GrowSF 2026 voter guide

Becerra has spent his career in government: more than two decades representing Los Angeles in Congress, then California Attorney General, then U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. As Attorney General he sued the first Trump administration 120 times and filed the state's first lawsuit against a city for refusing to plan for the homes state law required. He broke with Governor Newsom to vote for Prop 36, the 2024 measure we supported that restored felony charges for repeat theft and drug offenses, and he says he would fully fund it. He opposes the billionaire tax on this ballot, and he says people who are offered shelter should not be allowed to stay on the street. On housing, he says he would declare a state of emergency on his first day, fund the nearly 40,000 subsidized homes that are approved and waiting on a last piece of financing, and end exclusionary zoning near transit. What he has not done is campaign. Becerra finished first in June, 28% to Hilton's 25%, leads 55% to 37% in the latest Berkeley IGS poll, and has treated that lead as a reason to say as little as possible. Asked onstage what voters could expect from him as governor, he declined to name a single commitment: "I would prefer not to run on inflated promises. I will run on my record." By the end of July, Hilton had accepted six debate invitations and Becerra had accepted none. The one debate now on the calendar is September 30, five weeks before Election Day. Menlo College political scientist Melissa Michelson called this "textbook political science," and she is right, but a candidate who won't say what he will do is asking voters to take a lot on faith. We hope Becerra has spent the quiet months building a strong bench of advisors and agency heads. The governor's real job is choosing the people who run the state, and that is exactly where his experience should pay off.

In June we endorsed Josh Fryday, who unfortunately finished third and didn't advance. The general election is now Fiona Ma, a Democrat, against Gloria Romero, a Republican, and Ma is the clear choice. The Lieutenant Governor sits on the State Lands Commission, holds voting seats on the UC Regents, CSU Trustees, and Community Colleges Board of Governors, and chairs the Commission for Economic Development. Most candidates treat this office as a stepping stone. Ma has specific plans for its actual tools. Why vote for Fiona Ma? Fiona Ma started her public service career in San Francisco, serving as the Sunset's Supervisor from 2002 to 2006, and has since held office at every level of California government: six years in the Assembly, where she had more than 60 bills signed into law and served as Speaker pro Tempore, a term on the Board of Equalization, and two terms as State Treasurer. We endorsed her for Treasurer in 2022 and called her the safe and stable choice. She was. I have never lost a race for office, and that is not by accident. When I set out to accomplish something, I commit fully and I deliver. — Fiona Ma, GrowSF questionnaire The Treasurer's job turns out to be direct preparation for this one. Ma chairs the committee that allocates the tax credits that make affordable housing possible, sits on the California Housing Finance Agency board, issued the state's first-ever bonds for community college student housing, and launched the Dream for All down payment program for first-time homebuyers. As Lieutenant Governor she would sit on the boards of the very institutions she has been financing, and she is the only elected official who sits on all three. Her plan would put workforce housing on the 75,000 acres of land that school districts and colleges already own, funded through a zero-interest revolving loan fund, so teachers and college staff can afford to live where they work.

Shirley Weber has done the job competently, and we endorse her for another term. The Secretary of State's primary job is running California's elections, and Weber has done it without drama, which is exactly what you want. Under her tenure, California hit a record 22.6 million registered voters in 2024, and over 5 million Californians signed up for ballot tracking through the "Where's My Ballot" system. She's also expanded same-day voter registration and grown the number of Voter Choice Act counties, which give voters more flexibility in where and when they cast their ballots. When the federal government demanded California's full voter registration database, Social Security numbers included, Weber refused and won in court in January. She has defended mail voting the same way. When the Supreme Court cleared the administration in August to keep pursuing new limits on mail voting, she committed that every eligible Californian will still get a mail ballot and have it counted. And California's rule that a ballot postmarked by Election Day counts if it arrives within seven days held up when the Supreme Court ruled on the question in June. We'd like to see her push harder on campaign finance transparency. The state's Cal-Access disclosure database is difficult to use and makes it too hard to trace certain types of electoral spending. Voters deserve full transparency around political money.

