Cops, permits, housing, ethics — four City Hall machines, four reports, all jammed on the same desk this morning. Bad luck doesn't explain that. You're looking at a pattern. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily, Monday the 22nd. Today: the 2025 police staffing analysis, a step back on what “open a small business” actually takes, and two reviews on housing and ethics. City & County of San Francisco Police Department writes:
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.
Okay, for three days I've been asking — when the city says SFPD is understaffed, understaffed compared to what? Here it is: the 2025 Prop E staffing analysis, dated June 30th. And it says it's building the baseline from workload methodology, not the old number. And that matters, because Prop E in 2020 ripped out the 1994 Prop D baseline entirely. So now the test is simple: is this fresh workload math, or the old 1994 number laundered through a 2025 PDF? Right. And let's be precise about Prop E — voters removed the fixed staffing floor and told the Department to bring this report to the Police Commission every two years as part of the budget. It has consequences: the Commission is supposed to act on it. That's the part I keep coming back to. A fifteen-point-nine billion dollar budget, and the number that's supposed to drive police hiring lands on the Commission's desk as a live decision. So no more arguing about 2015 Controller estimates in the abstract — there's a document now, and someone has to vote on it. The lineage matters too — this traces back to Resolution 63-17 in 2017, and the Staffing Task Force the Board and the Commission stood up. So the city's been chewing on the right methodology for the better part of a decade before we got this PDF. Eight years to answer “how many cops do we need.” Fine. I'll take the answer. But if it doesn't break down geographic deployment — which stations are drowning, basically — then all you've got is a headcount. You still don't have an actual deployment plan. When people say San Francisco needs to make it easier to open a small business, what does that mean on the ground — what has to happen between signing a lease and opening the doors, and where do the delays usually come from? So the ugly stretch is the one between “I signed a lease” and “I can serve my first customer.” That's where San Francisco's reputation is genuinely bad, and honestly, it's earned. You're not dealing with one city agency; you're dealing with several, and historically they haven't talked to each other. Restaurant owners especially have complained about contradictory directions from different departments. The Chronicle reported that was one of the big grievances behind the city's quiet rollout of new policies in fall 2025 to ease the process. Then there's the system itself, which even Mayor Lurie's administration has called archaic. His big reform push, per the Chronicle and The Standard, is an online portal so people can apply for permits through a city website instead of navigating paper forms and in-person visits. And the delays are big enough that AB 671 was introduced at the state level after California restaurant operators called slow, onerous permitting one of their most significant challenges. That bill would make local building departments approve or deny permits on a defined timeline, instead of letting applications sit. Even after all that, neighborhood politics can still step in: when Lurie introduced a broader permitting speed-up package in May 2025, some San Francisco neighborhoods pushed back. You mentioned Lurie's online portal as the big fix — is that actually live, or are we still looking at a promise on a slide deck? That's the right question to press on. As of a Standard investigation published in May 2026, the project had already logged months of missed deadlines, involved a no-bid contract, and was using software that workers say is missing critical features. So the portal exists as a concept, but the execution is very much in dispute. In the meantime, the city has been trying smaller-bore relief, like the “First Year Free” program that waives certain costs for new businesses in their first year of operation, which the Board of Supervisors was considering extending as recently as June 2026. Watch whether the portal actually ships with the features business owners need, and whether neighborhood opposition to the broader permitting reform package gets resolved. Those two things decide whether any of this moves the needle. The California Department of Housing and Community Development has been tracking this. So this is the HCD review, October 2023 — the state of California walks into San Francisco and audits how we approve housing. And the key findings read like an indictment: CEQA abuse, discretionary review, development by negotiation. Negotiation! For an apartment building. HCD being the state Department of Housing and Community Development. And they say exactly why they singled out San Francisco: we take longer to approve housing than any city in the state. That's what triggered this whole review. And here's why I'm hot about it today — we just heard the SFPD staffing analysis, then the small-business lease-to-open mess, now this. Different agencies, same recurring failure: every process becomes another choke point. Publicly Initiated Discretionary Review — DR, in the lingo. That's when a neighbor who isn't even adjacent to a project can drag it back to the Planning Commission. The state's finding is that San Francisco basically institutionalized the heckler's veto. Hacker News, 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…
Read that consequences list again — loss of local land use authority to a court-appointed agent. The state can take the zoning keys away from City Hall and hand them to a referee. That is way past a wrist-slap. You're talking about receivership. Plus referral to the Attorney General and the loss of certain state funds. The polite term is the builder's remedy — if your housing element falls out of compliance, developers can route around your zoning entirely. And honestly? Good. For decades, the people hurt by all this negotiation were renters and working families priced clean out. If it takes Sacramento threatening receivership to build the housing, I'll take the embarrassment over the status quo. Here's Tyrone Jue at SF Environment:
1. The Commission on the Environment should ensure that SF Environment establishes a strong, ethical tone at the top, modeling the importance of compliance with ethics laws. 2. Policymakers should revise the refuse rate-setting process and procedures to clearly define SF Environment’s roles, responsibilities, and involvement in the refuse rate-setting process.
So here it is. The Controller's Public Integrity Review on SF Environment, and recommendation number one is — establish an ethical tone at the top. That's where we're starting. A city department needs a memo reminding it not to break ethics laws. For listeners — this is the fallout from the corruption mess that took down the old department head. Tyrone Jue is the acting director cleaning it up. The Controller lays out six recommendations, and a few of them are genuinely revealing. Recommendation six is the one that floors me. There's a “Friends of SF Environment” nonprofit — and the city's own report can't even decide whether it should sign an MOU with it, or shut it down and disburse the leftover funds. Nobody seems to know what this thing was doing. And recommendation three — codify Executive Directive 20-02. That's London Breed's 2020 order requiring departments to formalize relationships with these “Friends of” groups. The fact that it still needs codifying tells you 20-02 was widely ignored. Look — we had the staffing report this morning, the small-business lease-to-open mess, and now this. Different documents, different departments, but the pattern keeps landing in the same place. The refuse rate-setting recommendation? They're telling Environment to define its own role in setting your garbage rates, because right now nobody can say where the line is. This is City Hall's operating model showing up agency by agency. If San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up, subscribe wherever you’re listening. And if you've got a moment, leave a review — it really helps other people find the show.
Links to every story we covered today are in the show notes. If something stuck with you, take a minute to read a little deeper.
That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.