Voters just killed two business tax measures on the same night a senior housing building opened on Valencia Street and a vacant school in Chinatown finally turned on the lights — San Francisco, somehow, contains multitudes. I'm Cassidy, this is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily — Thursday, June fourth. Today we're ending the week with things that actually got built, races that actually landed, and the revenue hole those failed props just punched into Lurie's budget. And I'm Mark. The election-night story we had on Tuesday just picked up an asterisk — Lurie's allies won seats, but Props C and D both fell short, so the board math he got still doesn't come with a checkbook. We've got the Mission housing numbers, the Chinatown school story The Frisc broke, and Phil Kim's 63-to-25 margin. That's the whole board. Let's get into it. Here's Office of the Mayor:
SAN FRANCISCO – Mayor Daniel Lurie today celebrated the grand opening of 1633 Valencia, a new supportive housing community with 145 homes for older adults exiting homelessness and substantial onsite services and community‑focused amenities. The opening of 1633 Valencia builds on Mayor Lurie’s work to build more housing in San Francisco and make San Francisco more affordable for working families.
1633 Valencia is open — 145 units of supportive housing for seniors exiting homelessness, right there on Valencia Street in the Mission. This is the press-release version of the story, so we're taking the mayor's office at its word, but the ribbon is real and the building is real. And I'll take that. Monday we were talking about a Divisadero project that ran nearly a million dollars a unit — this release doesn't give us that kind of price tag, so I'm not going to fake precision here. But 145 seniors off the street on Valencia is a delivered result, not a pipeline projection. The line I keep coming back to is the one about the Housing Trust Fund expansion Lurie is pushing with District 7's Myrna Melgar. Props C and D both failed Tuesday, which means the revenue tools voters just rejected were probably part of how you'd capitalize something like that later. The building opened; the next one gets a lot harder to fund. Okay, so Lurie's allies had a big night — but San Francisco government is famously split across a million different bodies. How much does winning a couple supervisor races and some ballot measures actually move the needle for him? It moves it quite a bit, actually — just in a very specific structural way. The Board of Supervisors has eleven seats, and before Tuesday the math was close enough that Lurie's opponents were near the votes they needed to block him. Per the SF Standard, if his preferred candidates had lost, his foes could have picked up the votes they needed on the board to push back hard on his agenda. Both of his key allies — in districts covering the Sunset, Marina, and Pacific Heights — won, per the Chronicle, and that does materially solidify his working majority. On top of that, voters also backed ballot measures aligned with his vision, which gives him wins on multiple fronts at once — what the Standard called a "grand slam." Separate from the board, Lurie is also looking at a much bigger structural move: charter amendments being prepared for a future election that would let the mayor directly hire many city department heads, power he simply doesn't have today. What about the school district — because I know SFUSD is technically its own elected board, so does any of this actually reach classrooms? That's where his formal reach stops. The mayor doesn't run the school district, and as the Standard reported earlier this year, Lurie has very little actual control over SFUSD even when something like a teachers strike blows up in everyone's faces. The political question now is whether that charter reform push — giving mayors more direct hiring authority across city government — ever gets extended toward education or other independent bodies. That's the longer game, and November's ballot is the next real test of how far voters want to go. From Natalia Gurevich at San Francisco Examiner:
Two competing and controversial San Francisco business-tax measures were falling short as early results came in on Election Day. As of the ballot count released Tuesday at 9:45 p.m., 64% of voters had voted no on business-backed Prop. C, while 56.4% had voted no on labor unions’ Prop. D, which would hike The City’s Overpaid Executive Tax.
The Examiner's election-night scorecard: Props C and D — the dueling business-tax measures — both losing. Sixty-four percent no on the business-backed Prop C, fifty-six percent no on labor's Prop D, which would have expanded the Overpaid Executive Tax to pull in over three hundred million dollars. Voters killed both. So Lurie's allies swept supervisor seats, and voters shut both revenue doors at the same time. That's the governing math: you've got the board alignment, but the budget-gap fight from last week just got tighter. Public safety infrastructure sailed through at seventy-six percent, and the money to pay for the rest of it isn't coming. And that lands right on the three-week clock we've been tracking — advocates pushing back on the sixteen-point-nine billion Lurie budget before the Board of Supervisors votes. They were probably counting on one of these measures. Now neither one is there. Prop A passing is real — seventy-six percent for public-safety infrastructure is a mandate, not a rounding error. But a mandate doesn't write a check. Lurie has the votes and the goodwill; he just doesn't have the revenue tool. Here's Taylor Barton at The Frisc:
Like all California school districts, San Francisco’s public schools must serve all students who apply. But the San Francisco Unified School District, which has struggled with chronic teacher shortages, isn’t able to provide services to a small number of its special education students. The solution — busing dozens of kids out of town to private schools, sometimes three or four hours of travel a day — is disruptive for the students and families.
The Frisc has the story on Edwin and Anita Lee Newcomer School in Chinatown — a building that's been sitting empty for two years and is now becoming SFUSD's first dedicated special education campus. Sixteen kids move in this October, and another sixteen in 2027-28. I want to be honest about the scale here: 32 kids out of 160 being bused — some for up to four hours a day — is 20 percent. It's a real improvement from where things were, but eighty percent of those families are still watching their kid spend half a school day on a bus. And the October start date means those first 16 kids begin the year out of town anyway. That's a real crack in the ribbon-cutting narrative. But a vacant building turning into something specific and hard to argue with — that's worth naming alongside the SFUSD accountability questions we've been tracking since the algebra reversal and the Vidrale Franklin situation. The district now has a real win to point to. It doesn't end the accountability thread; it just changes the terms of it. Here's Mission Local:
Incumbent school board president Phil Kim celebrated a sweeping victory on Tuesday night: He led his closest rival for the seat, teachers union pick Virginia Cheung, 63 to 25. That will allow him to keep his seat, at least until the November general election. Kim’s seat, along with two others, will then be up for grabs again.
Phil Kim, board president, beats teachers union pick Virginia Cheung 63 to 25 — Mission Local has the full numbers. We were watching that race Tuesday night without the final margin; now we have it, and 63-to-25 is not a squeaker. Cheung was already outside City Hall with Connie Chan's congressional supporters while the votes were still coming in — that tells you exactly where the teachers union coalition thinks its future is. They're treating November as round two before round one is even cold. And the November general is real — Kim's seat goes back on the ballot then, along with two others. Today's Chinatown special-ed opening, broken by The Frisc, is exactly the kind of deliverable a reform-oriented board can point to between now and that rematch. If this briefing helps you stay on top of San Francisco politics and urban issues, consider subscribing wherever you're listening. And if you have a moment, leave a review — it helps other people find the show.
You'll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if one deserves a closer look, they're all there for you. That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for Thursday, June 4th. This is a Lantern Podcast.