Category: Update

By Josh Koehn and Gabe Greschler : sfstandard – excerpt

How close is too close in the famously incestuous world of San Francisco politics?

One political operative is testing those boundaries.

Jay Cheng, the executive director of the moderate political action committee Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, apparently spent time earlier this year moonlighting as a recruiter for the mayoral campaign of Mark Farrell.

Text messages shared with The Standard—first reported in a San Francisco Chronicle story on moderate political influence in the city—show that Cheng attempted to facilitate the hiring of a Farrell campaign staffer for a tidy $15,000 a month salary about two weeks after Farrell declared his candidacy.

“The offer is open!” Cheng wrote. “We’ll hold the position for you as long as you need.”… (more)

By Patrick Hoge : sfexaminer – excerpt (includes audio track)

TogetherSF Action, a group backed by billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, said Tuesday it would stop trying to qualify a measure for the November ballot that would increase the San Francisco mayor’s authority after people expressed concerns that it might give newfound powers to the wrong person if a candidate they did not favor were to win the mayoral race.

“It’s disappointing to put something out there and have to pull it back, but I think ultimately, we have to make the decision that is best for the city, for our community, for everybody that’s involved in the effort,” said Kanishka Cheng, the group’s founder and CEO, saying she did not want to waste resources on an unsuccessful campaign…(more)

I wonder if someone from the group saw this video that describes the mayor’s powers and realized how powerful the mayor is already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBb_UM4xm4U.

In my opinion, a political system works best with a balance of powers, something we are missing lately. It is particularly good when the balance favors the public will, not the will of government officials who are supposed to serve us. I look forward to a mayor who understands that.

By Kevin Truong : sfstandard – excerpt

Entities tied to the legendary Apple designer have spent tens of millions buying up nearly a city block in Jackson Square.

You can call legendary iPhone designer Sir Jony Ive something of a Jackson Square superfan—so much so that the famously private figure once penned an ode to the roughly six-block micro-neighborhood in the Financial Times.

Now appreciation has morphed into a mini-empire, as entities tied to Ive have spent the last four years accumulating the better part of a block in the neighborhood, bordered by Columbus and Pacific avenues and Jackson and Montgomery streets.

Consider it the Ive Hive, if you will…(more)

From Awattorneys via email:

Aleshire & Wynder, LLP Secures A Legal Win for Restoring Local Control on Housing: Court Rules In Favor of Five California Charter Cities Declaring Senate Bill 9 Unconstitutional

On April 22, 2024 at 11:00 AM, the Honorable Curtis A. Kin in Department 86 of the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a ruling granting a Petition for Writ of Mandate challenging the constitutionality of Senate Bill 9, as applied to charter cities. Senate Bill 9 requires all California cities to ministerially approve an application for a lot split, and up to four total housing units, on a single family residential lot that meets certain specified criteria.

Five charter cities – Carson, Redondo Beach, Torrance, Del Mar, and Whitter – initiated a lawsuit in early 2022 against the State of California claiming that Senate Bill 9 is unconstitutional and invalid against charter cities. The League of California Cities and the City of Cerritos filed respective amicus briefs in the Trial Court in support of the Charter cities’ position. After extensive briefing and two hearings in Department 86, the Court ruled in favor of the five charter cities. In this litigation, the charter cities are represented by Managing Partner Sunny Soltani, Equity Partner Pam Lee, Partner Michelle Villarreal, and Associate Shukan Patel of Aleshire & Wynder, LLP along with Michael Webb from the Redondo Beach City Attorney’s office

For further information on what this ruling means or how your city can benefit from this decision, please contact Pam Lee at plee or visit awattorneys.com… (more)

Now we may approach the city and county of SF and the SF Planning Commission with the news.

Forgive repeats

By Steve Stallone : 48hills – excerpt

Peskin, Chan amendments offer accountability—but where is the affordable housing, and why are details still secret?

The supes will consider Tuesday/23 a risky plan to bail out the developers of the Treasure Island housing development. This so-called “Alternative Financing” plan, embodied in the Disposition and Development Agreement amendment, could leave the city on the hook for more than $200 million at a time when the city is already facing a huge deficit.

This should be taken seriously.

Alarmingly, many in the city, led by Mayor London Breed and Supervisory Matt Dorsey, have remained conspicuously silent about the plan’s obvious deficiencies, even in the face of the board’s own budget analyst’s dire warnings…

In accordance with the Sunshine Ordinance and the city’s commitment to transparency, the board should demand the release of the fiscal impact study the staff has cited to assure board members that the numbers will all work out. If it proves it, prove it.

The supervisors need to take the legislative analyst’s advice to “pause” the Alternative Financial Plan until that is done.

