San Francisco has been trying to fix housing rules for years, so why does it still take a decade to get an apartment building out of the ground? Let's trace where these projects get stuck. Welcome to SF Politics and Urbanism Daily — I'm Cassidy, with Mark. Today we're on shadow rules, the gap between housing reform and actual housing, a bit of good news on homelessness, and a warning from the city's own economist on Prop D. The shadow thing gets me every time. We're blocking housing because of shadows. In San Francisco. A city that is basically fog with neighborhoods attached. Mark woke up ready to fight the zoning code, everybody. So this should go well. From News Pub:
The District 5 legislator is announcing a law on Thursday that would eliminate the ability for people to say shadows cast by a building are an “environmental concern” that can be used to delay, and possibly block, new housing.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, who represents District 5, is trying to pull shadows out of San Francisco's environmental review for housing. Right now, the shade a building casts on open space counts as an environmental concern, and that's been used to delay or block nearly 2,200 units across 11 projects since 2017. This is CEQA abuse in its purest form. The California Environmental Quality Act is supposed to deal with real environmental harm — not give NIMBYs a way to say, 'my park gets a little darker' and stop housing. Two thousand units on the altar of shade. And worth saying: that shadow-analysis requirement isn't in the state guidelines. Most California cities don't do this. San Francisco added its own hurdle. Of course it did. And the people using those appeals aren't the working-class family worried about their kid's playground. It's organized opposition to density in already-wealthy neighborhoods. Mahmood is right to go after it. SF keeps announcing these big zoning wins, but apartments don't just appear because the Board voted. So what actually has to happen between changing the rules and getting somebody into a new unit? Right — zoning is just step one of a whole chain, and every link can jam up. Once a project is zoned correctly, the developer still has to get through CEQA review, then planning approval, and then building permits, which are handled by two different city agencies. San Francisco has historically been one of the slowest cities in the country at that permitting stage; per J.K. Dineen's reporting in the Chronicle, SF still lags behind comparable cities like San Diego and Austin on permit issuance, even after a push to cut red tape. On the environmental side, shadow analysis alone — whether a new building casts shade on a nearby park — has been used as CEQA appeal grounds that delayed or killed 2,195 housing units over the past decade, per a Chronicle report on Supervisor Bilal Mahmood's legislation. And then there's the megaproject problem: the Chronicle reported in August that projects that would collectively bring about 20,000 homes online — places like Candlestick Point — are still stalled by financing gaps, infrastructure costs, and entitlement complexity. The good news is KQED reported San Francisco cut permit processing time roughly in half between January 2024 and August of that same year, so the machinery is moving faster. Just not fast enough yet. You said CEQA appeals are getting used over shadows, and that sounds almost absurd. Is that actually a common way to block projects, or is it more of a one-off? It's common enough that Supervisor Mahmood is introducing a bill specifically to remove shadow analysis as appeal grounds. And the Chronicle also covered a 70-unit affordable senior housing project in Bernal Heights that planners approved and still got stalled for months in an appeal process Supervisor Myrna Melgar described as creating a monster. So keep an eye on that SHADE legislation and whether the Board passes it — if it does, that's one of the clearest process fixes we've seen in a while. ABC7 San Francisco writes:
Data reviewed from the count indicates a shift. In 2024, the city identified 8,323 homeless individuals. The 2026 count showed a 4.2% decrease overall and found that, for the first time, more unhoused people were staying in shelters than living on the streets.
San Francisco is reporting its lowest level of unsheltered homelessness in fifteen years, according to preliminary results from the latest Point-in-Time count — that's the annual one-night census done every January by outreach workers and volunteers. Overall homelessness is down about four percent, and for the first time, more unhoused people are in shelters than on the streets. This matters, and I don't want it buried under caveats. We've been spending money on this for two decades with basically nothing to show for it, and now there's actual movement. Lurie came in, got more aggressive about clearing encampments and adding shelter beds, and the numbers moved. Worth noting, the Coalition on Homelessness is already pushing back on the methodology — they're questioning how the count was done and whether it reflects what's actually happening on the ground. That's fair scrutiny to keep in mind; Point-in-Time counts have always had limitations. The Coalition raises methodology concerns every single time the numbers go down, and never when they go up. At some point you have to ask: do they want the problem solved, or do they want the issue? From Patrick Hoge at San Francisco Examiner:
San Francisco’s chief economist has produced an analysis that says Proposition D — a union-backed measure on the June ballot that would raise municipal Overpaid Executive Tax — raises risk to The City’s economy at a time “when there is substantial evidence that businesses are reducing their presence in San Francisco, relative to other locations.”
The SF Examiner is reporting that City Chief Economist Ted Egan — that's the head of the Office of Economic Analysis inside the Controller's Office — has released a report warning that Prop D raises economic risk for the city. Prop D is on the June ballot, and it would dramatically hike the Overpaid Executive Tax, which applies to companies where the top earner makes more than 100 times what the median employee makes. An 800 percent tax increase. The city's own economist is projecting 944 lost jobs and $206 million in GDP gone over 20 years — and this is landing at a moment when businesses are already quietly shrinking their SF footprint. Unions are pitching it as fairness, but if the workers lose the jobs entirely, who exactly did that help? To be fair, Egan's report also says SF's economy 'cannot credibly be described as being in a downward spiral at the moment' — so this isn't a doom prediction, it's a risk warning. But an 800 percent hike on any tax deserves scrutiny, and it's notable that the city's own economist is the one doing it. If you follow San Francisco politics, you may also like California Governor's Race — daily 2026 race coverage on candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy for voters who want more than horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
We've linked the reporting behind each story in the show notes, so if something from today's briefing stuck with you, that's a good place to keep reading.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Friday. This is a Lantern Podcast.