Rejected six years ago, a City Hall effort to make each San Francisco district host its share of homeless shelters and services is back. This time around, it has gained more traction.
Yet the latest proposal has also created the first notable disagreement between Mayor Daniel Lurie and some of his board allies.
Introduced in April, the new geographic equity law seeks to ease overconcentration of services in a few neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin, South of Market, Mission, and Bayview. First, it would require every supervisorial district to appprove at least one facility by June 30, 2026. The type of site could range from overnight shelters and longer-term “transitional” housing to clinics and programs that offer addiction treatment and mental health care.
The bill would also establish a 1,000-foot buffer between facilities, making it harder to open new services where they are already concentrated.
Sup. Bilal Mahmood, who represents the Tenderloin, Haight, and other central neighborhoods, is the main sponsor. “On the record, every supervisor has already voted and said yes to shelter in every district,” Mahmood tells The Frisc. He’s referring to a March resolution that urged the mayor to “explore and implement a fair distribution of new homeless shelters across all districts.” It passed unanimously.
Other supervisors in support are Shamann Walton, Matt Dorsey, Jackie Fielder, Myrna Melgar, and Danny Sauter. Melgar is the only one whose district doesn’t have any services, though for years District 7 has grappled to help or relocate people living in dozens of RVs near Lake Merced.
Six sponsors leave the bill two votes short if Mayor Lurie tries to veto it. The SF Standard reported two weeks ago that Lurie’s team has tried watering down the bill behind the scenes.
Update, 7/24/25: Responding to pressure from Lurie and five supervisors, Sup. Mahmood made substantial changes to the bill, prohibiting new shelters, transitional housing, or treatment facilities within 300 feet of another facility or in neighborhoods where the share of beds exceeds the number of unhoused individuals. It no longer requires at least one shelter in every district. The amended legislation won unanimous approval in the Budget and Finance Committee July 23 and will go to the full board for a vote.
While many supervisors have called for more homeless services and less concentration of them, they might not want to take the political risk in making policy, notes one Tenderloin neighborhood advocate. “What’s right and what’s fair is the spread of homeless services throughout this entire city, because our homeless population comes from this entire city,” says Del Seymour, who runs a Tenderloin nonprofit and has served on a local homelessness services oversight board. “But it’s going to be a nasty fight. The west side doesn’t want to share these services. So what are we going to do, just go out and fight people?”
Seymour is worried that the bill might not be feasible because of the political backlash. He also says Lurie’s pushback isn’t surprising because he “needs support from the west side.”
The political split isn’t just a west side thing. Progressives and moderates are also scrambled, just like when a similar bill came up in 2019. That effort came from then-District 6 Sup. Matt Haney, who now represents the eastern half of SF in the California Assembly. “The people who voted for it [in 2019] were the people having services crammed into their district, and the people who had no services in their district didn’t vote for it,” says Haney’s spokesperson Nate Allbee, who served on Haney’s staff at the time. “It wasn’t a progressive-moderate thing.”
The Frisc reached out to the five board members not supporting the bill: Rafael Mandelman, whose District 8 includes the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park; Steven Sherrill, whose District 2 includes the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Cow Hollow; Chyanne Chen, whose D11 is the Excelsior, Ingleside, and Outer Mission; and west-siders Connie Chan and Joel Engardio.
Only Mandelman and Sherrill responded.
Finding ‘the right way’
Sherrill tells The Frisc he’s still in the “information-gathering stage” and hasn’t decided where he stands.
Mandelman says the bill responds to a “very real problem” but has several concerns about location, funding, and neighborhood impact of new homeless facilities.
“It is often very hard to find an appropriate location for any single behavioral health or homeless facility,” Mandelman says. He added that the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing and the Department of Public Health already have strict criteria for choosing sites. He doesn’t know if the bill’s additional requirements would be “the right way to do this.”
Mandelman wants a “less prescriptive” ordinance that focuses on limiting sites in overburdened neighborhoods, not a “blanket category” of services across districts. He also thinks the city should prioritize more “well-staffed facilities for people with significant behavioral health needs.”
As for those who didn’t respond, some of their past actions could be indicators of where their votes may sway.
As for those who didn’t respond, at least some have shown a previous willingness to support homeless services in their districts.
Chen, a labor organizer, won her board seat last fall. Her campaign page called for more mental health treatment beds, the use of conservation to compel people into treatment, and more staff and services, but did not specify where.
D4’s Engardio has also called for more mental health treatment beds and more shelter and housing. During his 2022 campaign for election, Engardio supported an affordable housing project in the Sunset, even when it drew the vitriol of neighbors who said the building, with some units reserved for the formerly homeless, would become a drug-filled slum.
Chan, first elected in 2020, has a longer track record. She has called for other Bay Area cities to do more in a “regional approach” to homelessness. She recently promised permanent housing for homeless families. Chan has come out against the Mahmood bill. She told the Chronicle last month it would impede Lurie’s ability to add services “with some flexibility.”
Chan touted Lurie’s new powers under the “Fentanyl State of Emergency” bill, which Chan and the board approved in February. That marked Lurie’s first major legislative victory, and it won early momentum when Mahmood and other supervisors lent eager support before many details became public.
The bill gives Lurie the right to move quickly, with less red tape, to open new facilities and sign contracts with service providers with less board oversight. He pledged 1,500 new shelter beds by June during last year’s campaign, a promise that’s become a moving target. Part of his push for more beds include expansion of a Bayview site in Walton’s district, spurring the supervisor to call Lurie an oligarch. (Walton was the only vote against the fentanyl emergency bill.)
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Mahmood answers back
Mahmood has answers for criticism of his bill. He says facilities would be sensitive to their immediate neighborhoods. As for Mandelman’s budget concerns, Mahmood says he hasn’t seen evidence that building shelter in one part of the city is any more or less expensive than another.
He emphasizes that every district has a homeless population, and spreading facilities around would make it easier for them to get services without traveling to the Tenderloin or SOMA. (The population isn’t distributed equally; Districts 5, 6, and 10 make up the vast majority.)
Meanwhile, Lurie’s proposed changes could diminish the bill’s impact. For example, instead of requiring a new facility per district, an amendment says the city should “endeavor” to hit that goal.
Mahmood says the amendments are just a draft, and he’s in conversation with the mayor about the bill.
Even if the bill is watered down or can’t withstand a veto, its support so far is a sign of progress in the city, says Haney spokesperson Allbee: “It shows you how much the attitudes have changed.”
The bill’s first public hearing is scheduled for the supervisor’s Budget and Finance Committee on July 16, according to Mahmood. Of the three committee members — Chan, Dorsey, and Engardio — only one has offered support so far. Engardio is already facing political jeopardy, with a recall now scheduled for September that stems from his support of the Great Highway closure. That peril could be enough to prevent the homeless bill from taking the next step toward a full board vote.
Correction, 6/7/25: This story originally said that Sup. Mahmood’s bill would require every district to open at least one facility by June 30, 2026. That is incorrect. The bill would require approval of facilities by that date.