Three open loops from this week — a housing rule, a school budget, a supervisor's return — and they all snap shut on the same Monday. If you're just joining us, San Francisco's housing debate has moved past pro-housing promises and into the hard math of whether anything actually gets built. The city's been weighing cuts to housing fees after Controller and SPUR analysis found only one of eighty modeled development scenarios broke even. Permits, appeals, charter rules, local mandates — they're all still bottlenecks City Hall could change. This is San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily, and today we're done diagnosing — we're grading. Wong's got an actual bill, there's a 5% inclusionary number floating around, and a 'balanced' school budget that raises a question or two. Sarah, start with Wong. If Housing fee reform and development feasibility matters to you, hit follow — we'll be back on it soon. This one's from GrowSF:
Supervisor Jackie Fielder plans to return Monday after a three-month leave following a mental health crisis. The Board approved her request to be excused from meetings from April 7 through June 30. Her return comes while a City Attorney investigation into her office remains unresolved.
Per GrowSF, Supervisor Jackie Fielder returns to the Board Monday after a three-month leave following a mental health crisis. The Board excused her from April 7 through June 30 — so she's back with a day to spare. And look — mental health crisis, she's a person, I genuinely wish her well. But District 9 went months without its supervisor through the entire budget fight. That's a real gap. Right, and her return brings that unresolved City Attorney investigation back into the room — the one into her office over the leaked RESET Center memo. That's the memo Mission Local published, warning Lurie's sobering center carried 'very high legal risk' if it detained people without meeting detention-facility standards. And here's what still bugs me — the Chronicle reported the probe zeroed in on her office, her office denied leaking it, and then... nothing. If a confidential legal memo can hit the press with zero consequence, why would any city lawyer ever write an honest one again? Just to separate the pieces: denying you leaked it and the investigation closing are two very different events. We have the first. We don't have the second. Neal Wong, writing in Richmond Review/Sunset Beacon:
This morning at City Hall, District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong announced a draft ordinance to change a decades-old building rule that housing advocates say has kept thousands of existing housing units off the legal rental market. The change would make those existing homes legal without requiring expensive renovations, and could make new construction more affordable, since lower ceilings require less material to build.
Six inches. The whole thing comes down to six inches of ceiling. San Francisco demands seven-foot-six, California says seven flat, and that gap has been quietly making thousands of perfectly livable units illegal. So this is District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong's draft ordinance, announced yesterday morning at City Hall — credit to the Richmond Review and Sunset Beacon, that's Neal Wong's reporting. And the kicker: it grew out of Wong's 'Dumb Laws Contest' from March. Two hundred-plus submissions, and the ceiling-height rule took the crown. A Dumb Laws Contest that produced actual legislation. I've been hammering all week about scraping bureaucratic barnacles off the budget — this is exactly that. SF YIMBY's Bobak Esfandiari says homeowners are facing tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, in renovations over a ceiling height that's already legal under state law. And it connects straight to Tuesday's permitting math — the stalled units, the 280-day timeline. I want Wong's office to say how many units are actually stuck in this specific limbo. 'Thousands' is the advocates' word. I want the number. Right, and who's been guarding that extra six inches for decades? Somebody wrote that into city code on purpose. That's the history I want — was it fire safety, was it just inertia, or was it somebody's idea of 'character'? SFUSD, with Ezra Wallach:
San Francisco (June 25, 2026) - The San Francisco Board of Education approved a balanced budget in a 4 - 3 vote for the upcoming school year that meets its financial obligations in the current and next two fiscal years. This budget will support student learning while continuing to ensure the district stays on its fiscally responsible track.
SFUSD adopted a three-year balanced budget Tuesday — a $1.36 billion operating budget — and that lets the district self-certify a positive budget to the state before the July 1 deadline. Per the SF Standard, the hard questions start now. And the LCAP — that's the Local Control and Accountability Plan, the state-required document that ties spending to student outcomes — passed on a 4-3 vote. Balanced, but barely. Here's what gets me about that 4-3 split, per GrowSF: the three no votes weren't about the math. They were about weak strategic alignment. Translation — the dollars add up, but nobody's convinced they're aimed at anything. So I want to know what actually survived. Because 'balanced' can quietly mean a program got propped up by an anonymous check instead of a real line item. Show me where Rainbow Clubs landed in this thing. Right, and Superintendent Maria Su is calling this a milestone in fiscal stabilization. But the Tenderloin-adjacent programs, the nonprofit-run pieces — none of that detail is in the press release. That's where the next questions are. And which nonprofits running school programs lobbied to protect their slice? Under what disclosure? A balanced budget is the easiest place in the world to launder a dependency into 'the plan.' Sfist, with J.K. Dineen, Laura Waxmann:
The proposed 790-unit Marina Safeway redevelopment was granted fast-track status under a state housing law, but opponents argue the project may not actually qualify because the law requires that the majority of the surrounding land already be developed for "urban uses."
790 units on the Marina Safeway site, 25 stories, granted fast-track status under state housing law — and now opponents are saying hold on, maybe it doesn't actually qualify. This is the Marina, folks. The fast-track tool here is the state Housing Accountability Act — it limits how much a city can slow-walk a qualifying project. So the whole fight has shifted from 'we hate the tower' to 'we found a technicality.' Right, because you can't just say out loud 'we don't want 790 homes near the water.' You have to find the eligibility loophole. We just heard Wong fighting a decades-old rule to let homeowners legalize extra units — and over here, a project that pencils gets the slow-the-roll treatment. Just to be precise about the allegation — opponents say the project may not meet the criteria the fast-track law requires. The Chronicle's Dineen and Waxmann broke the detail; SFist picked it up. Whether that argument holds up is now a legal question, not a popularity contest. And that's the test, isn't it. Either these state laws have teeth or every well-lawyered neighborhood finds the exit ramp. The Sunset gets studied to death, the Marina gets a procedural objection. Same playbook, nicer zip code. Realtor.com writes:
San Francisco may be on the verge of slashing its affordable housing requirements for new housing projects to just 5%—a dramatic retreat from rules that city consultants say have increasingly made new construction financially unworkable across the city.
Okay, the inclusionary number this week — Realtor.com has it. The on-site inclusionary rate is the share of units in a new building a developer has to set aside as below-market. Right now it's an interim 15%. This ordinance would drop it to 5% for most projects of 25 units or more. But — and this is the catch — only if the Board puts a recurring affordable housing funding measure on the November ballot by July. No ballot measure, the rate lands at 10% instead. And this is the answer to the math we walked through earlier this week. Century Urban looked at every apartment prototype — every single one — and the residual land value came in below the sixty-to-seventy grand per unit you need to even buy the land. A low-rise pencils out at negative one hundred thirty-one thousand a unit. Negative. Even with zero affordability required. So when somebody tells you 15% inclusionary is what gives us affordable housing — it gives us no housing. You can't take five percent of a building that never gets built. That's the trade, though. Cut the mandate to 5%, then try to backfill affordability with a tax that goes to voters. The fee fight finally has real numbers attached to it. Right, and that's the part I'll be watching — does loosening the mandate actually unlock units, or does it just pad developer margins? Show me a building going vertical, then I'll call it a win. If you follow San Francisco politics, you may 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.
What we’re watching next: before July, whether the Board of Supervisors puts a recurring affordable-housing funding measure on the November 2026 ballot — and whether SFUSD’s approved budget gets to the state by July 1.
You’ll find links to every story we discussed in the show notes, if you want to dig further into any of them. That’s San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.