Why Does San Francisco Keep Getting Sued?
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.
San Francisco Hit With Another Lawsuit Over Tenderloin Street Conditions
Last week, a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses sued San Francisco for failing to take any kind of meaningful action to fix the long-term deterioration in street conditions in the Tenderloin. For anyone counting, that’s the second lawsuit on the same issue in four years.
Tenderloin residents have been dealing with crime, tent encampments, and drug dealing for decades. But during the pandemic, smaller drug dealing operations turned into sprawling open-air drug markets, and tent encampments took over full sidewalks. This lawsuit, like the previous suit from UC Law SF in 2020, is an attempt to force the city to actually take action to fix these long-term problems in the neighborhood, instead of using the Tenderloin as a kind of containment zone.
“The real impetus for this is to create some positive change. We want the residents, the employees, the tourists and the businesses in the Tenderloin to be treated the same as everywhere else in the city.”
The city has made progress in the past year cracking down on fentanyl dealing and crime in the Tenderloin, by collaborating with state and federal law enforcement. And the 2022 injunction banning San Francisco from cleaning homeless encampments has limited the city’s effectiveness at getting unhoused people into shelter. City officials argue that their efforts to reduce crime, disrupt open-air drug markets, and tackle homelessness are starting to show results despite the ongoing injunction.
But a deeper, systemic acceptance of the social conditions in the Tenderloin persists. Too many city officials seem to see the Tenderloin’s problems as unsolvable, believing if they can limit drug dealing, crime, and homelessness to the neighborhood, it will protect other neighborhoods in the city. This “containment zone” theory might work in fiction (Hamsterdam in The Wire is a notable example), but in reality it’s a disaster.
Residents of the Tenderloin deserve safe, clean, and violence-free streets just as much as every other resident of San Francisco. Yes, the Tenderloin has dealt with crime, drug dealing, and homelessness for decades. And yes, city officials have to work around restrictions when trying to get unhoused people into shelter. But in a city with a $14.6 budget and five (!) commissions dedicated to homelessness, San Francisco’s leaders can find meaningful ways to create a Tenderloin community that’s safe for all residents.
Shocking New Bill Requires Some Kind of Accountability For City Contractors?
Great news for anyone fed up with the constant stream of nonprofit scandals in San Francisco—District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani just passed legislation requiring nonprofits that contract with the city to use standard performance metrics, allowing San Francisco to monitor their services and activities. As part of this legislation, San Francisco’s city controller will also create a new policy to deal with underperforming nonprofits.
San Francisco uses nonprofit contractors to provide critical city services—running homeless shelters, organizing crime prevention groups, and providing drug treatment programs. While the city spends around $1.7 billion annually on over 600 nonprofit organizations, it doesn’t hold those organizations accountable for any kind of performance metrics. San Francisco’s city controller reviews each nonprofit’s financial conditions (financial impropriety is how a lot of these recent scandals came to light), but that’s about the extent of San Francisco’s involvement.
Unsurprisingly, handing out $1.7 billion in public money to hundreds of different organizations and then saying “use this however you want,” has allowed a number of grifters to take advantage of San Francisco’s generosity. The United Council of Human Services took in over $109 million from 2017 to 2022, while CEO Gwendolyn Westbrook used funds to enrich herself. SF Safe collected $11 million over the past decade while spending money on trips to Tahoe, valet parking, and limo services. And Drew Jenkins, CEO of J&J Community Services, created fake invoices and double billed San Francisco for expenses while pulling in $1 million in city funds.
The lack of regulation and accountability emboldens bad actors, while making it more difficult for the organizations doing good work to compete for funds. Supervisor Stefani's legislation sets a simple baseline on how nonprofits operate, so we can understand if the work they’re doing is actually effective. It’s a key step forward to creating an accountable city government, and a big improvement from what San Francisco had been doing—pouring money into a black hole and hoping everything works out alright.
Supervisors Charge Ahead on Ebike Battery Restrictions, Putting Small Businesses at Risk
Last month, the Board of Supervisors updated San Francisco’s fire code to add new rules for electric bike (ebike) batteries. The updated rules set a minimum distance between charging stations in bike shops and require stores that charge five or more bikes at a time to have sprinkler systems.
District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin authored the new regulations, in what he described as a response to the increased risk of fires caused by improper ebike battery charging. San Francisco’s fire department responds to an average of 30 ebike battery fires a year, and some fires have been bad enough to cause injuries and displace people from their homes.
But bike shop owners say these regulations are misguided and unnecessary. Most San Francisco bike shops are small operations, and can’t afford the cost of implementing these changes—installing a sprinkler system can cost between $50,000–$60,000. And in almost every case, battery fires usually come from cheap, imported ebikes that don't meet US safety standards and aren’t sold by bike shops.
It makes sense that San Francisco is trying to regulate a potential safety hazard. Managing a city requires mitigating risk for hundreds of thousands of people living in close proximity. But in this case, the regulations far outweigh the risk. San Francisco deals with an average of 30 ebike battery fires a year. Meanwhile, the city averaged 242 severe injury crashes each year caused by cars over the last decade, and you don’t see Supervisors out here trying to ban cars.
It’s also very telling that these new rules were authored by Supervisor Peskin. Peskin has a mixed record on small businesses, and a very specific vision of what makes San Francisco great. If businesses or transportation (like ebikes) don’t conform to his vision, he will take action to regulate them. That’s his prerogative as Board President, but we wish the Supervisor considered the financial impacts his new rules will have on San Francisco’s small businesses before passing them.
He Don’t Miss—or Do He?
Steph Curry is hands-down the greatest basketball player in Golden State Warriors history, and there’s an argument to be made that he might be the greatest basketball player ever. Would that success on the court translate to politics? In a recent CBS This Morning interview, Curry didn’t rule out the possibility of running for office after he retires.
The list of athletes-turned-politicians is a mixed bag. Bill Bradley was an Olympian and New York Knick before serving as New Jersey’s Senator for two decades, Gerald Ford starred at Michigan in football before filling in as President post-Nixon, and Steve Garvey is currently running for US Senate after a long career as a Los Angeles Dodger because he apparently doesn’t have anything else to do.
Curry has been successful at most of his ventures so far—basketball is obviously his bread and butter, but he’s also a pretty solid golfer, a decent-enough actor, and game show host. He’d have the Bay Area vote locked up, but running a country is very different than running a half-court offense, and hitting the campaign trail takes a different kind of skill than hitting three-pointers. We just hope his position on affordable housing evolves if he does decide to get into politics.