Cohen knows public finance, and she knows San Francisco. Before becoming Controller, Cohen chaired the Budget and Finance Committee and the Audit and Oversight Committee on the SF Board of Supervisors. After that, she ran the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System, a $35 billion pension fund. Now she sits on the boards of CalPERS and CalSTRS, the two biggest public pension funds in the country, with almost $1T in assets, combined. She also went after California's largest-ever charter school fraud. Cohen led a task force that came up with 20 fixes for how the state checks school finances: tougher rules for auditors, faster reporting, and more disclosure. Her office also publishes pay data for over 2 million government workers across 5,000+ agencies. We would like to see the Controller's Office return $15B in unclaimed property such as forgotten bank accounts and uncashed checks that belong to Californians. Other states send it back automatically. California still doesn't. Overall, Cohen has brought transparency and accountability to the state's spending.

The Treasurer chairs CDLAC (which decides how billions in tax-exempt bonds get spent) and CTCAC (which hands out the federal tax credits that make affordable housing possible). If those agencies move slowly, housing doesn't get built. Kounalakis is the only candidate in this race who has actually built housing, financed infrastructure, and managed large-scale investments in the private sector. Kounalakis named three measurable outcomes voters should use to judge her after two years: more housing units financed through state programs with faster time to delivery, pension returns that meet or exceed benchmarks with improved transparency, and significant growth in CalSavers, CalKIDS, ScholarShare 529, and CalABLE enrollment, especially among working families and underserved communities. That kind of accountability is rare in a statewide race. I will focus on lowering financing costs, unlocking capital, and partnering with local governments to move projects from approval to construction faster, because affordability depends on supply. Eleni KounalakisLieutenant Governor of California On fiscal discipline, she's specific: hold the state's debt-service-to-General Fund ratio at or below 6%, publish a public "California Balance Sheet" dashboard tracking bond debt, pension assets, and investment performance in plain language, and push for stable pension returns with downward pressure on fees. California's heavy reliance on capital-gains tax revenue creates boom-and-bust budget cycles. Kounalakis would align cash management with economic cycles, maintaining liquidity during downturns rather than borrowing at the worst time. Before entering public life, Kounalakis spent nearly two decades as a housing developer at AKT Development, building master-planned communities in the Sacramento region where thousands of California families now live. She has firsthand experience with the bond financing, tax credit programs, and capital market tools that the Treasurer's office controls.

Rob Bonta has been an effective Attorney General, and we're happy to endorse him for another term. For San Francisco voters, Bonta's most important work has been on housing. He co-sponsored SB 1037 with Scott Wiener, which gave the AG's office real teeth to fine cities that block housing, and he has used them. His office has forced compliance from cities across California that were illegally stalling housing plans, including settlements with Fullerton, Norwalk, Elk Grove, and Huntington Beach. When Woodside declared the entire town a mountain lion sanctuary to avoid SB 9, Bonta told the town it was breaking state law. Woodside rescinded the policy the same week and started accepting applications. Every home that gets built because a NIMBY city was forced to follow the law makes San Francisco's regional housing market a little less insane. He's also gone after anticompetitive behavior in the rental market. His office got a $7M settlement from Greystar, the nation's largest landlord, for using software to coordinate rent prices with competitors, which is a cartel run through an algorithm. That kind of enforcement matters to every renter in the Bay Area. Bonta has also been active defending California against the Trump administration, filing over 50 lawsuits on issues from immigration to environmental protections. Two of them protect your mail ballot. When a March 2025 executive order tried to force states to throw out ballots cast by Election Day but received a few days later, Bonta co-led the 19-state lawsuit that won a permanent injunction against it in June 2026. When a second order this April directed the Postal Service to mail ballots only to voters on new federal lists, he sued again and won, though the Supreme Court paused that ruling on August 24 on timing grounds, without deciding whether the order is legal.