In the meantime, the board must demand a plan for when and how the promised affordable housing will be built, and tell anxious TI residents when it will be ready for occupancy…(more)

By Han Li : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco’s Democratic Party entered a new era Friday night as candidates from the city’s moderate political camp, who won in a landslide in the March election, were sworn into office.

The governing body, officially known as the Democratic County Central Committee, or DCCC, also elected Nancy Tung, a career prosecutor and chief-level attorney working for the District Attorney’s Office, as the party chair.

The committee will play a major role this election year as moderate mayoral candidates compete for endorsements and support. Tung said the mayoral endorsement process will start in June after the filing deadline.

The political calculation and manipulation for the mayoral endorsement may start soon, if it hasn’t started already, as multiple moderate candidates are running, including incumbent Mayor London Breed, former interim mayor Mark Farrell and philanthropist Daniel Lurie.

“The moderates in general are on the same page about ranked-choice voting,” Jade Tu, a newly sworn-in member and campaign manager for Farrell, told The Standard about the potential dual or triple endorsement of the moderate candidates. “People already are talking about endorsement, chatting about it.”…(more)

By Kevin V. Nguyen : sfstandard – excerpt

San Francisco is full of empty offices that residents and politicians keep saying need to be converted into housing, but most developers are not interested in pursuing such projects because of the high costs.

But in the exclusive Presidio Heights neighborhood, the back-to-back closures of two massive hospitals have opened the door for a different type of transformation—one where a local developer plans to turn medical campuses into over 1,300 new homes.

Both are located on California Street on either end of thriving Laurel Village—a business strip filled with ground-floor boutiques, small chains, fitness studios and beauty salons, among other small businesses. Historically, this is one of the city’s most built-out and tightly constrained neighborhoods.

One hospital is located at 3700 California St., which is the site of the former California Pacific Medical Center, recently home to Sutter Health before it decamped to Van Ness Avenue…(more)

Ever wonder why every piece of available property must be torn down and rebuilt to be converted into something it is not? As we understand it, there are plans to set up medical facilities for people who need to transition from using drugs on the street to living indoors. It seems like using the hospitals as medical facilities more or less as they are and turning some of the buildings into transitional housing within the shell would be the cheapest, and therefore our government avoids it. Somebody has to make money on every project or the government will not support it. How do we bring economic sanity to San Francisco?

By Savannah Dewberry : 48hills – excerpt

So far, the Breed Administration has not taken advantage of a program that will close in September.

In 2023, San Francisco announced its goal of having 82,000 new homes built by 2031 in order to address affordability and overcrowding concerns. This would require the city to build 28 new units every day for the entire eight year span of the project.

The city’s goals include 46,000 units of affordable housing. But only 871 were built in 2023.

A new funding program developed by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could alleviate this issue—if the city takes advantage of it. Called Faircloth-to-RAD, the program debuted in 2021 with the first new affordable units being built in Galveston, Texas…

RAD is short for Rental Assistance Demonstration, a HUD program that launched during the Obama administration. It would allow public housing authorities to convert subsidized public housing units to Section 8 subsidies, and potentially attract private investors to help cover repairs. …

Supervisor Dean Preston’s chief of staff, Preston Kilgore, said in an interview that their office asked asked the Breed Administration to look into the RAD program back in 2022. However, it wasn’t until this month, when the Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution calling on SFHA to release a call for interested developers, did SFHA and the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Developmen confirm that they plan to do a feasibility analysis of the program this year… (more)

From Scott Wiener via email

SACRAMENTO – The Senate Environmental Quality Committee passed Senator Scott Wiener’s (D-San Francisco) Senate Bill 1227, new legislation that spurs the revitalization of downtown San Francisco by providing regulatory and tax relief to a targeted area for a period of 7 years. The bill passed 4-2 and heads next to the Senate Revenue & Taxation Committee…

The bill provides an expedited pathway to convert parts of downtown San Francisco’s office-heavy downtown to a vibrant mixed-use hub of activity…

SB 1227 does not relax any local permitting or zoning requirements. The City of San Francisco will continue to implement its local permitting requirements. The City will also be able to invoke this CEQA exemption.

Second, SB 1227 expands the ‘welfare exemption’ from property tax for specified projects that provide rental housing up to 120% of the area median income, so long as projects are rented 10% below the market value, as determined by the Housing and Urban Development Fair Market Rents. This provision expands a property tax exemption used by affordable housing projects to encourage the production of moderate-income workforce housing projects in downtown San Francisco. This expansion will help the City meet its housing goals while giving more moderate-income workers a chance to locate close to jobs and supporting local businesses with an increase in area residents.

The downtown zone covered by the bill includes the Financial District, Union Square, Civic Center, Yerba Buena, East Cut, Eastern and Central SOMA, South Beach, and Rincon Hill.

SB 1227 is sponsored by San Francisco Mayor London Breed. The bill is supported by the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, YIMBY Action, SPUR, Bay Area Council, and many others… (more)