San Francisco Targets the Shadow Veto — and, yes, we mean that literally. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today we're untangling how California law treats shade the same way it treats contaminated soil — and there's a parking lot at 469 Stevenson Street with 495 unbuilt units that basically tells the whole story. We've also got the Bay Area's first structured transit efficiency report under SB 63, and I have questions about whether "a billion in savings" is a real number or just a press release with better tailoring. And Dog Court is back — which sounds like a punchline, until you realize there's a real public-safety story underneath it. From Allison Arieff at San Francisco Chronicle:
Last week, San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood introduced legislation to stop the weaponization of shade in the city. His Slashing Housing Appeals & Delays Everywhere (or SHADE) Act would streamline environmental review procedures that go beyond state requirements — by removing shadows cast by buildings as a criterion for local CEQA review and as a basis for environmental appeals.
Allison Arieff has a piece in the Chronicle today that I really want people to hear: under CEQA — the California Environmental Quality Act — shade from a building gets classified the same way as toxic soil. Same bucket. Same basis for an environmental appeal. And this isn't hypothetical. 469 Stevenson Street — the former Nordstrom valet parking lot in South of Market — is still a parking lot because a shadow appeal killed 495 units of housing. So if you're wondering where the structural blockage went, it went straight to a parking lot in SoMa. Supervisor Bilal Mahmood introduced legislation last week called the SHADE Act — Slashing Housing Appeals and Delays Everywhere — and it would knock shadow impacts out of local CEQA review entirely. Since 2017, shade appeals have delayed or killed eleven projects totaling 2,195 units citywide. We spent two days this week asking whether the Housing Trust Fund expansion would actually produce units or just build a bigger pile of stalled projects. Here's the answer: you can fund them all you want, and one neighbor with a lawyer and a shadow complaint can still stall the whole thing for years. The subsidy was never the missing piece. A billion dollars in savings sounds great on paper — but how do we actually know whether these transit agencies got leaner, or whether they just kicked repairs down the road, ran fewer trains, and burned through emergency COVID money? That skepticism is exactly the right instinct here. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission just transmitted a draft Phase 1 efficiency report — required under state Senate Bill 63, the Connect Bay Area Act — covering AC Transit, BART, Caltrain, and SFMTA, and the headline is that those four agencies have collectively saved around a billion dollars since 2020. But the picture underneath that is much messier. Per KQED, the big question is whether those savings are actually sustainable. SPUR's transportation policy team has flagged that the four largest operators are still looking at a structural hole of more than 800 million dollars a year once pandemic-era federal relief runs out, so part of what looks like discipline may just be one-time federal money hiding a deeper cost problem. And then BART's board voted earlier this year on a worst-case contingency plan that included a more than 60 percent service reduction, elimination of the Red and Green lines, and ending service at 9 p.m. — so no, the savings haven't closed the gap. Nationally, the Eno Center for Transportation says transit ridership is still roughly 20 percent below 2019 levels, which means agencies are running leaner partly because fewer people are riding. So if the federal relief money has been holding the floor up, what happens when that runs out? Didn't the state just step in with emergency cash? Governor Newsom did sign a 590 million dollar emergency bridge loan earlier this year specifically to prevent immediate station closures and service slashing — but a loan is a delay, not a fix. The Phase 1 efficiency report and the ballot measure heading toward November are the things to watch: if the ballot measure fails and the structural funding gap isn't closed, those worst-case BART scenarios come right back. From Marin County Visitor:
Steven Betz, the city’s public safety chief, told a Board of Supervisors committee that San Francisco plans to bring back the hearings that deal with vicious and dangerous dogs. The Department of Police Accountability put the court on pause in July 2025 after losing its hearing officer and facing budget cuts. That decision left 66 cases in limbo, with another 15 under SFPD review.
Dog Court is back. Steven Betz, the city's public safety chief, told a Board of Supervisors committee that San Francisco is reviving its Vicious and Dangerous Dog hearings — the Department of Police Accountability suspended them last July after losing a hearing officer and taking budget cuts, leaving 66 cases in limbo. Sixty-six cases in limbo for nearly a year, and the story buries the lead: the people left with nowhere to turn during that backlog were disproportionately unhoused residents. Getting bitten with no enforcement mechanism to call is not a minor inconvenience — it's a public-safety gap that landed on the people least able to absorb it. It's also a useful parallel to something we've been tracking all week — what happens when a city system just quietly goes dark. The RESET Center, now Dog Court. Once the mechanism lapses, the cost doesn't disappear; it just lands on whoever can't advocate for themselves. From Steven Greenhut at Pacific Research Institute:
But a lot has changed in the last few years, It’s not an exaggeration to conclude the city has self-corrected to a noticeable degree. San Francisco will be San Francisco, so there’s always plenty to criticize and lots of sideshows.
Pacific Research Institute — that's a Sacramento-based free-market think tank, so not exactly a source that goes out of its way to praise San Francisco — published a piece Friday calling the city a case of genuine self-correction under Lurie. Author Steven Greenhut, who has spent years cataloguing SF's policy failures, is now saying the turnaround is real. Look, when PRI is writing your victory lap, you've moved the needle somewhere. Greenhut's been dunking on this city since the Happy Meal ban in 2010 — and he name-checks Boudin, plus the school board renaming schools instead of teaching kids. That's the baseline he's using, and by that baseline, yeah, we've moved. I'd just note we've been asking all week whether the reform narrative is holding up structurally or just getting repackaged. PRI calling it real is one data point — but Steven Greenhut is praising the direction, and direction isn't delivery. That's exactly the right tension. The Board of Supervisors is still reaching for charter amendments as its default move even as the mayor is going the other way — so if the city is self-correcting, why does the Board keep trying to rewrite the operating system? Outside validation of the turnaround makes that friction sharper, not softer. If you're tracking 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.
You'll find links to all the stories we mentioned today in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can go straight to the source.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.