We recommend voting for Ben Allen for Insurance Commissioner. Allen has the experience, knowledge, and track record to fix California's broken insurance market. In the June primary we endorsed Patrick Wolff while mentioning that Ben Allen was also a good choice. Unfortunately, Patrick Wolff lost, so the November election is a head-to-head matchup between Ben Allen and Jane Kim. We strongly recommend Ben Allen and strongly oppose Jane Kim. California's insurance market is broken. Insurance companies are leaving the state, the state-run FAIR Plan has blown up to 610,000+ policies (up 154% since 2021), and homeowners in fire-prone areas are getting pushed into a bare-bones backup plan that just asked for a 36% rate hike. The next Insurance Commissioner needs to understand what's actually broken and how to fix it. Only one candidate in this race does. Why vote for Ben Allen? Allen has spent over a decade working on insurance, climate, and consumer protection. As a State Senator, he represents the communities devastated by the Palisades Fire, where he spent the aftermath helping hundreds of constituents fight for their insurance claims, an experience he calls "a front-row seat to our broken insurance system." He watched the FAIR Plan nearly collapse under $4 billion in losses from the LA fires, with the costs spread to policyholders statewide through a $1 billion emergency assessment, and he drew the right lesson: letting the FAIR Plan grow unchecked creates systemic risk for everyone. Standing amid smoke, ashes, and uncertainty, I saw what failure looks like. Ben AllenCalifornia State Senator Allen didn't wait for tragedy before acting, though. In 2024, a year before the Palisades Fire, he authored Proposition 4 to authorize a $10 billion bond for wildfire risk reduction and water infrastructure that voters approved.

The Board of Equalization has a fairly narrow role, after most of its powers were stripped in 2017 following an audit that revealed missing funds and signs of nepotism. Governor Brown signed legislation stripping the Board of most of its duties, and the real work went to two new agencies the governor controls. What's left is setting the taxable value of railroad and utility property, overseeing statewide property tax assessment practices for consistency across county assessors, and hearing certain tax appeals. In fact, the office should probably be abolished. Legislators have proposed exactly that, and former board member and State Controller Betty Yee questions how the board "continues to have relevance". Pimentel is the rare candidate who agrees that this elected office shouldn't exist. He campaigns on folding the board's remaining work into the state's other tax agencies, which would end the practice of paying four elected board members $184,000 a year to oversee a technical, administrative function. The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed him "for his willingness to eliminate his own job." California does not suffer from a lack of good intentions. We suffer from a lack of follow-through, accountability, practical execution, and the discipline to say 'NO'. — John Pimentel, GrowSF questionnaire Why vote for John Pimentel? But until the board is abolished, it needs someone who can run it well. The board has been plagued by scandal and mismanagement, and the Legislature has stripped it of most of its powers. The remaining duties are technical and administrative, and the board deserves someone who has actually run large, complicated things. His platform is practical: modernize the board's oversight of county assessors with shared data tools, speed up assessment appeals and refunds, and use the office to push for ending the sales tax on groceries and prepared food. Pimentel's record is heavy on execution.

Stefani has had a productive first term. Newsom signed seven of her bills into law in 2025. Highlights include the Restitution First Act (AB 1213), which makes sure crime victims get paid back before other fines are collected; a license plate cover ban (AB 1085) that closes a loophole criminals used to dodge toll cameras; and Wyland's Law (AB 1363), which closes a deadly gap in how California enforces gun-restraining orders. Gun safety is her signature issue. She founded the SF chapter of Moms Demand Action and wrote SF's first-in-California ghost gun ban as a Supervisor. We do have some concerns about Stefani's alignment with Sacramento special interests, particularly on issues where the priorities of state-level advocacy groups don't always match what's best for San Francisco. We'll be watching her second term closely. But on the merits of what she's done so far, she's earned our endorsement.

