City Hall Digest: Our New Year’s Resolutions for City Hall
City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s biweekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces. This week, we take a look at the big issues San Francisco needs to address next year. With a new mayoral administration and a fresher Board of Supervisors, we’re excited to see what new elected officials will do to tackle these problems (we’ve got some suggestions).
#1 Build Enough Housing
Wondering why your rent is exorbitant, you have to search for months to find a home you can afford, and homelessness is rising? It all comes down to one major issue: San Francisco is way behind on housing construction. The city needs to build 82,000 homes by 2031 to meet our Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goal, or an average of roughly 13,000 new homes each year. Here’s how we’re doing on that goal: in 2024, San Francisco built just a little more than 1,000 homes.
Even in our housing “boom” years between 2016 and 2021, the city was only completing between 4,500 and 5,250 new homes per year. For comparison, similar-sized metros like Charlotte, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee all built between 9,000 and 11,000 homes just last year.
Of course, a few of the factors that slow down housing construction are largely out of the city’s direct control. High interest rates make financing new housing more difficult, and the high cost of materials and labor make it harder for new construction to pencil out. But there are a few things San Francisco can directly control, and Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie has a few levers he can pull to make building new homes quicker and less expensive.
New housing does get built when the city has a robust economy. Attracting new employers and supporting small businesses should be one of the new administration’s biggest priorities. To do that, they’ll need to continue to improve public safety (we’re on the right track), which in turn will improve the city’s image. If long-depressed Detroit can turn things around, temporarily-embarrassed San Francisco can do the same with the right leadership.
Mayor Lurie will also need to streamline the red tape that blocks housing construction. While Mayor London Breed and Senator Scott Wiener made progress here in the past few years, there are still more barriers to building here than in almost every other city in the country. San Francisco requires a high rate of affordable housing included in new projects, which makes it hard for new projects to pencil out. Complicated and often district-specific zoning codes means each project needs to start from scratch, and confusing permitting takes time and money to decipher. Many of these barriers are frivolous and could be removed with no damage to neighborhoods or the city at large.
In 2025, we want San Francisco to start making serious progress on making housing affordable and attainable. At this point, it’s not really a question of if San Francisco will fall short of its goal, but how badly. When that happens, California could take over our housing approval process, and San Franciscans would lose all input for where projects go and how big they are. Most San Franciscans want some say in the housing that gets built here, so the city needs to work to make the gap between housing goals and housing production as small as possible.
#2 A Decline in Drug Deaths
San Francisco’s drug treatment system is broken. The city saw a record high number of drug overdose deaths last year, and while they’re lower this year, they’re still much higher than the US average. And now, a new investigation from the San Francisco Chronicle found glaring flaws with programs run by HealthRight360, San Francisco’s largest addiction treatment service provider.
Source: The New York Times
Four clients and one staff member fatally overdosed inside HealthRight360’s treatment facilities between March 2023 and April 2024. The Chronicle found that the policies meant to keep drugs and alcohol out of HealthRight360’s residential programs, like drug tests, intake searches, and hourly observation checks on clients were often ignored. State-mandated orientations to explain program rules for newly-admitted clients were skipped, and weekly one-on-one meetings with recovery counselors sometimes didn’t take place. And although HealthRight bills its Walden House program as one that “fully integrates” drug treatment with mental health services, its residential treatment facilities in San Francisco went years without any on-site therapists.
Last year, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health (DPH) gave HealthRight360 $65 million, over half of which went towards operating approximately 430 beds across its substance-use detox, residential treatment, and sober living programs. That’s about 75 percent of all publicly funded treatment beds in San Francisco, so the city is heavily reliant on HeathRight360 for addiction treatment.
But the city’s biggest treatment provider is actively failing to provide guardrails to prevent people from dying in its care. People struggling with addiction are at a higher risk of death from overdose, but HealthRight360 is failing to provide adequate care, and city government isn’t holding them accountable—both need to do better
It’s another example of San Francisco handing out money to a city contractor with essentially no guardrails or standards for performance. The Department of Health has given HealthRight360 hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, and they aren’t providing the required standard of care to keep people in their own treatment facilities from dying of drug overdoses.
In 2025, we want accountability, not excuses, from DPH officials. When contractors like HealthRight360 fail, there need to be standards and real timelines set for improvements, or the city needs to find better service providers. Mayor-elect Lurie has promised to add performance indicators to every city contract—that would go a long way towards rooting out underperforming contractors.
