City Hall Digest: Breaking Down Mayor Breed’s Plans and the City’s Boycott of 30 States May End

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s weekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right.

Supervisors Propose Removing U.S. States Boycott 

In 2016, in response to a slew of states enacting anti-LGBT laws, Supervisors Scott Wiener, David Campos, and Mark Farrell authored legislation that banned city-funded travel to those states. This legislation also prevented the City of San Francisco from doing business with any companies headquartered in those states. This blanket ban was later expanded twice to include states with restrictive abortion (2019) and voting laws (2021). All told, the City of San Francisco technically can’t do business with companies in 30 states. 

Despite the ban, city departments have been granting waivers to allow some business with partners in banned states to continue, to the tune of almost $1 billion worth of contracts and purchase orders. Still, the bans have created “high levels of administrative burden” and stymie opportunity. The loss of this competition has been found to increase the city’s contracting costs between 10 and 20 percent annually, according to a new report from City Administrator Carmen Chu’s office. Chu states in the 16-page report that this entire section of code hasn’t been effective, as it has failed to pressure those state governments to change their policies. The intention behind this was good, but the negative impact on San Francisco far outweighs the benefit. 

Chu proposed five potential solutions to these bans, including to repeal it in its entirety (which Supervisor Rafael Mandelman is proposing), or to amend it to exempt construction and construction services from the ban (which Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is proposing) but which leaves other things like medical supplies, crime lab equipment, and water treatment chemicals subject to it. We are hopeful that this ineffective section of code is done away with entirely. 

This is a good opportunity to remember to demand that our elected officials display our Californian values in ways that actually move the needle on the biggest issues San Franciscans care about like housing, education, safety, and economic opportunity.

Breaking Down Mayor Breed’s Recent Policy Proposals

In the last few weeks, Mayor London Breed has laid out plans with concrete actions to address how the city is going to move forward on its most pressing issues: downtown recovery, the drug crisis as well as general public safety, and a lack of affordable housing. Let’s dive into each proposal. 

Public Safety

For years, the Tenderloin has struggled with drug dealing and other illicit activities that make it difficult for small businesses and families to thrive. For this reason, the neighborhood has become the poster child for the city’s failures, obscuring its actual identity as a diverse area with a rich history and culture. Decades of mayors have tried to temporarily reduce crime in the area with increased police activity. In the wake of a nationwide opioid epidemic that has changed the nature of the issues facing the Tenderloin, Mayor Breed is hoping to make lasting change in the neighborhood after facing serious pressure from the Tenderloin Business Coalition, as well as from groups like TogetherSF Action. 

Mayor Breed and the SFPD have launched a new operation targeting drug dealing in the Tenderloin. The SFPD intends to make the neighborhood unwelcome to drug dealing by interfacing with dealers until they cease activity in the area. They will also send increased numbers of officers to hot spots.

The city hasn’t released details on how long this operation will be in place, but in order to separate herself from her predecessors, Breed’s approach must be consistent. This is a good first step in addressing the drug crisis, but there cannot be lasting change in the Tenderloin without reducing both the supply and the demand for drugs. This enforcement strategy must be paired with city departments working together to get drug users into recovery. 

Economic Prosperity

Downtown is still a ghost town. Part of this is because the pandemic changed the way we work, but it’s more than that—a decade of successive and significant taxes passed by voters targeting the city’s largest employers in the technology sector have created a unwelcoming environment for them and their employees. Companies have significantly downsized their presence in the city or have left altogether, leaving a staggeringly high amount of unused space. These changes pose threats to the city’s budget and its ability to fund social services that so many of our residents rely on. 

Breed has proposed solutions that would make it more attractive for businesses to operate here. This includes cutting red tape for small businesses looking to move downtown, marketing the city to new sectors, a three-year tax break for new businesses, a tax freeze for retail, hotels and other sectors, and rezoning parts of downtown to allow for arts and entertainment events. The biggest piece of this puzzle, though, would have to go to voters in the shape of a ballot measure overhauling the city’s tax codes. 

What may prove to be frustrating for the mayor and residents, though, is that most of the zoning and tax changes in her package deal would have to be approved by the Board of Supervisors. In the coming year, this is where we can make our voices heard in the most effective way possible—by holding them accountable to ensuring that San Francisco is a place where businesses both small and large can prosper. 

Housing

San Francisco recently passed a major hurdle when it comes to meeting our demands for housing by passing a plan, known as the Housing Element, that outlines how the city will build 82,000 units of housing over the next eight years. However, following through with this plan is another hurdle entirely, and will be considerably more difficult—Mayor Breed is acutely aware of this. She has announced a set of reforms “centered around changes that are going to make people a little uncomfortable” when it comes to building housing. 

Breed’s plan focuses on removing bureaucratic barriers to building housing that we as an organization have also called out as being obstructive—namely, discretionary review which allows anybody to challenge developments for a nominal fee, as well as permitting timelines which can become absurdly long. Her plan aims to diminish the outsize power of discretionary review and to reduce permitting times by 50 percent. It’s also daring in that it suggests what residents have known forever: that the west side of the city has not kept pace with the east side in terms of development. We say daring because this subject is politically toxic with west side residents, who typically view more development as a nonstarter. 

But, if done properly, these changes could unlock some 50,000 units of housing which have already been approved but not built due to the bureaucratic constraints Mayor Breed is looking to eliminate. 

This is the most comprehensive and ambitious attempt at streamlining the approval and construction process for housing, and has incredible potential. But it has equally dire consequences if parts of it are held up, watered down, or nixed by other elected officials—which is why we need to ensure that this package is executed to its fullest.

TogetherSF Action is making advocating for an end to the drug epidemic in San Francisco a top priority this year. Our first step? Flooding inboxes at City Hall. We need thousands of concerned San Franciscans to send letters to their leaders demanding they end open-air drug markets in 2023. Are you in?