We recommend voting Yes to retain Justices Kelli M. Evans and Joshua Groban on the California Supreme Court. Our rule is the same as for the Court of Appeal: retain a judge unless there is serious misconduct on the record, or poor judgment that deviates from legal norms. Evans was appointed by Governor Newsom in 2022 and Groban by Governor Brown in 2018. Neither appears in the Commission on Judicial Performance public discipline record, and we found no organized campaign against either of them.

This office matters far less than it did the last time you voted on it. Under the budget Newsom signed in June, a commissioner appointed by the governor takes over the Department of Education from the superintendent on January 15, 2027. Whoever wins this race is sworn in earlier that month and will run the department for a matter of days. The superintendent gets a vote on the State Board of Education, which grows from 11 members to 13 and decides what students are expected to learn, approves textbooks, and runs the state tests. The office also comes with seats on the boards that run the community colleges, CSU, and UC, and a platform to speak for public schools. Why Barrera? Textbook approval is the biggest lever this office has left, and reading is where California is failing. Only 47% of kids read at grade level, and SFUSD is in the bottom 10% of 287 districts. California's answer in 2025 was a phonics law that districts can adopt or ignore. Mississippi went further, moving from 49th in fourth-grade reading in 2013 to about the national average by 2019 by training teachers in phonics, putting reading coaches in struggling schools, and holding back third graders who couldn't read. Richard Barrera calls it "worth studying seriously." He would have the Board track a short list of statewide outcomes and report publicly on whether they improve, rather than keep adding goals. California does not suffer from a shortage of goals. It suffers from scattered responsibility and uneven follow-through. Richard BarreraSan Diego Unified School Board Trustee At San Diego Unified, Barrera pushed the district to require every graduate to complete the courses needed for UC and CSU admission, and he says the share of Latino students meeting that bar rose from 25% to 70% within a decade. He did that with a district trustee's power to set graduation requirements.

Scott Wiener has spent the last decade as one of California's most persistent and effective pro-housing legislators. As a former San Francisco supervisor and now the state senator representing District 11 (San Francisco), he has built a record on the issues that most directly shape San Francisco's quality of life and cost of living: housing production, transit, and government's ability to actually deliver. In this field, Wiener stands out because he has already passed big, controversial laws in hostile political conditions, and that matters in Washington, where rhetoric is cheap and follow-through is not. Like every candidate, there are things we don't align with Wiener on, but he's still the best choice for getting results. Results over rhetoric. My job isn't to maintain ideological purity; it's to improve people's lives. Scott WienerState Senator, District 11 Why vote for Scott Wiener? Scott Wiener's top policy goals are: 1. Build more housing to lower the cost of living Wiener's strongest argument in this race is simple: he has actually passed pro-housing law at scale. SB 35 forced cities that weren't building enough housing to approve qualifying projects automatically. SB 423 extended and tightened that framework. And SB 79, signed in 2025, legalized mid-rise apartment buildings near major transit stops throughout California. Those laws did not solve California's housing crisis on their own, but they changed the terms of the fight, making it harder for cities to dodge their housing obligations and easier to get badly needed homes approved. But state law can only do so much. The country is short 8 million homes, and Congress controls the federal tools that decide how housing gets paid for and built: tax credits, Section 8 vouchers, and environmental review rules. Wiener wants to expand housing tax credits, fund rental assistance, reward cities that build, and cut through federal red tape. He treats housing as both a building problem and a rules problem.

Only a small piece of southern San Francisco is in this district; most of it is San Mateo County. Mullin has represented it since 2022, after ten years in the State Assembly, where he was Speaker pro Tempore from 2014 to 2022. In Congress he sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, and this year he brought home $12.8 million in community project funding for the district, including $960,000 for the Visitacion Valley Family Center and $250,000 for Crocker Amazon Playground. His opponent, Charles Hoelter, is a retired UPS supervisor running on term limits, voter ID, and barring transgender athletes from women's sports. Neither candidate returned our questionnaire. Mullin is an effective incumbent with a record of delivering for the district, and he has our vote.