#3 Fix SFUSD
This year, San Francisco’s Unified School District (SFUSD) tried, failed, and ultimately reevaluated its plan to close and combine schools. Now, a newly-public report from former City Controller Ben Rosenfield—a respected public official who worked on city finances for almost three decades—found that the plan was flawed from the beginning, and the district had much larger problems that needed to be fixed first.
At a high level, Rosenfield’s report seriously questioned SFUSD’s ability to enact three “generational” changes all at the same time. The district was attempting to fix its budget deficit, implement a new Enterprise Resource Planning management system, and develop an equitable school closure plan. Accomplishing any one of these three planned changes would be impressive by itself—but all three at the same time? That was way too much for SFUSD to handle at once.
Rosenfield pointed to six specific areas SFUSD needs to address before starting work on school closures. His report found problems with the district’s hastily-planned, poorly-communicated budget cuts, outdated and slow methods for data access, a work plan that left the district stretched thin, and even the chemistry among senior leadership. These interconnected problems meant that the decisions SFUSD was making weren’t based in data-backed reality, and wouldn’t have been effective even if they had managed to pull them off.
That’s not to say the district doesn’t need to consolidate schools—district leadership has to consider this in order to stabilize its long-term finances. Many SFUSD schools have fewer than 200 children enrolled in them—the smallest school has just 11 students in two classrooms yet costs almost $1 million per year to operate. But former Superintendent Matt Wayne failed students, parents, and teachers by setting unrealistic goals for school closures and fixing budget problems within a single year. Now it’s one year later, and the only difference is SFUSD is one year closer to a fiscal cliff.
In 2025, we want the new Board of Education to work productively with new Superintendent Maria Su to solve San Francisco’s school’s problems. That largely means allowing the Superintendent to do their job, and holding them accountable if they’re not meeting expectations. Collaboration, and focusing on the best way to educate San Francisco’s kids is key here—the district literally can’t afford to get sidetracked.
#4 Balance the Budget
San Francisco officials just revised projections for the city’s budget—we’re now on track for an absolutely massive two-year budget deficit of $876 million. For those keeping track, that’s a 9.5 percent increase from the previously projected $800 million budget deficit, and a sign that the next administration has a lot of work to do to rein in spending.
San Francisco’s expenses continue to outpace revenues, as hotel taxes and other tourism-related revenue remain stubbornly low. Long-term, city officials project expenses will grow by $1.7 billion over the next five years, while revenue will rise just $520 million. This growth in expenses is largely driven by ever-increasing employee salaries and benefits, driven by the most powerful labor unions in the city. Those rising costs hinder San Francisco’s ability to consciously budget. If no action were taken, that would result in a deficit of nearly $1.5 billion in the 2030 fiscal year.
That’s a grim financial picture—but while San Francisco has some feckless elected officials, they’re not going to just sit around and let a billion dollar budget deficit metastasize without doing anything. Outgoing Mayor London Breed told city departments to plan for 15 percent spending reductions starting next fiscal year, but it will be up to Mayor Lurie to decide which cuts he’ll adopt. So far, he’s revealed few specifics about how he’ll approach the budget, other than stating he won’t allow SFMTA to cut cable car service.
In 2025, we want to see a real plan to get San Francisco’s economy growing again, limiting the need for future service cuts. At the same time, elected officials need to get serious about trimming ineffective programs and budget items that aren’t vital to a functional, healthy city. This is a full-blown crisis that will lead to cuts to basic services that keep our city functioning, and San Francisco’s government can’t kick the can down the road or wait for a bailout that’s not coming from the federal government.
STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLES OF THE WEEK
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STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLES OF THE WEEK •
The Invisible Man
Patrick Fealey | eqsuire.com
“This article is a gripping, first-hand account of what being homeless in America is actually like. Our social safety net has been hollowed out so much that there’s almost no services left to catch people on the fringe—a major health problem or mental health episode is all it takes for people to slip. It reads almost like a horror story. Stick with it until the end for the real scare." –Shawn Dillon
Read the article here.
Brain Rot’ Is Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year
Chad De Guzman | time.com
Look, it’s been a long election year. Doomscrolling social media, neverending breaking news, and a new national administration that seems determined to make “Idiocracy” a reality in our lifetime have left everyone pretty frazzled. Oxford English Dictionary has been paying attention, and they’ve quite reasonably chosen “brain rot” as their word of the year. It’s a fitting choice—but here’s hoping 2025 inspires something a bit more optimistic. Maybe “revival,” “fire,” or “LFG?” Just suggestions, Oxford.
Read the article here.
