SF politics

SF politics

On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered in Golden Gate Park to celebrate the life and legacy of a San Francisco icon. The California Academy of Sciences honored Claude, the beloved albino alligator. Claude was 30 years old and lived at the academy for 17 years until his death last month. Sunday's festivities included a NOLA-style second line parade in a nod to Claude's Louisiana roots, a Claude costume contest for kids and stories shared by the late gator's care team.

Though he was better known before running for his charitable leadership as founder of the poverty-fighting nonprofit Tipping Point, Lurie immediately after getting elected began focusing on crime, homelessness, housing bottlenecks and quality-of-life issues like cleaning the streets. Lurie streamlined housing approvals, re-organized and sped up city safety responses, launched an anti-homelessness campaign and won a 73% approval rating at Thanksgiving among local voters.

I know that people think this happened overnight, but it definitely did not. This is my stuff, and I'm very proud of it.

The general public has no idea how much coffee Mayor London Breed drank. For all we know, her predecessor Mayor Ed Lee started each morning by wading into a kiddie pool full of macchiato. That's because neither of these mayors had their staff post even a fraction of what Lurie's team has to social media. Lurie, on the other hand, is seemingly perusing all the cafes in the Yellow Pages, A to Z, and taking his Instagram followers with him.

Too many people in San Francisco are falling into crisis when intervention could and should come sooner. At the center of this effort is a simple reality: Stability is the gateway to recovery. For many people with severe mental illness, medication is what allows treatment to work at all. Without it, housing placements fail, care plans break down, and crises repeat themselvesoften with greater harm each time.

Did the Upper Great Highway closure make Sunset neighborhood streets less safe? Supervisor Alan Wong claimed it did at a January 8 press conference, citing a simple year-over-year map comparison of crash data. But my analysis, using the same DataSF crash data with rigorous statistical controls, finds no evidence to support that claim, and if anything, the data suggest the opposite.

Lurie's upzoning measure, which the Board of Supervisors approved last month and which comes in response to intense state pressure to build tens of thousands of new housing units in the next half-decade, would allow for six- to 10-story buildings on major thoroughfares in multiple parts of the west and north side San Francisco. But opponents fear the measure will lead to mass displacement of existing residents as older buildings are torn down for redevelopment, and will lead to altering the character of their neighborhoods.

In Star Trek: The Original Series, the USS Enterprise never returned to Earth. In The Next Generation, Picard's Enterprise-D visited every once in a while, and when debuted, the basic premise put the crew on the fringes of the Federation. But in a two-part thriller that aired 30 years ago, on January 1 and January 8, 1996, Deep Space Nine took a trip back to idealistic 24th-century Earth, where even paradise could turn into a snakepit.

Back when London Breed was still mayor, her idea to clamp down on the notorious drug trade and nighttime street circus that pervaded the Tenderloin District was to shut down corner liquor stores earlier in parts of the Tenderloin, and prohibit them from doing business between midnight and 5 am. That proposal got passed into law in June 2024 (taking effect the following month), and liquor stores on this 20-block area of the Tenderloin are now forced to close at midnight.

The place was originally busted for offering sex-for-cash to an undercover police officer in May 2019, after which SF DPH revoked their massage license. The department then found they were still continuing that practice. A customer filed a police report in 2024 over an employee who was determined to tug at his genitals, and SF City Attorney David Chiu ordered the place closed in March 2025 after another SF DPH inspection found the place to be operating, well, more or less as a brothel.

A former high-ranking San Francisco city employee was sentenced on Monday to three years in state prison after pleading guilty to multiple felony counts tied to a yearslong public corruption scheme that siphoned more than $627,000 from the city's workers' compensation system. Stanley Ellicott, 40, was sentenced by San Francisco Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan following convictions on seven felony counts, according to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office.

The store was at the center of the mini-scandal that ultimately forced Alcaraz to resign seven days into her tenure, after the woman who took over the store from Alcaraz in April, Julia Baran, went to the media with evidence that the 29-year-old Alcaraz had mismanaged the store, and had apparently paid employees under the table to evade taxes.

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.

If we can make the little things go away then all the larger projects and the more significant issues can all be dealt with by all the regulatory agencies,

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 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.