We endorsed Dorsey when he first ran in 2022, and he has spent the four years since passing laws to help people get off drugs and into treatment. Before joining the Board he spent 14 years in the City Attorney's office, where he worked on the nine-year legal fight for marriage equality and the lawsuit that saved City College from closure, and later served as SFPD's communications director. It was my own journey in recovery from addiction that moved me to ask — first Mayor London Breed, and then District 6 voters — for a role on the Board of Supervisors. Matt DorseySupervisor, District 6 Why vote for Matt Dorsey? 1. Recovery first Supervisor Dorsey has done more to redirect San Francisco's drug policy toward treatment and recovery than any of his colleagues. His Recovery First ordinance passed the Board unanimously and was signed by Mayor Lurie in May 2025, making long-term remission the official goal of the city's drug programs. This July, his Drug-Free Housing ordinance passed the Board 7-4, which requires the city to prioritize drug-free options in permanent supportive housing. That's a big change in city policy: today just 42 of the city's roughly 8,500 supportive housing units are drug-free, even though the Health Department reports that 26% of the city's fatal overdoses happened inside supportive housing in 2024, more than died on the street. People in recovery shouldn't be forced to live among drug and alcohol abuse just because they need housing assistance. He also co-sponsored the RESET Center, which gives people arrested for public drug use an alternative to an ER visit or jail, both connecting people with recovery resources and saving taxpayers money. Dorsey calls it the most important policy shift since the fentanyl crisis began. 2. A fully staffed police force Dorsey has relentlessly focused on solving SFPD's staffing shortage.

Sherrill brings real policy experience and a laser focus on responsive, effective government. He served as a senior policy advisor in the Bloomberg administration in New York, led the Mayor's Office of Innovation here, and as Supervisor has cut red tape while focusing on public safety, small businesses, and the cost of living. District 2 agrees: he won 69% of the vote in June, and he faces no serious opposition in November. Without safe streets, parents won't let their kids walk to school, businesses can't keep their doors open, and people lose faith in the city. Rebuilding that trust starts with visible results like cleaner sidewalks, faster responses when people call for help, and better coordination across city departments to address public drug use and improve street conditions. Stephen SherrillSupervisor, District 2 Why vote for Stephen Sherrill? Public safety: Sherrill co-sponsored legislation to speed up 911 responses near schools and parks, co-sponsored Mayor Lurie's RV homelessness legislation, supported the Recovery First ordinance expanding sober housing, and led the city's new free firearm storage program with SFPD. Small business: Van Ness from City Hall to Broadway has 53% ground-floor vacancy. Sherrill's plan to let stores fill those longtime-vacant spaces passed unanimously, and he helped extend the First Year Free program, which has waived startup fees for over 13,000 small businesses. Making government work: When he ran the Mayor's Office of Innovation, his team built the technology that finally let San Francisco's nine street outreach teams across four departments share one view of the people they serve: better care, faster service, lower costs. He runs his own office the same way, measuring success by constituent satisfaction and follow-through.

