A 761,000-square-foot hospital permit, a unanimous demolition clearance, and a new downtown liquor license zone — San Francisco just had one of those weeks where things actually got built and approved. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. I'm Sarah. We’re wrapping a week that started with housing math and budget gaps and ends with permits, classrooms, and a confirmed revenue hole — and we’re going to connect the dots. I'm Mark. Props C and D are officially trailing — the San Mateo Daily Journal, citing Bay City News, has the actual numbers — and that means Lurie's budget problem just went from shaky to locked in. And along with that, we’ve got a new SFUSD special ed site that actually opened. We’ll take the win where we can get it. Let’s start with Kaiser. Chris Malone Méndez, writing in The Real Deal:
Kaiser Permanente has recently filed permits for a proposed replacement hospital in San Francisco’s Anza Vista neighborhood. The Oakland-based health care system is looking to replace its 1954-built San Francisco Medical Center campus at 2190 O’Farrell Street with a new 266-foot-tall hospital and accompanying parking garage across the street from its current location at 2425 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco YIMBY reported.
Kaiser Permanente just filed permits for a 761,000-square-foot replacement hospital in Anza Vista — 266 feet tall, more than 300 inpatient beds, a full emergency center, all at 2425 Geary across from its current 1954-built campus on O'Farrell. The Real Deal had the story, and SF YIMBY broke the footprint details first. And the timing isn’t just Kaiser wanting to grow — SB 1953, the state seismic upgrade law with a 2030 deadline, requires acute-care hospitals to meet new structural standards or close. That 1954 building is the whole story. An earthquake law with a hard deadline is what got 761,000 square feet moving through the SF permit pipeline, and now it’s actually moving. Meanwhile, publicly subsidized affordable housing at 650 Divisadero is sitting at $944,000 a unit and still just in the permit stage — no seismic gun to anyone’s head, no deadline, just the process grinding along. Kaiser had a forcing function. The affordable pipeline doesn’t. To be fair, those two projects aren’t perfectly comparable. Kaiser is a private health system with its own capital stack, not waiting on tax credit allocations or state bond rounds. Still, the contrast is hard to miss: when there’s a statutory clock and a private actor with money, 3.5 acres in Anza Vista gets a 12-story parking structure with five basement levels. That’s not nothing in a city that can spend years permitting a four-unit building. From Aldo Toledo at San Francisco Chronicle:
The developer can now move ahead with figuring out how to redevelop the long-derelict building, known to many residents as the Coit Liquors building. Previous plans have included housing, retail space and a rooftop restaurant.
The Board of Appeals voted unanimously on May 20th to clear the emergency demolition of the Verdi Building at 659 Union Street in North Beach — that’s the old Coit Liquors building facing Washington Square Park. It’s been gutted since a 2018 fire, so we’re talking about eight years of blight right on Columbus Avenue. Unanimous. Not four-to-one, not squeaking through — unanimous. The Board of Appeals is finally admitting that “historically significant” and “actively falling down” do not belong in the same preservation argument. The historic-preservation-versus-practical-need tension I’ve been flagging all week just got its cleanest case study. The earlier plans for the site included housing, retail, and a rooftop restaurant — so no, the developer isn’t just clearing it for a parking lot. But we’re still at the figuring-out-how-to-redevelop stage, which means the permit pipeline question is wide open. It took a collapsing building to move the bureaucracy. That’s the honest headline. And then Kaiser files 761,000 square feet in Anza Vista because a state earthquake deadline gave them no choice. In both cases, it wasn’t good governance that unlocked the project — it was a deadline or a disaster. Alise Maripuu, writing in San Mateo Daily Journal:
Two dueling business tax measures in San Francisco — Propositions C and D — are both lagging behind the necessary majority each needs in order to pass, early results showed Tuesday night. Prop D, or the “Overpaid CEO Salary Tax,” proposes to increase tax rates of large businesses and corporations through changing the city’s tax structure as a way to increase revenue for the city.
Bay City News, picked up by the San Mateo Daily Journal — not an SF outlet — is where the numbers got pinned down: 55% of ballots rejecting Prop D, 64% rejecting Prop C. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a rout on both sides of the business-tax debate. And that closes the loop we left open Tuesday night. Lurie’s $16.9 billion budget now has a confirmed hole where those revenue tools were supposed to go — not a projected hole, a locked-in one. The three-week clock before the Board votes just got a lot less theoretical. Worth noting: these were competing measures — if both had somehow passed, the higher vote-getter would have prevailed. But voters rejected Prop C so hard, 64% against, that the business community’s own counter-proposal got buried worse than the thing it was meant to stop. That’s the part downtown should feel. You ran a rival measure to kill the CEO tax, and you lost by a wider margin than the CEO tax itself. You didn’t just fail to win — you showed voters had less patience for your framing than for the progressive one. Figure that out before the next budget cycle. From James Salazar at San Francisco Examiner:
The San Francisco Unified School District and the San Francisco County Office of Education will expand special education services in the next academic year with a new program serving students in the fifth through 12th grades who have extensive support needs.
The SF Examiner’s James Salazar has the full story — and this one actually closes a loop The Frisc opened earlier this week. SFUSD and the SF County Office of Education are launching a new special ed program for fifth through twelfth graders with autism and intellectual disabilities, housed in the Edwin and Anita Lee Building in Chinatown. Kids with IEPs who are currently in non-public schools — meaning the district has been paying private placement costs — now have a public option with academic, behavioral, and social-emotional support in one building. That is a delivered result. Superintendent Maria Su can actually point to a classroom. Worth flagging: this is the County Office of Education partnering with SFUSD, not SFUSD acting alone — and that joint structure matters when the district’s budget is already under pressure from Props C and D both failing. After a week of SFUSD stories where I kept asking, “but what did they actually build?” — this is the answer. A building, a grade band, a population served. That’s the bar, and they cleared it. Here's James Salazar at The San Francisco Examiner:
A proposed San Francisco law would make it easier for businesses to open around Union Square and the Moscone Center convention halls. The Board of Supervisors Rules Committee this week unanimously advanced Mayor Daniel Lurie’s proposal with a positive recommendation. It would create a hospitality zone allowing The City to issue up to 12 new on-sale general liquor licenses for new bars and restaurants.
The Examiner’s James Salazar has the Rules Committee unanimously advancing Lurie’s proposal to create a hospitality zone around Union Square and Moscone — twelve new on-sale general liquor licenses for new bars and restaurants. Quick explainer: this isn’t a standard zoning designation. A hospitality zone is a state-authorized carve-out that lets the city issue licenses above California’s hard cap of one per two thousand residents — a cap San Francisco has been over for eighty years. Twelve licenses. Union Square to Moscone. I’ll take it. But let’s be honest: this is downtown-first policy at the exact moment the city just voted down two tax measures and the budget hole is real. If the theory is that a dozen new bars revive the convention corridor, that theory needs a number attached to it, not just a unanimous committee vote. Worth flagging: we covered Dorsey’s corner-store legislation earlier this week, and that was partly about concentrations of alcohol retail in residential neighborhoods. The hospitality zone is the opposite move — deliberately concentrating new licenses in a commercial corridor. Those two policies pull in different directions, and the Board hasn’t publicly reconciled them. If you’re tracking local politics 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.
We’ve put links to the reporting behind each story in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can take a closer look there.
That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. Enjoy your Friday, and thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.