San Francisco, take the hint
(The Weekend Edition)
My Take:
It was a meaningful election day across America: Prop 50 in California, Zohran Mamdani’s big night in New York, Spanberger’s and Sherrill’s wins back east. Plenty of headlines, plenty of heat. But maybe the most important result didn’t come from a candidate race at all. It came from the other side of the ballot in New York City, where voters quietly and overwhelmingly approved three proposals to make it faster and easier to build housing.
While most were watching the horse race, New York took aim at the real villain: bureaucracy. The tangle of red tape that’s made it nearly impossible to build homes for ordinary people in one of the world’s greatest cities. These measures streamline approvals and create new paths to get affordable projects off the ground without the decade-long obstacle course that’s become standard. In short: less red tape, more roofs.
San Francisco should take notes.
Because the same thing choking New York is strangling us here. It’s not a lack of money, talent, or vision. It’s process — the endless layers of review, appeals, and politics that turn every project, from a teacher’s housing development to a corner café renovation, into a marathon of hearings and lawsuits.
Look at 469 Stevenson Street. A downtown housing project next to BART, backed by a union pension fund and city planners, was approved and then overturned after well-housed opponents raised speculative and disingenuous environmental concerns. Years later, it’s still a parking lot. That’s the cost of a system where delay is easier than decision, and every “temporary pause” becomes a permanent no.
We’ve normalized dysfunction. We call it “due diligence” or “community input,” but what we’ve really built is a system optimized to say no. In a city that prides itself on innovation, we’ve somehow made building — the most basic act of progress — the hardest thing to do.
New York’s reforms won’t fix everything overnight, but they signal something bigger: the courage to admit the system is broken and the will to cut through it. That’s exactly the conversation San Francisco needs right now. If we don’t have it, we’ll keep exporting talent to Austin and Seattle, not because people want to leave but because we’ve made staying impossible. If we want the Bay Area to keep leading in tech, in climate, in culture, we need to lead again in building.
The bad news? We’re still behind. A new state report finds San Francisco’s family-zoning plan will fall short of meeting California’s housing mandates, proof that even well-intentioned reform isn’t enough when the bureaucracy stays the same. Mayor Lurie’s proposal to open corridors across under-built neighborhoods to mid-rise, family-friendly housing is a step in the right direction. It would create homes teachers, nurses, and startup employees can actually afford. But permission on paper doesn’t put shovels in the ground.
Zoning is just one piece of the puzzle. The bigger challenge is execution. We need to pair zoning reform with long-overdue fixes to the hearings, appeals, and duplicative reviews that bog down even compliant projects. And while permitting times are trending down, it still takes about a year for a proposal to get through the process, not counting months of pre-application outreach and neighborhood politicking.
If San Francisco wants to meet the state’s goals and its own ideals, we need to modernize permitting, streamline approvals, and give city staff the tools to move projects forward instead of burying them in paperwork. We can protect the right to be heard without letting it become the right to obstruct.
So while Tuesday’s results will keep pundits busy with their favorite sport, parsing the personalities, the real lesson comes from those three little boxes on New York’s ballot. Reforming how we build isn’t flashy, but it’s the difference between cities that grow and cities that calcify. The next generation deserves better than a parking lot.