Wong was appointed by Mayor Lurie in December 2025, chosen from five finalists in an open process, and won the June special election with 46% of first-choice votes in a five-candidate field, nearly double his closest rival, and finished with 64.3% in the final ranked-choice round. He grew up in the Sunset, attended Lincoln High, and came to the job with a long record of public service: labor organizer, legislative aide to a former D4 Supervisor, policy lead at the Children's Council of San Francisco, Community College Board Trustee, and First Lieutenant in the Army National Guard. The Sunset is the community I love and the only home I've ever known. Serving as Supervisor is the greatest honor of my life. I will approach this work with a public servant's heart. As a veteran, I will always put my community and my country first—above partisanship or ideology. Alan WongSupervisor, District 4 What he's done in office In less than a year, Wong has built the record we hoped for: His first vote was for Mayor Lurie's Family Zoning Plan, breaking with the district's anti-density history. He said blocking it risked "losing local control, which is not acceptable." He co-sponsored doubling the maximum fine for sideshows after one took over Kirkham and La Playa, matching Oakland's and San Jose's penalties. He co-sponsored accepting a $6.25M federal grant that funds 50 police officer positions, a police retention agreement, and Supervisor Dorsey's drug-free supportive housing legislation. His office is helping Sunset residents petition SFMTA to convert streets to angled parking, adding spaces without slowing the buses. The Great Highway Wong's first act in office was submitting a ballot measure to re-open the Great Highway, reflecting the majority view in his district. It fell one Board signature short. That effort has since been superseded by the citizen-led Great Highway for Everyone Act, which would reopen the road to cars on weekdays while keeping it car-free on weekends.

Manny Yekutiel has dropped out. He ended his campaign on October 1. His name is still on your ballot, but he is not running. Patel is with us on housing. She supports Mayor Lurie's Family Zoning Plan: "Nearly 50 years after we downzoned, ending the freeze was necessary," she told Mission Local. She supported lowering the inclusionary housing rate, which Nguyen opposed, and she wants permitting deadlines that escalate automatically when the City misses them. We also love how she makes decisions. She reads the research and lets the data shape her positions. GrowSF will keep publishing research and polling to help shape City policy, and we're excited to have a supervisor in District 8 who will read it. Patel worked on social innovation and civic participation in the Obama White House. At DoorDash she helped launch more than 300 markets and built the team that advocated for its restaurants. Her campaign's sibling site, TLDR SF, publishes a city budget explorer and twelve years of Board of Supervisors votes, about 139,000 of them. When data contradicts what I expected to find, I change my position, not the data. Darshini PatelCommunity Advocate Why vote for Darshini Patel? 1. Get the rezoned homes built The state requires San Francisco to plan for 82,069 new homes by 2031. The Controller's Office of Economic Analysis projects that the Family Zoning Plan will add 8,500 to 14,600 homes over twenty years. Patel's housing platform starts from that gap: "Rezoning was necessary, but it's not sufficient alone." Along with enforcing permit deadlines, she would extend the fee reductions that expire this November and build local financing tools that don't depend on federal money. 2. Measure results, then publish them She wants 311 judged by whether problems come back, not by how fast tickets close, with the results published by district. She says Muni has not published route-level performance data since 2018, and she wants it published again.

We recommend voting for Joaquín Torres for Assessor-Recorder. This office assesses more than $350 billion in taxable property and keeps the city's official records. Though Torres is running unopposed, he has earned the seat on the merits. Torres inherited an in-progress $55 million replacement of the office's decades-old technology, started under his predecessor Carmen Chu, and carried it to completion. We don't want to diminish Chu's role in that important transition. She deserves all the credit for the hard work getting it rolling, but Torres does deserve the credit for ensuring it completed successfully. In December 2024 he made San Francisco the first county in California to put its recorded documents online for free, more than 7 million of them going back to 1990, replacing a system that charged residents for copies of their own deeds. He did it while keeping assessments on schedule through the most volatile commercial real estate market in memory and, by his own account, the highest volume of assessment appeals since the Great Recession.

Phil is a former public school teacher who led STEM policy across 20+ states and 300+ schools, and his colleagues elected him Board President unanimously in January. Since joining in 2024 he has pushed the district toward things you can measure. He was the deciding vote that brought algebra back to 8th grade, and he made fiscal sustainability part of how the superintendent is evaluated, helping move SFUSD out of the budget hole that nearly cost teachers their jobs. "We are seeing literacy and math outcomes improving for the first time in years, even as we underwent significant budget reductions last year."

