Sixteen billion dollars on the table, a 22% rent spike behind us, and now the school board president's job is suddenly in play. Lurie's reform era just hit a wall. This is SF Politics and Urbanism Daily — I'm Cassidy, Mark's here, and Mission Local finally dropped the full budget ledger on us. So now we're out of rumor land and into the line items. Yeah, and I want to know whether this so-called shared sacrifice is actually shared, or whether it lands, like usual, on the same neighborhoods that already got hammered last cycle. We've also got Lurie's chief of staff pick changing in the middle of the budget fight, Alo looking at a flagship here, and Phil Kim's school board race. It all comes back to one question: is the reform coalition holding together, or starting to split? Here's Mission Local:
Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposed budget for the next two years will drop sometime before June 1, and with it the mayor’s vision for how San Francisco will close a projected $607 million deficit. Cutting $607 million over the next two years isn’t going to be easy — Lurie has warned of “painful cuts” ahead — but it’s still a fraction of what the city spends in a given budget cycle.
Mission Local gets direct credit here — they pulled together the actual guide to San Francisco's full $16 billion budget, and that's the document we've been waiting on all week. So the headline is $16 billion in spending against a $607 million gap. Six hundred and seven million on a $16 billion base is under four percent. And you can usually guess where that pain lands: not on the departments with lobbyists in the room, but on nonprofit contracts and social services. That's the part the Mission Local guide finally lets us see instead of guess at — which line items got cut and which ones got protected. Free City College and shelter beds were the early ones flagged this week. Lurie campaigned like the budget would show who the city actually has to work for — working people, not just the tech corridor. This is the first receipt. If Free City got cut and shelter math barely moved, that's the same neighborhoods taking the same hit again. Okay, so SF is in this big YIMBY reform moment — less red tape, more building — and rents are still rocketing. What's actually pushing that, and can the city do anything about it on a real timeline? Yeah, it's a messy picture. Demand has outrun reform-era supply by a mile. San Francisco is now the fastest-growing rental market in the country — median one-bedroom rents hit $3,156 in January, year-over-year growth was 13.3% per Apartment List, and Zumper has it even higher. A big chunk of that demand is AI-sector hiring bringing waves of new workers into the city, which Mission Local has been tracking closely. Meanwhile, the construction pipeline basically dried up; the Chronicle reported in December that despite all those new renters, very few new homes got built to absorb them. The city does have rent control, which caps annual increases at 1.6% for covered tenants under the Rent Ordinance, per SF.gov. But under Costa-Hawkins, a 1995 state law, landlords can reset the rent when a unit turns over to a new tenant. So that 22% spike you're talking about hits the people trying to get in now, not the long-timers already protected. So if the city just went hard on rezoning tomorrow, would that actually get rents back to something livable in any reasonable window? Not quickly, and the city's own numbers say so. The city controller found that even San Francisco's most ambitious upzoning plan would only cut rents by about $75 to $125 a month in a best-case scenario, and it would produce less than half the units the state wants. A newer study, covered by the SF Standard, went even further: at current rates, it could take about a century for supply-side YIMBY policy alone to deliver real affordability. So the thing to watch isn't just which bills Sacramento passes — it's whether shovels actually hit the ground, and how fast. Ezra Wallach, writing in San Francisco Standard:
With a June 2 special election approaching, Kim and two other candidates are asking voters to decide who should hold that seat. San Francisco Unified has significant problems — third-grade reading proficiency has slid to 47% against a target of 70%, roughly 35% of city families have fled to private schools, and 14,000 seats sit empty across district campuses.
Here's KRON4:
Alo is planning to open a store in an affluent San Francisco neighborhood, according to city documents. The athleisure giant has submitted the paperwork to open at 2071 Union St. in the Cow Hollow neighborhood. Alo takes over the 3,485-square-foot space currently occupied by outdoor apparel retailer KÜHL.
Alo Yoga is filing permits for 2071 Union Street in Cow Hollow — that's the same corridor where Lululemon and Vuori already have stores. So this isn't a speculative bet on SF recovery; it's a brand looking at a proven retail strip and saying the math works. Remember, Alo had five Bay Area locations — Burlingame, Walnut Creek, Corte Madera, Palo Alto, Santa Clara — and skipped San Francisco entirely. That's not an accident, that's a risk call. The fact that they're filing now is basically a retailer voting with its lease deposit. The permit is still under review with SF Planning, so it's not done yet. But the filing itself matters. Cow Hollow on Union Street isn't a distressed corridor, so the question is whether this tells us anything about the blocks that actually need a signal. Cow Hollow was never the doom-loop story — Mid-Market and the Tenderloin were. But premium brands follow foot traffic and safety perception, and if Alo's underwriters signed off on Union Street, that confidence has to be coming from somewhere real. Here's J.D. Morris at San Francisco Chronicle:
Aly Bonde, Lurie’s deputy chief of staff who has helped steer his policy agenda during his campaign and at City Hall, will succeed Slaughter as the mayor’s most senior adviser. Bonde’s current role will be filled by Adam Thongsavat, who is now the mayor’s liaison to the Board of Supervisors.
Chronicle reporter J.D. Morris broke this one: Aly Bonde, Lurie's deputy chief of staff, is moving up to replace Staci Slaughter. Bonde has been steering the policy agenda since the campaign, so this isn't an outside hire — it's a promotion from inside the same machine right as the Board of Supervisors is about to push back on the budget cuts. And the other move that matters is Adam Thongsavat — currently the mayor's liaison to the Board of Supervisors — sliding into Bonde's deputy role. So the person who knows where every supervisor's body is buried just got elevated. Mid-budget-season, that is not random. That answers one question we had all week: who's actually running the room when the Board starts negotiating? It's someone who came up through this administration, not a lateral hire from outside. Whether that means continuity or an echo chamber is the live issue now. If you track local power and policy here, you might 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.
Links to everything we talked about today are in the show notes, so if a story stuck with you, you can head there and read more from the original reporting. That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.