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 and duty.

Small Business, Big Dysfunction

San Francisco elected officials always talk about supporting small businesses—it’s a well worn cliche in local politics. But as entrepreneur Naz Khorram detailed last week, the city doesn’t actually back that talk up with any kind of meaningful action. In some cases, the city seems to actively undermine new businesses by making them jump through bureaucratic hoops.

In most other cities, opening a restaurant in a commercial district is a simple matter of obtaining the proper permits, building out the space, hiring employees, and opening the doors for business. Not so in San Francisco. In their editorial, Khorram described a year-long process of navigating multiple city departments, neighborhood outreach, public notice periods, inspections, and background checks before finally getting all the necessary approvals to open.

Dealing with well-connected, politically powerful neighborhood groups is an especially frustrating chore. Neighborhood groups are active all over San Francisco, and sometimes they can be forces for positive change. But way too often they function as gatekeepers, actively working against small business owners who don’t conform to their specific vision of their neighborhood.

In Khorram’s case, one group tried to make changes to the restaurant design, the hours they could stay open, even the food they would serve. A vegan restaurant? In the Mission? Not so fast, said this particular group.

Making matters worse is the fact that these groups have the tacit approval of City Hall. Although new businesses don’t technically need their signoff to open, neighborhood groups can create lengthy, expensive delays without it. As one City Hall staffer told Khorram, “sometimes you just need to kiss the ring.”

Kiss the ring? Just to open a new restaurant on Mission Street? Nearly one-third of San Francisco’s commercial spaces are currently vacant, one of the worst vacancy rates in the country. The city literally can’t afford to make it harder for new businesses to open quickly.

Needless to say, forcing new business owners to navigate this maze of bureaucracy is an incredibly inefficient way to run a city. But San Francisco does appear to be trying to improve, at least in some small ways. 2020’s Prop H, the Save Our Small Businesses Initiative, is intended to streamline the permitting process so new restaurants, bars, or entertainment venues on commercially zoned corridors no longer require special approval to open. Unfortunately, city officials made sure to include specific streets where this new legislation doesn’t apply, so small businesses still face opposition in places like 24th Street and Mission Street.

San Francisco’s economy is recovering much more slowly than other cities in the US, and city officials need to do a lot more to incentivize new businesses to open here. Removing unnecessary, outdated, artificial, and costly barriers like bespoke neighborhood approval would go a long way toward making that happen.

State Leadership Means Sober Housing Might Get State Funding

Last Wednesday, state lawmakers voted to advance Assemblymember Matt Haney’s bill to allow drug-free housing programs to compete for state funding, which it can’t under current rules. Those rules are well-intentioned—lawmakers didn’t want any state-funded housing facilities to deny people spots in supportive housing just because they’re using drugs.

But because building housing is so expensive in California, sober housing would need to get state funding to be feasible, and so there’s not a lot of it in the state. The vast majority of supportive housing here allows residents to continue using drugs in their facilities. And while that means supportive housing is welcoming to drug users, a lot of people who are trying to recover from substance use disorders find it difficult to recover in an environment where other people are using drugs. Supportive housing isn’t very welcoming to those trying to recover.

Recovery advocates have pushed for this change for years, and we championed their efforts with our work during San Francisco’s budget negotiations last year. Forcing people into sober housing if they’re not ready to start recovery doesn’t work—but drug-free housing should be an option for those who want it.

In San Francisco, Delancey Street, Positive Directions Equals Change, and the Salvation Army have run successful drug-free supportive housing programs for years, so it’s proven to be a workable model. Haney’s bill has specific eviction for tenants who relapse and would cap funding at 25 percent of all funding that goes to supportive housing, so it ensures the housing-first model still receives the vast majority of money in California.

While this bill passed out of committee last week, it still needs approval from the full legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom to become law. We strongly urge the legislature and Governor Newsom to support this bill. A blanket, one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work to treat substance use disorder. It won’t work to house people trying to recover, either.

Enforcement Rises, Crime Falls

San Francisco has faced rising crime for years, and public safety is one of the biggest concerns for residents. So a recent analysis of police data by the San Francisco Standard should be hailed as great news—crime in six major categories is down year over year, and way down from post-pandemic highs. This drop comes after a focused, sustained increase in law enforcement. Funny how that works.

Let’s dig into the data. The most recent crime stats from San Francisco’s Police Department show robberies are down 27 percent from 2020 to the same period this year. Burglaries, which hit a peak in 2021, dropped 41 percent in the same period this year. And reports of larceny theft have trended downward, from a high in 2018 to down more than 48 percent the same time period this year.

Now, this analysis should come with a grain of salt. Not all incidents of crime are reported, so this data is imperfect. But the fact that we can see a noticeable decline in crime reports after years of increases is reason to celebrate.

It’s also an encouraging sign that the accountability and enforcement strategies TogetherSF Action advocates are working. Mayor London Breed has taken a stronger stance for public safety than some of her predecessors, directing local authorities to coordinate with state and federal officials to disrupt drug trafficking and introducing a ballot measure in the March primary election that modernized policing in San Francisco. This year, that work is starting to pay off.

Of course, it’s too early to tell if this decrease in crime will be sustained. But after years of increasing crime, these numbers are an encouraging sign of progress, and we’re thankful to our elected officials and law enforcement for their work to make it happen.

Panda-monium

After returning from her diplomatic trip to China last week, Mayor London Breed made a giant panda-sized splash when she announced the San Francisco Zoo would receive giant pandas from China. That’s a huge win for the city—pandas are a massive tourist draw and currently the Atlanta Zoo is the only other zoo in the US that has giant pandas.

So San Francisco should expect a nice bump in tourism as visitors flock to the zoo to see the new pandas when they arrive in about 18 months. But the zoo needs to seriously improve before it can expect to properly care for these rare animals, because they have an incredibly flawed safety record. In 2007, a tiger escaped its enclosure and killed a visitor, a baby gorilla was crushed to death by a door in 2014, and just last year, a grizzly bear managed to get through an open door and chase a zookeeper.

These incidents invited controversy after Mayor Breed’s announcement, with some San Franciscans saying our zoo isn’t properly equipped to care for giant pandas. Which are valid points. But the opportunity to welcome these animals, stimulate tourism, and improve diplomatic ties with an economic power like China is too great to pass up. We just hope the zoo takes people’s concerns seriously and takes the steps necessary to care for these animals, because we can’t wait to see San Francisco’s giant pandas thriving for years to come.

STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLE OF THE WEEK

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STAFF RECOMMENDED ARTICLE OF THE WEEK -

A Close Examination of the Most Infamous Public Toilet in America

Ezra Klein | The New York Times

“I love this article, because it uses our infamous million dollar Noe Valley toilet to explain why even small public projects like a toilet take so long and cost so much in San Francisco.

We could build public projects much quicker and at a much lower cost, but San Francisco has a bunch of unnecessary commission reviews and restrictions that slow everything down and drive prices up. Our work to decrease the number of commissions we have is going to help—they’ll combine duplicative commissions, making City Hall more efficient.”

—Jake Decker, Senior Organizer

Neighborhood Groups Create Giant Headaches for Small Businesses