Ball is a college campus planner who has done this job at other California community colleges. He was a campus planner for Folsom Lake College's 2025 facilities master plan and worked on state capital funding proposals for Long Beach City College and Pasadena City College. His argument is that enrollment, academic programs, facilities, and money are one problem rather than four, and that trustees should be judging decisions against a five-year outlook instead of the next budget cycle. He wants the Board to track the college's 2024 enrollment plan against actual results, and to find a use for the Downtown Campus that closed this year.

Lace teaches at a Title I school, chairs her department, and sits on her school site council, which puts her on the SFUSD end of the pipeline to City College she wants to widen. She would expand Bridge to Success, the program that walks SFUSD seniors through enrolling at City College, and restore credit-recovery classes at high school campuses instead of only at the Mission Center. A licensed cosmetologist herself, she points out that San Francisco has no public college program in cosmetology, barbering, or manicuring, so students commute to San Bruno or Oakland, and that City College's career-technical graduates see an average 44% wage increase. She also takes on the third finding in that warning, the one about trustees interfering in the Chancellor's job. A trustee who promises to direct the hiring of specific employees or bypass the Chancellor from the dais misunderstands the office.

Tam, a former City College student, has spent 25 years as a municipal financial advisor and has worked with more than 30 California community colleges on their financing plans. He has diagnosed the college's money problem: enrollment has fallen by a quarter in a decade, and by his count a state guarantee that props up funding for shrinking colleges has grown from 6.6% to 19.1% of City College's state funding in four years. That guarantee will stay flat from here on, which Tam calls a fiscal cliff. City College's next board inherits a deficit, an accreditation clock, and an enrollment problem. Ball knows how a campus gets built and paid for, Lace knows where the students would come from, and Tam knows how to read the books.

We endorsed Barz for the Democratic County Central Committee in March 2024, and this is the job her career has been pointed at the whole time. She co-founded Seamless Bay Area to push the region's agencies to work as one system rather than two dozen fiefdoms, and co-authored SPUR's 2015 report making that case. She worked on Clipper and the Clipper START low-income fare discount at MTC, and has spent the years since at Apple putting transit cards into Apple Wallet across North America and Europe. All of it is what riders use on every trip: how you pay and how you get through the gate. That matters more than usual right now. If the regional transit measure fails in November, BART's own board materials lay out a 63% cut in train hours, a 30% fare increase, a 9 p.m. shutdown, and ten station closures starting in January 2027. She is specific about what she would do with the seat. She supports the new fare gates and still wants them fixed, because the lines they create at rush hour are their own problem. She would expand the transit ambassador program as the cheapest way to put more staff where riders can see them. She wants BART's outreach contracts tied to results, pointing to the $350,000 contract an audit found had gotten one person into treatment over two years. And she wants BART to stop treating ground leases as its whole development strategy and win state authority to capture more of the value its stations create. BART needs to do its part to address the shortage of affordable homes, but it also doesn't benefit low-income workers to build transit-oriented housing next to a transit system that can't afford to run transit.

We endorsed Ferguson in 2024, and Mayor Lurie appointed her to the Board in January to fill the seat Alan Wong left when he became District 4 Supervisor. She is running unopposed for the rest of that term. Half a year in, she has the college's cost problem down to specifics. Salaries and benefits consume more than 90% of the unrestricted general fund against a state Chancellor's Office guideline of 85%, and as she points out, that share keeps climbing even when headcount holds flat, because the revenue underneath it is not growing. She backed Chancellor Messina's division reorganization as one answer. Her enrollment plan follows the same logic: put money where demand already exceeds seats. That means health care pathways, where City College's nursing and allied health programs are capacity-constrained in the largest employment sector in San Francisco, and the workforce pipelines that already work, including CityBuild and the fire and police training programs. She came to this from student homelessness policy in the state Legislature, and before that she was student body president of a community college of more than 17,000 students, where she oversaw a $1.4M budget. City College's finances will be decided in the next two years, not the next decade. Ferguson has spent her first six months on the Board learning exactly where the money goes.

