Cops, homes, and fewer fees — three reform fronts, and today we finally get to ask City Hall what it actually did with the paperwork. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. I'm Sarah, here with Mark. The SFPD staffing analysis dated June 30th is now in front of the Police Commission as a Prop E deliverable. And I've been waiting all week to stop asking whether that report would land and start asking whether it changes a single deployment in the Tenderloin. We've also got the mayor backing a fee-waiver extension for small businesses — Local News Matters broke that — plus a SPUR primer on where SF actually needs to allow homes. Let's start with the cops. So the Chronicle's step-back piece does the thing I've wanted somebody to do — it says out loud that if you can't hire fast enough, somebody eats the triage cut. And the Tenderloin response-time problem is the sharpest. Right, and Prop E — if you're just tuning in, that's the 2024 measure requiring SFPD to file a workload-based staffing analysis every two years. This is the first real one. And it finally separates the numbers — budgeted positions, sworn officers, and who's actually deployable. So when somebody says we're short, we can ask: short against what? That's the part I want the Commission held to. The report separates officers on patrol from positions on a spreadsheet, so 'more cops on the street' has to mean one of those things, not both at once. And if the answer is reallocate, then say which neighborhoods absorb the loss. Because it's always the same zip codes, and the report basically admits it. Let's turn to the money. The mayor's backing an extension of startup fee waivers — while the city's staring at a billion-dollar gap by 2030. Mark, smart policy or feel-good? Here's what grabs me — this is Lurie's first concrete move since Props C and D both went down at the ballot. Voters just said no to revenue, and the response is to waive more of it. I mean, waiving startup fees and projecting a deficit aren't automatically a contradiction — small-business formation can be exactly the bet you make when downtown's still soft. Sure, if it's a bet. But then show the math. C and D failed, the gap is real, and 'fewer fees for the corner store' makes a great photo op. It doesn't close a billion-dollar hole. Fair. And it's a small number against that gap, so I'd want the dollar figure on the table before I call it either way. On housing, SPUR's primer gets past the slogan and asks where SF actually needs to put the homes. Which is the right question. The state's HCD review already told SF its own permitting process blocks housing. SPUR's now naming geography. So does the Housing Element actually reflect that, or does it get admired and filed? Exactly — get past 'streamline the process' as a slogan and name the neighborhoods and parcels that are choking things off. SPUR's Erika McLitus puts a map under the diagnosis we've been circling. And the tell will be whether the zoning changes show up before HCD forces them, or after. Self-correction versus compliance theater — that's the whole ballgame. Three documents, three places to hold someone accountable. The reading week's over — now it's the doing week. We'll be tracking what the Commission and City Hall actually move. 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.
So here it is — the actual document: the SFPD Staffing Analysis, dated June 30th, 2025. This is the formal Prop E deliverable. Every two years, the department has to hand the Police Commission a staffing recommendation built on real methodology. And the key word here is workload. Back in 2018, the Board and the Commission, through Resolution 63-17, told SFPD to stop using the old 1994 Prop D fixed number and size the force around actual demand for police service. That's the benchmark now. Right, and Prop E in 2020 ripped the fixed baseline out of the Charter entirely. So for years we've argued about whether the department is "short" — but compared with what? Now we finally have the city's own answer: measured demand, not a number somebody picked in '94. But a report is just paper until the Commission acts on it. They have to weigh this when they approve the budget. I care less about admiring the methodology and more about whether anyone downstream actually deploys around it. And that's the line I want to hold them to. The document is the floor now. Did the Commission approve these baseline numbers, or did they admire the binder and move on? If San Francisco can't just hire its way out of the police staffing shortage fast enough, then what does SFPD stop doing, dial back, or hand off to someone else — and what does that mean for people waiting on a 911 call? This is the tension. SFPD is short-staffed. Response times have improved since their 2023 peak, but they're still wildly uneven: in the Chronicle's analysis, people in the Tenderloin and SoMa wait roughly twice as long as other neighborhoods for medium- and low-priority calls. Southern Station's response times for those lower-priority calls were about 55 percent slower than the rest of the city over a recent six-month stretch, even with District 6 among the highest call volumes. And the budget doesn't leave much room for a hiring surge. Police and fire contracts together run roughly a billion dollars a year — about 39 percent of the city's discretionary budget, according to SPUR — and a new tentative Police Officers Association contract adds a 14 percent raise over four years on top of an existing $877 million deficit. So the practical call is: which calls need a sworn officer? Right now SFPD handles everything from violent crimes to welfare checks to concert security. The city has started moving some of that last category out — up to 100 retired officers for events and homeless shelters — but that's still triage; it doesn't add up to a strategy. You mentioned SoMa specifically — is that a case where some alternative response is already being tried, or is that neighborhood basically just absorbing the shortage? Mostly absorbing it. Residents there have been vocal — calling parts of West SoMa a de facto 'containment zone,' where private outreach workers are filling gaps sworn officers aren't. That's a community paying for workarounds because the official system isn't keeping up. What I'd watch now is whether the city ties any contract or budget decision to an explicit triage framework, with the call types that get a non-sworn response spelled out. Right now, a lot of this is default reallocation, with no real design behind it. Here's Erika McLitus at SPUR:
The State of California has determined that San Francisco’s current zoning regulations will not allow enough housing construction to meet the state-set target of 82,069 new homes in the city by 2031. San Francisco must make changes to its zoning rules by January 2026 to comply with state law.
