SoMa residents walked into a city hearing and called their own neighborhood a de facto containment zone — to SFPD's face. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily, Wednesday the tenth. Today: what SFPD command actually said back to those residents, where housing permits get expensive after zoning has already cleared, and a quiet Ethics Commission policy worth knowing about. All week it's been PDFs and biennial reports. Today it's a room full of neighbors on the mic. Finally. And credit where it's due — Mission Local was in that room and broke the hearing coverage. So let's start there. SoMa residents pressed SFPD on response times — that's the Southern Station data we've been citing all week, now with faces attached. Right, and here's what I want answered: did command respond to the 'containment zone' characterization directly, or just fall back on staffing numbers? If the biennial staffing methodology were actually driving deployment, those residents wouldn't be at City Hall in 2026 demanding answers. The report got filed. The street didn't change. That's basically the accountability moment Prop E's staffing report was supposed to create — Prop E being the 2024 measure that tied police hiring and tech use to performance reporting. The report exists. Now the public is testing it. And I want to hear one thing command told those neighbors that lines up with the staffing document. Show me the connection. Let's move to the Step Back segment, because this one finally gets granular: not 'cut red tape' as a slogan, but where a project slows down after it's already allowed on paper. Here's what gets me. The city study shows processing times actually improved between 2024 and mid-2025. So if it's faster on paper, why does the pipeline still feel stuck? Because 'approved' doesn't mean you can build it tomorrow. You clear zoning, then you hit the fees, the discretionary review windows, the CEQA triggers stacking up downstream — CEQA being the state environmental review law that can get weaponized against housing. Exactly — the bottleneck shifted. Speed up intake, and the cost wall just moves further down the line. That's where I'd push the fee-reform crowd: when you cut impact fees, are you fixing the negotiation culture, or just trimming the affordable unit count? And that's the honest version of the inclusionary debate — does lowering the requirement speed production, or just subsidize a market-rate developer. The Step Back lays out the cost side pretty clearly. HCD flagged this — California's housing department called it development by negotiation. Every project becomes a custom deal instead of a predictable process. Today's breakdown is the first time I've seen the chokepoints mapped instead of waved at. Last thing, and it's procedural but it matters. The Ethics Commission posted its Investigation Suspension and Parallel Proceedings Policy. In plain terms: it governs whether an ethics probe gets paused when a criminal or civil case runs alongside it. So before anyone assumes ethics proceedings are quietly moving on the budget or housing players, this is the rulebook for when they stop. And I'd ask whether that oversight machinery is built to correct itself, or built to wait for some outside case to force action. Because waiting is how SoMa ended up at a hearing in the first place. Mission Local writes:
Southern Station’s response times for lower-priority calls were as much as 55 percent slower than the rest of the city over a recent six-month period, according to Mission Local’s analysis, despite having the highest crime rates in the city. SFPD officials said that since December 2025, Southern Station has received 20 additional patrol officers for its area, which covers SoMa, the Embarcadero, China Basin, Mission Bay, Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island, bringing staffing from 91 to 111 officers.
Update on the SFPD staffing-and-response story we've been following all week — SoMa residents took it to City Hall Thursday. They pressed SFPD directly at a hearing over slow response times in District 6. And the number behind it is Mission Local's: Southern Station's response times for lower-priority calls ran as much as 55 percent slower than the rest of the city over a recent six-month stretch — in the neighborhood with the highest crime rates in the city. Highest crime, slowest response. All week we've been reading that off a PDF — now it's neighbors on the mic. The thing I want is the response. What did SFPD command actually say back to those residents? The hearing was called by Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who chairs Public Safety and Neighborhood Services — after his own constituents kept calling him out. So this is a chair holding a hearing about complaints aimed partly at his own district. And here's the tell, Sarah — if that biennial staffing report were actually steering deployment, these folks would not be at City Hall in 2026 demanding answers about response times. The report got filed. The street didn't move. Okay, City Hall keeps saying it wants to 'cut red tape' for housing — but once a project is already allowed on paper, where does San Francisco's permitting process actually slow it down or make it too expensive to build? The short answer: almost everywhere, and it stacks up fast. San Francisco has historically been one of the slowest cities in the country on permits — though a city study published earlier this year found that between 2024 and mid-2025, processing times were cut roughly in half, per KQED. Real progress. Still, even after that, the city trails peers like San Diego and Austin. And the software system meant to modernize the whole workflow — the one-stop platform Mayor Lurie has been pushing since taking office in January 2025 — has reportedly missed deadlines and, according to The Standard's investigation, workers say it's still missing critical features. That's just the front end. On the cost side, a February 2026 academic paper by economists Soltas and Gruber found that in Los Angeles, developers paid fifty percent more — about forty-eight dollars per square foot — for land that already had a pre-approved permit. That tells you how much the market prices in permitting risk and delay before a shovel hits the ground. Then you get to the charter problem: SPUR's latest report argues that many of the deepest bottlenecks are baked into the city charter itself, meaning staff and officials literally cannot fix them without a ballot measure. If zoning reform has already opened up big parts of the west side to denser construction, why aren't developers rushing in now that it's theoretically allowed? Because permitting delay is only one piece of the cost puzzle — and right now, financing and construction costs are hurting projects just as much as red tape. Bisnow reported in May that six months after Lurie's Family Zoning Plan opened large swaths of the west side to taller, denser construction, the multifamily pipeline is still largely stalled because the numbers don't pencil on most projects. Put that next to the Chronicle's count: roughly twenty thousand homes tied up in stalled megaprojects, while the city needs somewhere around ten thousand new units per year just to make a dent in its shortage, according to AEI. So watch whether charter reform heads to the ballot, because faster approvals only unlock construction if the underlying economics can close too. This one's from San Francisco Ethics Commission:
When Ethics Commission Staff receives a request for suspension of its administrative investigation into a complaint alleging violations of San Francisco’s campaign finance, lobbying, conflicts of interest, or governmental ethics laws, from another governmental agency with shared authority for enforcing those laws, Staff will accommodate the request as follows: The Executive Director reserves the right to decline any request for suspension of administrative investigation for good cause.
One procedural document I want to note before anyone assumes ethics probes move in a vacuum. The Ethics Commission's Investigation Suspension and Parallel Proceedings Policy — adopted January 23rd, 2017 — governs what happens when another agency asks Ethics to pause its own investigation. Plain English: if a criminal or civil case is running alongside an ethics probe into campaign finance, lobbying, or conflicts of interest, this is the rulebook that decides whether Ethics keeps digging or stands down while the other case plays out. And that's the part I'd watch. Same week SoMa residents are on the mic demanding answers from SFPD, does the oversight machinery actually move on its own — or is it built to sit and wait for some outside case to force its hand? To be clear, a suspension request has to come from another government agency — Ethics doesn't just pause itself for fun. But yeah, if every probe touching a budget or housing player gets parked behind a parallel proceeding, 'open investigation' can mean 'frozen' for a long time. Right, and nine years on the books with almost nobody talking about it tells you something. If accountability pauses itself the moment things get complicated, nobody in SoMa is going to feel it. If San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up with the city, consider subscribing and leaving a quick review wherever you're listening. It really helps other people find the show.
We've put links to all of today's stories in the show notes, so if something sounded worth a closer look, you can find the original reporting there.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for Wednesday, June 10th. This is a Lantern Podcast.