Parcel taxes are a type of property taxes, but they're legal under Prop. 13. In essence, the city imposes a tax not on the value of a piece of property but on its size: larger lots pay higher taxes than smaller ones, but within each category the tax is flat. A $2 million 2,000-square-foot house on a standard 25-by-100 foot lot pays the same as a similar house assessed at $400,000.
The measure does not allocate any initial city dollars, a move that may have helped secure support from the board's moderates after repeated years of city budget shortfalls. Instead, the ordinance establishes a framework to receive future contributions - whether through city appropriations or private donations. "This most certainly is different than asking the city to pony up dollars to support reparations recommendations," said Supervisor Shamann Walton, who authored the ordinance.
Mayor Daniel Lurie said Friday that his office will pare back city functions during next year's budget cuts and focus on "core" services like public safety, clean streets, and transit in a bid to shave some $400 million and continue addressing the deficit. The mayor's office said departments are being instructed to reduce the total number of funded programs and services, stop new hiring, review all contracts for potential savings and reduce administrative costs.
San Francisco's public defenders say the district attorney's office is still withholding evidence months after they warned the state bar about an alleged "pattern and practice," and doing so in nearly half of their misdemeanor trials. Withholding evidence, the public defenders say, makes it much harder for them to represent their clients, and violates their clients' constitutional rights. The allegations come amidst a rise in misdemeanor cases filed by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins as the city has prioritized lower-level crimes for policing and prosecution.
The sidewalk outside Majed Zeidan's grocery store in San Francisco's Mission District has stayed filled with flowers, candles, memorials and pictures since his cat was crushed under a Waymo in late October. A month later, a Waymo reportedly crushed a dog. Amid the pictures of the cat, a visitor had placed a poster that said, save the cat, kill the car. That's when Zeidan knew Kit Kat, his bodega cat, had become the face of the simmering discontent over San Francisco's growing number of self-driving cars.
Ellicott was charged in January 2024 for invoicing the city $14,000 for earthquake supplies. But according to his charging statement from the DA's office, The actual items purchased were three Oculus virtual reality headsets, four Rylo Action cameras, an HDTV projector, a Nikon DSLR camera worth nearly $2,000, four GoPro cameras, three mini instant cameras, six Microsoft tablets, and four OSMO pocket cameras with expansion kits. Moreover, Ellicott then went and just resold most of these items on eBay.
The Attorney General, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the Secretary of Transportation shall take immediate steps to assess their discretionary grant programs and determine whether priority for those grants may be given to grantees in States and municipalities that actively meet the below criteria, to the maximum extent permitted by law:
Lew has worked at the city's Ingleside, Bayview and Mission police stations and later became captain of the Ingleside station in 2022. He was later promoted to commander and ran the city's Drug Market Agency Coordinating Center, an effort started by former Mayor London Breed to bring together various city agencies to tackle outdoor drug dealing. Most recently, he led the city's Field Operations Bureau and served as deputy chief under Yep.
That data also reveals that ICE arrests across Northern California have more than tripled this year. A Mission Local analysis of data released from the Deportation Data Project, a group of researchers based at the University of California, Berkeley, shows that 48 percent of the people arrested by ICE across Northern California in September had no criminal background, while 39 percent had a criminal conviction. The remaining 14 percent had pending criminal charges.
Fiona Hinze can see it coming when she spins around the streets of San Francisco: An indicator showing that her wheelchair battery is running out of juice. Hinze is always with someone when she's out with her power chair. When the battery dies, she switches on the manual mode, takes the chair out of gear, and asks her companion to push her chair - which weighs a couple hundred pounds, plus her body weight - to her car.
Members of the Board of Supervisors are calling for action and accountability after Mission Local reported that women held in a San Francisco jail were allegedly forced to undress in front of each other while sheriff's deputies watched and filmed them with their body-worn cameras. Late Thursday afternoon, 17 women filed a claim with the city saying that deputies violated multiple laws and policies in May when they strip searched them en masse while male deputies were present.
What is a People Mover? People movers are neither moving walkways nor Tesla Tunnels. Instead, people movers refer to trains often used to shuttle passengers around airports. However, San Diego's APM would travel beyond the airport to connect to Trolley Lines at Santa Fe Depot and serve Civic Center (below) or the Convention Center. The APM would emulate Vancouver's Skytrain, whose 22.6-mile Expo Line serves urban neighborhoods far from any airport.
Ali Sutton, Tipping Point's chief program officer, warned that the situation could deteriorate further depending on federal policy changes after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, formally known as HR 1. "We are expecting some of the deepest cuts to our social safety net in our history," Sutton said. "Given those substantial cuts, we anticipate these numbers will only worsen over the next few years."
Mayor Daniel Lurie's District 4 appointee, Beya Alcaraz, was the only San Francisco supervisor appointee in at least 30 years to enter the job with zero experience in either politics or government, a Mission Local analysis found. Alcaraz abruptly resigned from her post on Thursday night after controversy. Hours earlier, Mission Local published text messages in which Alcaraz said she paid her former pet store workers "under the table," skimped on taxes, and underreported income.
He recently wrote to SFMTA officials and Supervisor Myrna Melgar, arguing that they need to shift Vision Zero policy away from reacting to deadly crashes, and instead focus on streets and intersections where speeding and other forms of reckless driving are common. In other words, instead of depending on the high-injury network-a reactive system based on an accounting of deaths and serious injuries- take a proactive and systemic approach to making streets safe.
A vacant city-owned warehouse is going to become the drunk tank for people on drugs, as arresting people and trying to sober them up is Mayor Lurie's latest attempt to cut down on drug use on San Francisco streets. Now ten months in office, SF Mayor Daniel Lurie has tried a number of strategies to combat San Francisco's fentanyl scourge.
