City Hall Digest: Housing Bill Delayed By Board of Supervisors and Tone Shift at Department of Public Health

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.

Housing Bill to Increase Density Delayed By Board of Supervisors

Last week, we got another reminder of why San Francisco is decades into a housing crisis, as a modest piece of pro-housing legislation was stalled by anti-housing arguments wrapped in the guise of being thoughtful and inclusive of increased affordability. A bill authored by District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar aims to bring “gentle” upzoning to most of the city by allowing single-family homes to be converted into multi-unit buildings. How many units allowed would depend on the size of the piece of land, but most single-family homes would be eligible for conversion to four units. 

Last week, Supervisor Melgar’s bill was heard in the Land Use and Transportation Committee—a subset of the Board of Supervisors composed of Supervisors Melgar, Dean Preston, and Aaron Peskin that has considerable influence over housing policy. Supervisors Peskin and Preston made some last-minute amendments to Melgar’s bill that delayed it from being heard by the full Board of Supervisors until next week (it was originally supposed to be voted on by the Board this week). Next week will be the last meeting of the board before August recess—essentially summer break for the Board of Supervisors. 

Ultimately, these amendments are counterproductive to the bill. Chief among them is the decision to water down the bill by increasing the “look back” period to prevent the demolition of any rentals in which an eviction or tenant buyout happened. This hurts the chances of projects being able to proceed. Additionally, the need for a neighborhood meeting has been added as a requirement for projects to be eligible.

While not an amendment, the notorious anti-development neighborhood group, Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC) voiced strong opposition to the bill unless it had affordability requirements baked into it, with Supervisor Preston echoing HANC’s concerns. While affordability requirements sound good at the surface level, they often make projects infeasible due to lower payouts while sustaining the same building costs. These same, tired arguments have been brought out for decades to grind new housing construction to a halt. 

This is the same sort of dysfunctional behavior from our elected officials that drew a sharp rebuke from the state last year, and threatens our ability to meet our regional housing needs. With behavior like this from the Board of Supervisor, the 82,000 units San Francisco is supposed to build by 2031 feel more and more like a pie-in-the-sky feat, instead of a manageable and practical goal. 

On their own, each of these instances of opposition to new housing can seem like no big deal. But together, they create the massive gridlock that’s driving unaffordability and homelessness in our city.

Supervisors Play Politics With Toll Legislation

State legislators are working on a proposal to bolster public transit funds with a $1.50 toll hike over five years, which would generate an estimated $900 million for Bay Area agencies. But a bizarre vote by the Board of Supervisors last week indicates that not all supervisors are keen to support a bill to save public transit. 

The pandemic’s changes to worker behavior and commute patterns have hamstrung local and regional transit agencies, as a majority of their revenue is derived from traveler fares. While transit agencies like BART recognize that basing their entire system of funding in fares is now far too volatile to be reliable, the reality remains that there is no alternative source of money in place yet—leaving them vulnerable to looming crises which would include drastic service and personnel cuts. State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 532, the toll hike bill, aims to provide a new funding stream to bolster public transportation.

The legislation before the Board of Supervisors is a resolution that would declare that the San Francisco board supports State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 532—and that’s it. 

However, last week Supervisors Connie Chan and Shamann Walton kicked this resolution back to the committee process instead of allowing it to be voted on by the whole board. This is despite the fact that the very same Board of Supervisors, acting in their capacity as the County Transportation Authority, voted 7 to 1 (with Supervisor Chan dissenting) to support the legislation, just a week before. 

Even though the resolution is just a nonbinding piece of legislation showing support, it’s still an important way to tell how our legislators feel about issues like public transit, and blocking it only acts as a petty way to reflect their constituents’ views on the topic. While responding to constituents is part of the job, elected leaders have to mediate those feelings with the greater good.

Because the vote has now been delayed until after the board comes back from its August recess, there is also a chance that the state bill may face a vote before the City and County of San Francisco can even weigh in. Both Supervisors Walton and Chan represent constituents who typically do not trust or utilize transit, which is exactly the problem: a small percentage of people end up being able to block something useful that will benefit a far greater number of people. So while this resolution is non-binding legislation, we see this same behavior time and again from some of our elected officials—which indicates a structural problem in how our government functions in San Francisco.

DPH Changes Its Tune About the Danger of Fentanyl as City Faces a New Variant of the Drug

Last week, the Office of the County Medical Examiner (OCME, or, the morgue) released a fresh analysis of all of the 647 drug overdose deaths in 2022 which revealed disturbing news—that fluorofentanyl, a novel version of fentanyl, has been circulating in San Francisco’s illicit drug supply. Fluorofentanyl, which can be .5x to 5x the strength of fentanyl itself, has “migrated” from the East Coast drug supply to San Francisco. This is a concerning development in the drug overdose crisis. 

Fentanyl continues to get more potent over time as it is mixed with more adulterants, emphasizing the need to reduce the demand for fentanyl by getting drug users into recovery programs with sobriety as the goal. 

TogetherSF Action called on the city to emphasize getting drug users into recovery—and it worked. Now we’re starting to see a shift in the Department of Public Health’s messaging toward recovery as well. Recently, DPH held a press conference to give a grim update on fentanyl overdose deaths in June. During it, DPH head Dr. Grant Colfax acknowledged that just a small amount of the illicit drug is fatal, and that people currently using it should seek treatment to stop their usage. 

It’s a welcome course correction to see DPH using their powerful platform to encourage drug users to enter recovery. However, some people used this opportunity to claim that DPH was embracing a “law enforcement” narrative by being truthful about the drug—which we find to be disingenuous and divisive. The lethality of fentanyl necessitates strong messaging around the importance of recovery. 

This shift in tone is an important step in the right direction for the Department of Public Health. We now hope to see DPH shift its tactics and focus toward getting people into recovery.