SPUR's Erika McLitus lays out the number we keep circling — 82,069 new homes the state wants San Francisco to allow by 2031, with zoning rules due to change by this coming January. And the sharper turn in her primer is geography. The target is 82,069 homes, but state law also says you can't hit it by locking in segregation. Where the homes go is the policy. Right, and that's the part everybody dodges. It's easy to say, 'build more.' It's hard to say, 'build more on this block, in this neighborhood that's been saying no for forty years.' McLitus is basically calling the bluff: a housing plan that only upzones parcels nobody fights over is paper compliance. Which is a tougher ask than the process critique we've been chewing on all week. 'Fix the permitting' is one thing. 'Name the chokepoint parcels' is another. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has the details on this one. This is the HCD review — the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the state's housing watchdog. In October 2023, they put San Francisco's whole planning process under the microscope and found it inconsistent with state housing law. And right there in the table of contents — "Public Hearings and Development by Negotiation." The state literally named the disease two and a half years ago. The SPUR primer we hit earlier tells you where the homes need to go; this tells you why they don't get built. Right — SPUR points at the parcels, HCD points at the process. I keep coming back to whether the city's own Housing Element actually answers what's in this document, or just files it next to the other binders. That's my fear. With a finding this blunt — historic inequities in zoning, CEQA misused locally — the test is whether anyone changed a single hearing because of it. From Hacker News:
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…
And here's the teeth. If San Francisco doesn't comply, HCD can revoke housing element status — losing state funds, triggering an AG referral, facing court penalties, even handing land-use authority to a court-appointed agent. A judge zoning San Francisco instead of the Planning Commission. Honestly, for some parcels that might be the only forcing function that's ever worked. That's the local-control argument eating itself — you protect every neighborhood veto until the state takes the whole pen away. The threat's been on the table since 2023; the live question is whether City Hall believes it. Local News Matters writes:
A program to help spur the creation of small businesses in San Francisco that is set to expire this summer could be extended another year after receiving backing from Mayor Daniel Lurie.
So here's Lurie's first concrete move since Props C and D both went down at the ballot: backing an extension of First Year Free, which waives registration, license, and permit fees for a new business's first year, per Local News Matters. Which is a fascinating thing to choose, given we've spent all week on a billion-dollar gap by 2030. You're waiving revenue while projecting you don't have enough of it. Right, but let's be honest about the scale — this is small-dollar. A bakery skipping its first-year permit fee doesn't blow a hole in a fifteen-point-nine billion budget. The question is whether it's the right lever or just a ribbon-cutting feel-good that dodges the 'what replaces C and D' problem. And I'd actually defend it on those terms. Fees that scare off a corner store owner are a rounding error to the city but a real barrier at the storefront. If it fills a vacant space, the city can collect more later than it waived now. Fine — that's the case for it. But I want to see the vacancy numbers before I call it strategy. Otherwise it's a nice press release while the how-do-you-pay-for-it question from the ballot losses sits there unanswered. If you're tracking San Francisco politics, 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 all of today's stories in the show notes, so if one caught your ear, you can follow it there and read a little deeper.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Tuesday, June 9th. This is a Lantern Podcast.