Two names on one housing plan — Breed and Peskin, who don't exactly finish each other's sentences. So why are they co-signing the same document this week? This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. Today: a fee reform plan with actual names attached, a budget that pencils out to nineteen grand per resident, and whether a 'Public Integrity Review' has any teeth at all. Hit follow and you won't have to come looking for the next episode. Here's Media:
The Housing Fee Reform Plan is composed of two pieces of legislation that will reduce inclusionary housing requirements on new and already approved development projects and reform and defer development impact fees in order to spur development projects and economic activity.
After a week of structural complaints, here's something with two names on it — Mayor Breed and Board President Aaron Peskin, jointly proposing a Housing Fee Reform Plan. Two pieces of legislation: one cuts inclusionary housing requirements, the other reforms and defers development impact fees. And for anyone keeping a scorecard — Breed and Peskin have not exactly been a duet over the years. Peskin, the slow-growth skeptic, co-signing a plan to, quote, unlock the housing pipeline? That's the headline inside the headline. That's the whole story, Sarah. A mayor and a board president putting their names on the same document starts looking like a coalition. All week I've been griping about beautiful PDFs with nobody accountable — this one's got two owners. And let's be clear what it's aimed at. Inclusionary means the share of affordable units a developer's forced to include. They're cutting that on already-approved projects too — the stuff sitting frozen in the pipeline. That could move buildings already on the books, with real approvals, instead of waiting on some hypothetical permit years from now. It fits into the Housing Element — the state-certified plan the Board passed unanimously in January — with a target of 82,000 homes over eight years. So now it's about sequencing: does the fee reform actually unblock projects Housing for All already approved in concept? Right, and here's my worry. Cutting inclusionary requirements means fewer mandated affordable units per building. The bet is you get more total housing built, so more affordable units overall. That math has to actually pencil out — for renters and working families, instead of just techies waiting on luxury towers. San Francisco has released integrity reports and ethics reviews before, and the scandals keep coming anyway — so what changes when a new one drops, and who has real power to make departments or contractors comply? Fair skepticism. The honest answer: the machinery exists, but the teeth depend a lot on who's using it. On contractors, the Department of Building Inspection has the Expanded Compliance Control Program — created in 2021 — which tracks serious permit violations, fraud convictions, and misuse. It can put contractors on a blacklist that restricts future city work, so there are real business consequences. For public officials, the Ethics Commission's Enforcement Division handles complaints, investigates, and can levy fines. And per its December 2025 quarterly enforcement report, it publishes case-by-case resolution data so the public can track outcomes. The commission also finished hiring two new senior investigators as of mid-2025, which matters because staffing has been a bottleneck. And the Audits Division wrapped the full 27-audit cycle of publicly financed candidates from the 2024 election by March 2026. That's systematic, documented accountability — harder to ignore than a one-off report. But if the Ethics Commission is the main watchdog, what happens when someone tries to weaken it from the inside — like lowering the bar for removing commissioners? That's exactly the pressure point. A city task force proposal surfaced in late 2025 that would lower the threshold for removing Ethics Commission panelists — which critics called, quote, 'completely inappropriate,' because that three-decade protection is what lets commissioners penalize powerful City Hall officials without fearing retaliation. And when a supervisor separately called for an investigation into an official at the Sheriff's Department Oversight Board in June 2026, it was a reminder that referral power often sits with elected officials who have political interests of their own. The system works when that independence holds. So watch that removal-threshold proposal; if it advances, the watchdog's bite gets a lot softer. Here's San Francisco:
Housing for All is Mayor London Breed’s implementation strategy for the Housing Element. The first step for Housing for All is the issuance of Mayor Breed’s Executive Directive which sets the immediate and near-term actions the City will take to start this process and begin to make real change to how San Francisco approves and builds housing.
So here's the framing on this Housing for All page that I keep coming back to — the city's own words: the housing shortage drives out families, forces workers into long commutes, puts seniors at risk. That's homelessness, that's climate, that's the recovery. All downstream of not building. And just to pin down what we're talking about — Housing for All is Breed's implementation strategy for the Housing Element, and the first concrete step is an Executive Directive. So it's the vision document that the fee reform plan we just hit slots underneath. Right, and that's the sequencing question. The fee plan has two names on it — Breed and Peskin. This page has one. So which is the engine and which is the press release? The page does lean on one real credential — San Francisco was one of only two Bay Area cities to get its Housing Element certified by the state on deadline. That's a fact you can check. The rest is governmental, administrative, and legislative actions, which is a lot of categories for a strategy that lists no specific projects. This one's 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.
Fifteen-point-nine billion dollars. Thirty-four thousand city workers. Nineteen grand a resident, per the Blueprint folks. That's bigger than what some entire states run on. And homelessness is still unsolved, and there's a billion-dollar deficit penciled in by 2030. So I keep asking — where does nineteen thousand a head actually land? Here's the catch, Mark — the page that's supposed to 'Fix the Budget' came up empty on the how. Big number up top, a 'Take Action' button, and not much in between. Useful frame, though. We've been chewing on that billion-dollar deficit all week without the per-capita anchor. Nineteen thousand per resident makes it concrete. Right, and set that next to the housing fee plan we just hit — Breed and Peskin actually attached names and a mechanism to that one. This Blueprint item names a problem and stops. So one PDF with two signatures, one with a slogan. Quite the contrast in a single rundown. If you follow San Francisco politics closely, you might also like California Governor's Race — daily coverage of the 2026 race, with candidates, polling, debates, fundraising, and policy beyond the horse-race takes. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Every story we talked about today is linked in the show notes. If one caught your ear, you can follow it there and read more. Thanks for listening. That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.