Today's headline: San Francisco reform crunch — cops, housing, and a budget reckoning Welcome to San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Here's 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.
That's the document underneath the whole staffing fight — SFPD's own Proposition E analysis, dated June 30th. Prop E is the 2020 charter amendment voters passed that scrapped the old fixed officer minimum and told the department to study and recommend staffing levels every two years. Right, and the irony is, the old number they killed off came from a 1994 Prop D charter amendment. So we've spent thirty years arguing over whether to count cops by a fixed number or by workload. And the methodology matters here. It's a workload model, based on actual demand for police service, not some round number somebody picked. It traces through Resolution 63-17, the Board and the Commission, back to a 2018 task force. Okay, but here's my problem, Sarah. We've got a rigorous biennial report that lands every two years on the Commission's desk. Does anyone actually have to act on it, or does it just get filed and admired? Police1 writes:
SAN FRANCISCO —The city of San Francisco has issued an Executive Directive aimed at tackling severe staffing shortages in the city’s Police Department and Sheriff’s Office, both operating at historically low levels. The San Francisco Police Department is short more than 500 officers from the recommended 2,074 full-duty personnel, according to the directive.
Okay, here's the part that grabs me — the Executive Directive talks about rehiring retired officers and reassessing overtime and special duty assignments. It reads like an admission that the pipeline can't fill 700 seats fast enough. And per Police1, that 700 is combined — police and sheriff together. So before anyone runs with that number, we don't have the split yet. SFPD's short by one chunk, the Sheriff's Office by another, and the fixes don't necessarily map evenly across both. Right, and rehiring retirees is the tell. You bring people back precisely because the front of the funnel — recruit, academy, street — takes years. This is a stopgap dressed up as a strategy. The staffing analysis we just hit basically diagnosed this. I want to know whether “putting more officers on patrol” means reallocating bodies you already have, or actually closing the gap. Those are very different claims. And reassessing overtime — that's the controller's $60.2 million headache from last week. If you backfill with retirees and OT instead of new hires, you don't fix the bleed, you just rename it. Here's Coblentz Law:
To reduce financial roadblocks to “pipeline,” or already approved but unbuilt residential projects, and to incentivize new projects, the legislation would temporarily reduce inclusionary housing requirements and would reduce and reform other City development impact fees, including through reactivation of a dormant impact fee deferral program.
Okay, here it is — the Housing Fee Reform Plan. Breed and Peskin temporarily cut inclusionary requirements and reform the impact fees to get the pipeline projects unstuck. This is the first actual lever I've seen all week instead of another report. Right, and let's be precise about what “inclusionary” means — it's the share of below-market units a developer has to include to get the project approved. So the pitch is: lower that bar, and the approved-but-unbuilt towers finally start pouring concrete. And the backdrop is brutal — the state's told San Francisco to produce 82,000 units in eight years. You don't hit that number with projects that pencil out at a loss and just sit there approved. But here's my honest question, Mark — does lowering inclusionary actually speed production, or does it just hand market-rate developers a subsidy and quietly shrink the affordable count? The California Department of Housing and Community Development is tracking all of this. Here's the thing about this HCD review — it dropped in October 2023, and we're sitting here in June of 2026 finally watching the city introduce a bill to touch inclusionary requirements. That's the response time. Two and a half years. And for anyone joining mid-stream — this is the state Department of Housing and Community Development's formal review of how San Francisco actually permits housing. They went line by line through CEQA misuse, discretionary review, the public-hearing process. The phrase the state used — and I want to attribute this, it's HCD's, not ours — was public hearings and “development by negotiation.” Every project becomes a deal you cut at the hearing instead of a thing you're allowed to build. Right, and the Coblentz piece we hit earlier — the fee reform bill — is supposed to answer that exact diagnosis. So here's the test: does cutting impact fees fix the negotiation culture HCD flagged, or does it just lower the affordable unit count while the same hearing gauntlet stays standing? Hacker News (3 pts thread), weighing in:
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…
There it is — “loss of local land use authority to a court-appointed agent.” That's the forcing function. That's the only sentence in this whole document with teeth, and the city knows it. And note the menu before you get there: ineligibility for state funds, AG referral, financial penalties. The court-appointed agent is the last resort, not the opening move. But that's the pattern, Sarah. Nothing in this town moves on the menu items. It moves when somebody puts a deadline and an outside agent on the table — that's what unsticks things. So is this inclusionary bill the city moving on its own, or just moving before HCD makes it? 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.
Okay, this is Part 3 — Neditch's whole series has been building to one line, and here it is: stop closing the gap with one-time money. That's the verdict. Nicole Neditch is SPUR's Governance and Economy Policy Director — and for the listener, SPUR is the local urban-policy think tank. Part 1 was the budget process, Part 2 was revenues versus expenditures. Today's the one that's supposed to actually name solutions. And does it? Because “stop relying on one-time sources” diagnoses the problem; it doesn't pull a lever. After Props C and D both went down, what's the actual mechanism to close it — a tax, a cut, what? That's the test, isn't it. We've spent the week documenting the hole. SPUR calling it “structural” rather than cyclical is the claim — meaning the old revenue base isn't coming back, so you can't wait it out. Right, and that connects straight to the hiring story we just hit — 700 police and sheriff vacancies. You can't staff your way to safety inside a budget that structurally doesn't balance. SPUR is saying the floor itself is tilted. My worry is SPUR's series ends on “difficult choices ahead” instead of an ask. If Part 3 doesn't put a number on the cut or the new revenue, it's three parts of framing and zero parts spine. And here's what I keep coming back to — every real fix in this city lately needed a forcing function. A court deadline, a state mandate. Does SPUR think the Board closes a structural deficit voluntarily? I've got doubts. If you're following these local stakes, you might also like California Governor's Race — daily 2026 coverage of candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy beyond the horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
You'll find links to all of today's stories in the show notes, if you want to dig further into any of the reporting we mentioned.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.