Three documents land in today's rundown — a police staffing report, a state housing review, and a structural deficit analysis — and read together, they ask whether San Francisco can still afford to run basic city services. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. I'm Sarah, here with Mark, and today we're going under the headlines into the unglamorous plumbing — cop math, housing rules, and a budget that spends nineteen thousand dollars a resident. And all those numbers are connected. Pull one thread and the other two move. Let's start where voters actually put a stake in the ground — the SFPD staffing report. Right, and that report exists because of Prop E, which voters passed in November 2020. They removed the old charter-mandated staffing floor and swapped it for a report every two years — so this document is the tradeoff they agreed to. So when City Hall says we're short hundreds of officers — short compared to what? Budgeted positions? Nine-one-one demand? Response-time targets in SoMa and the Tenderloin? Those are wildly different questions with wildly different price tags. And that's why we're stepping back today. 'Hundreds short' is a headline. It only means something once you say short against which benchmark — and this report finally gives us a document to hold City Hall to. The honest worry is whether this Prop E report does anything. Voters wanted a forcing function. Filing a PDF to the Police Commission every two years doesn't force anything if response times never move. Then layer in the fiscal ceiling. SPUR's third installment — Closing the Structural Deficit — sits right next to the SF Blueprint budget explainer. Fifteen-point-nine billion dollars, nineteen grand per resident, and the analysts are saying the math doesn't close. So picture it — we can't afford housing at nine hundred forty-four thousand a unit on Divisadero, and now we're asking whether the city can hire its way to public safety inside that same broken budget. Same ceiling on both. And the state already weighed in. The HCD Housing Policy and Practice Review found San Francisco's permitting practices deficient — 'development by negotiation' is the phrase. We're not editorializing; California diagnosed it that way. This is the pattern I've been chasing all week, and today three documents finally put a name to it: if the city can't streamline housing permits under direct state pressure, what on earth makes anyone think it'll streamline a police hiring pipeline? So the frame shifts. For four days we asked whether SF can afford to build housing. Today the question gets bigger — can it afford to run the basics? Not alarmist. Just where the evidence points. And the working-class stakes don't change. The person waiting on a slow nine-one-one call in the Tenderloin doesn't care about budgeted headcount. They care whether someone shows up. That's the outcome these documents have to be measured against. Sunday's a good day to read the boring PDFs, folks. Stay with us — we'll walk through the staffing benchmarks and the HCD findings line by line. This one's from City & County of San Francisco Police Department:
In November 2020, San Francisco voters approved Proposition E, amending the City Charter to remove the previously established Police staffing baseline and requiring the Police Department to submit a report and recommendation on staffing levels every two years to the Police Commission for consideration when approving the Department’s budget. The purpose of this report is to determine and recommend baseline staffing levels for the San Francisco Police Department using rigorous, industry-reputed methodologies.
So the SFPD staffing analysis is out, dated June 30th, and before anyone throws around 'hundreds short' — here's what that number actually rests on. This report exists because of Prop E, which voters passed in November 2020. Prop E removed the old charter-mandated staffing floor — that's the 1994 Prop D baseline — and replaced it with this: a report to the Police Commission every two years, using a workload methodology driven by demand for service. No more number handed down from on high. They're supposed to earn it with math. And that's the part I keep circling — the methodology actually goes back to 2018, Resolution 63-17, a whole Staffing Task Force. So voters didn't just want a number; they wanted a process that ties officers to actual demand in places like SoMa and the Tenderloin, where response times bite. My question is whether the biennial report is doing its job or just getting filed. We've spent all week on the same pattern — the city has the mandate, the paperwork, the official buy-in, and then the process is where it dies. This is the closest thing SFPD has to a forcing function. Is it forcing anything? And that's the shift today, Mark — we've been asking whether SF can afford to build housing. The staffing report broadens it: can the city run basic services at all? $19,000 a resident, and we're still doing a study to figure out how many cops we need. Same fiscal ceiling on all of it. The structural deficit caps the housing pipeline, and it caps the hiring pipeline. You can't hire your way to public safety out of a budget that doesn't pencil — and the HCD review already told us this city negotiates everything instead of streamlining it. Permits or police, same culture. When City Hall says SFPD is 'hundreds of officers short,' short compared to what, exactly — and how would a regular San Franciscan even know whether a new hiring push is actually making things safer on the ground? Great question, because 'hundreds short' can mean a few different things, and officials don't always say which benchmark they're using. The most direct measure is budgeted positions — the number of sworn officers the Board of Supervisors has funded versus the number actually on the payroll — and per the San Francisco Chronicle, SFPD remains hundreds of officers short of recommended staffing levels even as hiring picks up. But the more revealing metric is response time by neighborhood, and that's where the data gets uncomfortable. A Chronicle analysis found that for medium- and low-priority calls, residents in the Tenderloin wait disproportionately long compared to the rest of the city. And Mission Local's analysis found Southern Station — that's SoMa — had response times for lower-priority calls that were as much as 55 percent slower than the citywide average over a six-month stretch, even though that district has some of the highest call volume in the city. On the sheriff's side, the staffing gap shows up in the budget another way: the department