The mayor’s out on the City Hall steps this morning promising to double the Housing Trust Fund — and, same week, the Board just approved $8.5 million to bail out the zoo. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily — I’m Cassidy, with Mark. On the docket today: doubling housing subsidies, creating a public bank, and a very real question about spending priorities, courtesy of that zoo bailout. Three charter amendments at once — housing, a public bank, Muni governance — and we’re also writing a check for endangered wolves. Somebody made a very specific set of choices. Let’s start with the housing money, because Supervisor Melgar is co-sponsoring this one — and if her name rings a bell, it should. KRON4 writes:
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar held a rally on the steps of City Hall Tuesday morning to announce a new charter amendment proposal that would double the city’s Housing Trust Fund, with the money earmarked for affordable housing programs.
Lurie and Supervisor Melgar were on the City Hall steps this morning for a Housing Trust Fund rally. The proposal would more than double the annual contribution, from $52 million to over $125 million, by carving out a slice of future property tax growth, with a $3 billion cap over 30 years. Voters would see it in November as a charter amendment. Melgar — and if you heard last week’s SHADE conversation, you know she was the one calling shadow-appeal delays “creating a monster” — drafted this with nonprofit and affordable housing groups, then took it to the mayor’s office. The original Housing Trust Fund was a 2012 charter amendment, so yes, this is an amendment to an amendment. I want to believe the $125 million number, but we already spent time last week on the real choke point: land costs, permitting timelines, and CEQA-style delay tactics upstream. If those stay in place, you’re just pouring more money into a pipeline that’s still jammed. And in the same week, this Board is also pushing a public bank charter amendment and the Muni governance amendment. Three charter amendments in parallel is not an accident — at some point you have to wonder if rewriting the charter is the city’s substitute for actually delivering units. So when the city talks about doubling the Housing Trust Fund, where does that money really go? And is more subsidy actually the missing piece, or are bigger structural problems killing affordable housing projects before they ever break ground? That’s a fair skeptic’s question, because the subsidy is real, but it’s definitely not the whole story. Housing Trust Fund dollars usually cover the gap between what it actually costs to build an affordable unit and what a developer can piece together from financing — construction loans, low-income tax credit equity, capped rental income, all of it. In San Francisco, that gap is huge because, per the Office of Resilience and Capital Planning, housing costs have risen to the second-highest in the nation since the 2011 boom, driven by land, labor, and materials that have outpaced inflation for decades. CalMatters’ reporting on California’s stalled pipeline is useful here: tens of thousands of affordable units are sitting in what the piece calls “financial purgatory,” meaning they’ve got approvals and even some funding committed, but they can’t close financing because the numbers still don’t pencil. More subsidy would theoretically help those deals, but the underlying cost structure is the root problem. And on the west side specifically, Supervisor Myrna Melgar told the Examiner flat out, “We currently do not have a strategy for affordable-housing financing on the west side of town,” which tells you this expansion is also about filling a geographic gap in the city’s funding setup, not just adding more dollars to an existing pipeline. So if the pipeline already has projects that are approved but can’t close financing, does putting more money into the Trust Fund just mean more projects get stuck one step later? That’s the tension to watch. More subsidy can get individual deals across the finish line, but if permitting timelines and construction costs don’t get fixed at the same time, the city could just build a bigger queue of fragile projects instead of more actual units. The Planning Department’s Affordable Housing Sites Analysis, which was just transmitted to the Board in October, is supposed to show how the land and zoning pieces fit with the financing question, so seeing that report in front of the Land Use Committee is a real tell about whether the city sees this as a systems problem or just a bigger check. Alyce McFadden, writing in San Francisco Chronicle:
San Francisco is taking a step toward opening a public bank, with time running out to move the plan forward. Supervisor Chyanne Chen will introduce a charter amendment at the Board of Supervisors meeting that would establish a municipal financial corporation, a precursor institution to a public bank.
Supervisor Chyanne Chen is introducing a charter amendment today to create what the Chronicle calls a “municipal financial corporation” — which is not the public bank itself, just a precursor institution. Alyce McFadden has the story. The theory is that this entity could eventually grow into a full public bank, something no contemporary American city has actually managed to pull off. And notice the vehicle: another charter amendment. That makes three moving through the Board at once — Muni governance, the public bank, and the Housing Trust Fund. At some point you have to ask whether that’s bold governance or just the Board reaching for the highest lever it can find every time it wants to restructure something. The stated goals are affordable housing funding, small business support, climate priorities — basically the city’s entire wish list inside one financial institution. And the experts quoted in the piece are pretty skeptical about whether it would actually work. A public bank that’s never been done in any modern American city, introduced the same week the city is writing an $8.5 million check to the zoo and announcing it needs a charter amendment to find affordable housing money — I’m not ضد creative financing, but “precursor institution” is doing a lot of work as a stand-in for a proven model. From SFGATE:
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a resolution Tuesday to allow the city to loan the San Francisco Zoo up to $8.5 million to keep it afloat amid its current fiscal crisis. The resolution, which was approved unanimously without discussion, grants the city's Recreation and Park Department the ability to enter into a loan agreement with the San Francisco Zoological Society, the nonprofit that operates the struggling zoo.
The full Board voted unanimously — no discussion — to authorize an $8.5 million loan to the SF Zoo through Rec and Park. The zoo is projecting a $12 million deficit over the next two years, and the city’s argument is that shutting it down would cost more than the bailout. Same week the city is holding a rally about needing a charter amendment to scrape together affordable housing money, the Board rubber-stamps $8.5 million for a zoo — unanimously, without discussion. I’m not saying the wolves don’t matter, but the silence in that chamber says plenty. To be precise, it’s a loan, not a grant — the Zoological Society is supposed to turn things around and pay it back. Whether that distinction really means much with a $12 million hole is a fair question. A loan to a nonprofit running a $12 million deficit is a check the city is writing and hoping it gets back. Let’s just call it what it is. This one's from Petrelis Files:
After consulting with the City Attorney, we have established a process for formally investigating this and future complaints regarding 1. The City Administrator will send a letter to the grantee informing them a complaint has been made, and asking for information to demonstrate compliance with the section.
This one comes from the Petrelis Files — Michael Petrelis filed a formal complaint with the General Services Agency saying the SF Host Committee, a nonprofit headed by Charlotte Shultz in her role as the Mayor’s Protocol Chief, has taken $250,000 a year from the city for six straight fiscal years without holding a single required public board meeting. That’s $1.5 million over six years, and the city’s own nonprofit sunshine law says any group hitting that quarter-million threshold has to hold at least two well-publicized open board meetings a year. The city is cutting a $250,000 check every year to a nonprofit whose board apparently never met in public — and this is the same week we’re debating a charter amendment to find affordable housing dollars. The difference in scrutiny is pretty hard to miss. Got a correction, a tip, or a story idea about San Francisco politics or urban life? Send it to sfdailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com. We’re always glad to hear what you’re seeing.
You’ll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can follow it there.
That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Wednesday, May 20th. This is a Lantern Podcast.