Why We Started TogetherSF Action—And How You Can Get Involved

San Francisco is a small city with an outsized impact. It’s an economic powerhouse that propels the world forward with new ideas and innovations. Its natural beauty is second to none. Its cultural impact, driven by multiple generations of social movements and activists, is felt around the world.

Yet if you ask residents, or follow the news, or simply spend the day walking through many of the City’s neighborhoods, it is clear that something has gone wrong. Three in four voters say the City is on the wrong track. This year alone, residents have supported the recall of three school board members and the District Attorney.

The visible suffering of thousands of people on the City’s streets is omnipresent. The rise of fentanyl use is having devastating impacts on public health and quality of life. Open-air drug dealing in the Tenderloin and South of Market has made residents of these neighborhoods, which are home to a disproportionate number of the City’s families and children, feel unsafe to leave their homes.

The list of issues goes one: the public school district was among the last in the country to reopen during the pandemic despite private schools operating safely for months, car break-ins are so common that residents do not even bother reporting them to the police, housing costs are among the highest in the world, middle-income and low-income people commute for hours because they can’t afford the City’s rent. 

The social contract between the City and its residents right now is broken. We need to build it back, together.

We are a city of innovation, a city of diversity. We used to be known as “The City that Knows How.” We have every advantage in the world and a budget that is larger than that of fourteen states, yet every year our problems build and there do not seem to be any real attempts to solve them.

That is why we have created TogetherSF Action to mobilize San Franciscans and demand better from our elected leaders. San Franciscans are not happy with the state of our city, but that alone is not enough to drive the change that we need to see. We need to build the political will for action, demand competence in leadership, and if our elected officials are not up to the task, we need to vote them out of office.

It is fashionable to say that San Francisco’s problems are intractable, that they are too big for any one city to handle, or that the rot is too deep to be fixed. 

That’s incorrect. The issue is not that our problems are too big. The issue is that many of our elected officials are either unable or uninterested in making the changes needed to solve them. What is worse is that our civic discourse has become so divisive that residents are often attacked or vilified for trying to get involved in their community, often by the very same people who are supposed to represent them.

It shouldn’t be this way. Our elected officials are all Democrats and agree on 90% of the issues, yet they find every opportunity to fight bitterly over the 10% of things on which they disagree. When they do try to address the City’s major issues, the proposed solutions are either nowhere near the scale that is needed, or are so impractical and ideological that they stand no chance of having a real impact.

We can address the housing crisis by reforming our bureaucracy to streamline the permitting and approval process. We can make it easier for small businesses by designing our bureaucracy so that it is transparent and easy to navigate, rather than one that can take 34 different steps to open a new bookstore. We can reform our laws to eliminate opportunities for corruption, like how individual Supervisors can essentially veto changes to their district ranging from everything from new Navigation Centers and bike lanes, to even the most minor home remodels.

Most importantly, we need to demand results. Since 2018, the City has given more than $1 billion to nonprofits operating in the homelessness sector, yet during that same time the homeless population has risen by approximately 5,000 people. Many of these organizations do great work, but there is no standardized process to measure their results and allow for accountability. 

City governance needs to be reformed and streamlined, but right now there’s no will at City Hall to get it done. The Commission on the Status of Women and the Human Rights Commission overlap on the issues they cover and yet they both operate independently. The Office of Small Business was created not to reform the broken bureaucracy that makes it difficult for new businesses to open, but as a new layer of bureaucracy to help small businesses navigate the existing bureaucracy. San Francisco has over 100 different commissions and advisory boards that operate with varying levels of authority and oversight. Many seats go unfilled year after year because no one wants to serve on them. This is a system designed to fail, or worse, one that only works for those with resources and connections.

At TogetherSF Action, we are creating an organization that is focused on getting things done. 

Are you tired of inaction at City Hall? Join us and help pass legislation, show up to important hearings, and build public pressure. Are you new to the political process and want to get involved to improve your city? We’ll help you get up to speed on what’s happening and how you can best make a difference.

San Francisco deserves better but it is clear that change will not happen on its own. We are focused on getting people involved, mobilizing residents to take action, tracking results, and holding the City and our elected leaders accountable.

We need your help to make that happen.