is projected to spend $60.2 million on overtime this fiscal year, 46 percent more than the $41.2 million the Board of Supervisors approved, according to a controller's report. So the shortage is real, but it's hitting specific neighborhoods hardest, and it's being papered over with expensive overtime instead of filled headcount. So if SFPD is announcing a big hiring surge right now, is that actually translating into more officers on the street in those slow-response neighborhoods, or is it still mostly recruits sitting in the academy? That's exactly the lag to watch. SFPD's interim chief announced in October that the department has run four academy classes in a row — the largest surge in five years — and, for the first time since 2020, there's a net positive increase in officers actually deployed on the street, per the department's own release. But recruits take months to complete training and get assigned, so residents should track response-time data by district, not academy enrollment numbers, as the real signal that the hiring push is working where it counts. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has the details on this one. Let's land the plane on this one. The state's Housing and Community Development department reviewed San Francisco's housing practices back in October 2023 — and for listeners, HCD is the agency that signs off on whether a city's housing element is legally compliant. Their verdict: a stack of inconsistencies with state law. And the phrase that jumps out is 'development by negotiation.' That's the diagnosis — SF doesn't permit housing so much as negotiate it, hearing by hearing, discretionary review by discretionary review. And that's the link across the whole week, Sarah. The Divisadero project on Tuesday penciled out at 944,000 dollars a unit. This HCD review tells you why — the state is describing a documented culture, not one rogue project. The state put that in writing. Publicly initiated discretionary review, CEQA games, public hearings as a veto — every one of those is a place where a working-family apartment goes to die. And the people who can afford to wait it out aren't the ones who needed the unit. From Hacker News (3 pts thread):
The City’s failure to implement the Required Actions will result in HCD initiating the process to revoke housing element compliance. Various consequences may apply if the City does not have a housing element in compliance with Housing Element Law, including ineligibility or delay in receiving certain state funds, referral to the California Office of the Attorney General, court-imposed financial penalties, the loss of local land use authority to a court-appointed agent, and the application of…
This Hacker News comment shows the teeth of the thing — non-compliance means more than a stern letter. We're talking ineligibility for state funds, referral to the Attorney General, court-imposed penalties, and the big one: loss of local land use authority to a court-appointed agent. A court-appointed agent. That's the seismic gun to the head this city only ever responds to. The whole week's argument is right there — SF has the money and the mandate, but it doesn't move until someone with statutory power forces it to streamline. And hold that against today's other numbers — a 15.9 billion dollar budget, 19,000 dollars per resident. The state's basically pointing at process as the bottleneck in a city spending that much. Nicole Neditch, writing in SPUR:
San Francisco is facing a fiscal crisis unlike any in its history. While economic downturns and budget shortfalls are not new to the city, the current budget deficit is different — it’s the result of structural imbalances and the reality that a return to the city’s previous revenue growth rate has not, and likely will not, materialize.
SPUR's third and final budget piece landed today, from their governance and economy policy director Nicole Neditch — and the headline word is 'structural.' You don't wait this one out. The revenue base that used to bail the city out isn't coming back. Right, and Neditch's whole framing is: stop patching the budget with one-time money. We've been balancing $16 billion budgets with reserves and federal sugar for years and calling it solved. For the listener — 'structural deficit' means the gap between what the city spends every year and what it reliably takes in, every year. One-time fixes don't touch it. They just move the problem to next June. And that's what connects it across the week: $19,000 per resident spent, a 34,000-person workforce, and we still can't staff SFPD or pencil out housing at $944K a unit. Under every one of these fights, the process eats the money before it reaches the street. From SF Blueprint:
San Francisco has one of the largest and most complex local budgets in the United States. With a $15.9 billion annual budget, a ~34,000-person City workforce, and spending of roughly $19,000 per resident, the scale of government here rivals that of entire states and even entire countries. Yet despite this enormous level of spending and years of rapid budget growth, many of the City's most pressing problems such as homelessness remain unresolved.
The SF Blueprint dropped a budget explainer today, and the numbers do the talking: a $15.9 billion annual budget, a workforce around 34,000, and spending of roughly $19,000 per resident. For context — that's per-resident spending that outpaces a lot of entire states. The Blueprint's question is what that buys, with a projected deficit north of a billion dollars by 2030. And this is what ties the whole week together. We spent days asking whether SF can afford affordable housing at $944K a unit on Divisadero, and whether it can hire its way out of the SFPD staffing gap. Both fights hit the same ceiling. Nineteen grand a resident and homelessness is still the headline problem they can't crack. The money's there. The process eats it before it reaches anybody. And put this next to the SPUR structural deficit piece — when Props C and D failed in November, that revenue tool never materialized. Now the math doesn't pencil, and the Blueprint's saying it openly. This is the capstone, Sarah. The mandate passes, the voters want the outcome, and then the money isn't there — because the city's machinery is broken. Got a story idea, a correction, or something you think we should be watching in San Francisco politics and urbanism? Send us a note at sfdailyfix at lantern podcasts dot com.
You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, you can dig into the original reporting there.
That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.