. The new design reduces the street-level wall along Harrison, includes a more open Production, Distribution & Repair (PDR) space, and adds an area with benches and raised planters along the street.

We should reflect on what is working, where we've fallen short, and what's next,

On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered in Golden Gate Park to celebrate the life and legacy of a San Francisco icon. The California Academy of Sciences honored Claude, the beloved albino alligator. Claude was 30 years old and lived at the academy for 17 years until his death last month. Sunday's festivities included a NOLA-style second line parade in a nod to Claude's Louisiana roots, a Claude costume contest for kids and stories shared by the late gator's care team.

Though he was better known before running for his charitable leadership as founder of the poverty-fighting nonprofit Tipping Point, Lurie immediately after getting elected began focusing on crime, homelessness, housing bottlenecks and quality-of-life issues like cleaning the streets. Lurie streamlined housing approvals, re-organized and sped up city safety responses, launched an anti-homelessness campaign and won a 73% approval rating at Thanksgiving among local voters.

I know that people think this happened overnight, but it definitely did not. This is my stuff, and I'm very proud of it.

Too many people in San Francisco are falling into crisis when intervention could and should come sooner. At the center of this effort is a simple reality: Stability is the gateway to recovery. For many people with severe mental illness, medication is what allows treatment to work at all. Without it, housing placements fail, care plans break down, and crises repeat themselvesoften with greater harm each time.

Did the Upper Great Highway closure make Sunset neighborhood streets less safe? Supervisor Alan Wong claimed it did at a January 8 press conference, citing a simple year-over-year map comparison of crash data. But my analysis, using the same DataSF crash data with rigorous statistical controls, finds no evidence to support that claim, and if anything, the data suggest the opposite.

Lurie's upzoning measure, which the Board of Supervisors approved last month and which comes in response to intense state pressure to build tens of thousands of new housing units in the next half-decade, would allow for six- to 10-story buildings on major thoroughfares in multiple parts of the west and north side San Francisco. But opponents fear the measure will lead to mass displacement of existing residents as older buildings are torn down for redevelopment, and will lead to altering the character of their neighborhoods.

In Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise never returned to Earth. In The Next Generation, Picard's Enterprise-D visited every once in a while, and when debuted, the basic premise put the crew on the fringes of the Federation. But in a two-part thriller that aired 30 years ago, on January 1 and January 8, 1996, Deep Space Nine took a trip back to idealistic 24th-century Earth, where even paradise could turn into a snakepit.

Back when London Breed was still mayor, her idea to clamp down on the notorious drug trade and nighttime street circus that pervaded the Tenderloin District was to shut down corner liquor stores earlier in parts of the Tenderloin, and prohibit them from doing business between midnight and 5 am. That proposal got passed into law in June 2024 (taking effect the following month), and liquor stores on this 20-block area of the Tenderloin are now forced to close at midnight.

The place was originally busted for offering sex-for-cash to an undercover police officer in May 2019, after which SF DPH revoked their massage license. The department then found they were still continuing that practice. A customer filed a police report in 2024 over an employee who was determined to tug at his genitals, and SF City Attorney David Chiu ordered the place closed in March 2025 after another SF DPH inspection found the place to be operating, well, more or less as a brothel.

A former high-ranking San Francisco city employee was sentenced on Monday to three years in state prison after pleading guilty to multiple felony counts tied to a yearslong public corruption scheme that siphoned more than $627,000 from the city's workers' compensation system. Stanley Ellicott, 40, was sentenced by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan following convictions on seven felony counts, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

The store was at the center of the mini-scandal that ultimately forced Alcaraz to resign seven days into her tenure, after the woman who took over the store from Alcaraz in April, Julia Baran, went to the media with evidence that the 29-year-old Alcaraz had mismanaged the store, and had apparently paid employees under the table to evade taxes.

In the wake of what was surely Waymo's greatest SF screw-up yet, SF Supervisor Bilal Mahmood (of all people!) is the first local elected official calling for a probe into how Waymos stalled out all over town Saturday. As of 3:30 pm Monday afternoon, the fallout from Saturday's massive SF PG&E outage still continues, as thousands in SF still don't have their power back on.

Parcel taxes are a type of property taxes, but they're legal under Prop. 13. In essence, the city imposes a tax not on the value of a piece of property but on its size: larger lots pay higher taxes than smaller ones, but within each category the tax is flat. A $2 million 2,000-square-foot house on a standard 25-by-100 foot lot pays the same as a similar house assessed at $400,000.

The measure does not allocate any initial city dollars, a move that may have helped secure support from the board's moderates after repeated years of city budget shortfalls. Instead, the ordinance establishes a framework to receive future contributions - whether through city appropriations or private donations. "This most certainly is different than asking the city to pony up dollars to support reparations recommendations," said Supervisor Shamann Walton, who authored the ordinance.