Super Tuesday was Stunning Tuesday, throwing the race for the Democratic presidential nomination for a loop. But The Frisc is all about San Francisco. To review the election’s local impact, let’s start with our city’s national choices and work our way down ballot.
Usual SF caveat: As of midday March 4, there are still 104,000 ballots to be counted. (That’s a lot.) With the latest tally, San Francisco has gone the way of California, writ large, throwing in for Bernie Sanders. It was a rare bright spot in the Vermont senator’s night, with former VP Joe Biden sweeping the South and other states, including Maine, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, as well as the plum prize of Texas to take a lead, unthinkable two weeks ago, in the delegate race.
Local support for Elizabeth Warren in certain demographic bubbles didn’t punch up. At last count she’s in third place, down almost 1,000 votes to Biden; Sanders leads both of them by more than 10,000 votes.
Speaking of local love, the coattails of Sanders didn’t help the Democratic Socialist challenger to state senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco in Sacramento. Wiener has clashed with the SF Board of Supervisors over housing and other matters, but voters didn’t seem to care yesterday. He’s ahead of Jackie Fielder 54% to 32% (which this columnist says could be a good sign for Fielder), despite being pilloried for trying (and trying and trying) to increase housing density around transit lines and job centers, which would turn down the heat on the housing crisis and get commuters out of their cars. His signature proposal has been scuttled three times in Sacramento by legislators representing homeowners who cannot bear to lose local zoning control (and so have a hard time shaking the NIMBY stereotype) and lower-income neighborhoods who see density as a stalking horse for gentrification.
Full props
Some of the same forces fighting Wiener won the day in San Francisco with Proposition E, though, the most impactful among the city’s five ballot measures.
In 1986, voters set annual limits on new office construction to blunt the “Manhattanization” of the city. Fast-forward three decades: Prop E, which needs to pass 50% and so far has garnered 55% of the vote, will set further limits, tying office development to the construction of affordable housing. Sounds sensible enough, right? It certainly appeals to the tech-is-ruining-our-city beef, and to the feeling that SF needs more balance, unlike the NIMBY towns in Silicon Valley which are happy to host giant tech campuses but don’t want to house their workers.
But will it actually help build more affordable housing, so desperately needed in this town? San Francisco already has chronic trouble meeting minimum goals for affordable housing, thanks in large part to many of the backers of Prop. E, as we noted in our ballot preview. Prop E does nothing, for example, to curb attacks on even modest housing projects made possible by our regulatory system or rein in the power of people who don’t want lower-income seniors in their neighborhood.
So if affordable housing and office development are tied — “either we’re going to significantly increase our affordable housing or reduce our office development,” Prop E bankroller John Elberling told CityLab, “it’s going to be one or the other” — there’s a good chance we’ll have fewer offices.
(Editor’s note: Elberling took exception to our February 21 ballot preview. You can read his comment and our response. The Frisc is inviting him to write a post about San Francisco housing but has yet to hear back. Tag, you’re it, John E.)
Meanwhile, the city controller estimates that Prop E will have dramatic economic impacts, contracting our economic output and suppressing employment by almost 8%. So the hole in City Hall’s budget, already at $420 million, could get a lot bigger. If the economy slows down, coronavirus or not, we’re going to see service cuts just at the time we need them most, as people sleep on our streets and efforts to house them start to gain momentum.
Then again, we can keep borrowing until the lenders stop lending. San Franciscans approved huge spending through bond measures Tuesday, for City College, earthquake safety and emergency response, and retiree benefits for former SF Housing Authority employees.
Our decrepit City College has a new lease on life thanks to 70% of voters approving Prop A’s $845 million bond money to fix the place up. (That measure needed 55% of the vote to pass.) Prop B, which would issue more than $628 million in bonds for seismic upgrades at emergency facilities, was way beyond its two-thirds threshold with 81% approval.
Big problem, tiny solution
Consider the second to last measure on the ballot, Proposition D, a Hello Kitty Band-Aid applied to a gaping wound. (Looks cute, but really futile.) It will slap a small tax on properties that are vacant for roughly six months or more. (There are carve-outs galore for downtown and Union Square, tenants with multiyear leases, nonprofits, and more.)
As with Prop. E and affordable housing, there’s a significant chance it does little to nothing to address the main concern: empty storefronts. Which, yes, are a problem. The latest (albeit imperfect) count from the SF Office of Economic and Workforce Development is adjacent.
The tiny Prop D tax miiight compel a few landlords here to fill their empty properties, perhaps with lower rents. Yet there are so many factors involved. The proposal does not address the mess of opening a small business in this city or rethink the chain store rules that ensnare homegrown brands. It does nothing to lower the cost of doing business in the city, which might help merchants compete with the Amazons of the world.
It’s currently hovering around the two-thirds threshold needed for passage. If it prevails, it goes into effect January 1, which means its effects, if any, might not be noticeable for a few years.
Between now and then, we’ll have a bunch more elections that could compound the problems of our rapidly changing city.