Prop 1 would deliver the funding to build about 45,000 subsidized homes that are already fully designed, permitted, and ready to break ground. Bonds are required to fund this construction because California shut down ongoing funding in 2012 when the Legislature dissolved local redevelopment agencies. Prior to 2012, more than $1B per year was available to build low-income housing, but ever since it has been paid for by one-time bonds that voters are required to approve: $2.1B in 2002, $2.85B in 2006, $4B in 2018. Each bond gets fully committed to projects across the state, and then the pipeline freezes until the next voter-approved bond. That is a terrible way to fund something you need every year, and it is fair for voters to be annoyed by it. But the good news is that these bonds work. Averaged across past bonds, every $100,000 of state money turns into a home for a low-income family trying to make ends meet. As of June 2024, the 2018 bond delivered or funded 22,735 homes with the $2.34B awarded so far. Note, however, that not all have been built; those homes are at every stage from just-funded to fully-occupied. Unfortunately, costs have risen from about $100,000 per home to about $250,000, so we estimate this $11B bond will fund about 40,000 homes. We want to note that California is particularly expensive because of high labor costs and expensive design rules that the government requires for these projects. RAND found that California builds subsidized housing at 1.5 times the cost of market-rate housing here, and four times the Texas average. Voters must choose between funding a program that's expensive but works, or waiting for regulators to fix their self-imposed high construction costs. We think voters should authorize the bond and push for better cost controls. Every year a permitted project waits, its costs climb and its financing has to be rebuilt, so a delay itself burns public money. Vote Yes on Prop 1 to build the homes California has already approved.

California has a poorly designed tax system. We cap property taxes, starving the state of education funding, so we make up for it with high income and capital gains taxes. But capital gains are unpredictable, so in boom years we might have a $100B surplus and in bust years we might run an $80B deficit. This means a rainy day fund is required to capture the surplus when we're flush so we don't have to cut services or raise taxes when we're not. Reasonable people can disagree about the right amount to save, and whether the government should be forced to do so, so consider this endorsement a weak yes. Two things voters may want to consider when deciding how to vote: Both OpenAI and Anthropic are poised to launch record-shattering IPOs in the coming year. If voters enact Prop 2, then the state will save more of that money than it otherwise would, without raising taxes. The flipside is that Prop 2 would make boom-year taxpayer refunds less likely. Rebates like the 2022 stimulus checks happen only when revenue exceeds the state's constitutional spending limit two years running, and Prop 2 counts rainy day deposits against that limit only once the money is spent (see the Gann limit above). Overall, we think building up the rainy day fund is the right choice.

Higher taxes on high incomes raise more money for the state, but some of the people paying them leave, and some invest or work less. The question is how much of each. Luckily, we already know the effects of this tax: 535 top-bracket taxpayers left the state after this tax was enacted, against a backdrop of 66,936 total individuals, or about 0.8%. These top-bracket taxpayers make up roughly 2% of all taxpayers, but they account for about half of all state income taxes. We think voters should make these tax rates permanent and vote yes. Note: We object to the title of this proposition, which implies funding specifically for "Children's Education and Health Care." That's false, and Attorney General Bonta should have intervened to require an honest title.

Since San Francisco was not banned from running a public financing program, we were able to analyze its impact on our elections. From 2012 to 2019, donations to Supervisor candidates were matched 2-to-1 on every dollar, but after 2019 the city changed to a 6-to-1 match on just the first $150. We analyzed every itemized contribution to SF candidates since 2012 and found that after the city raised its match to 6-to-1 in 2019, the median donation went down while city funding was largely unchanged. So someone who could have given $450 in 2019 would just give $150 now. So it saved donors money while taxpayers picked up the bill. Maybe this would be worth it if it resulted in more diversity in elections, or in long-shot candidates making it, but elections did not change. The Ethics Commission's data shows incumbents winning at the same rate and fewer candidates running, while 2024 set a spending record and taxpayers picked up $8.8M of it. Public financing in San Francisco has meant donors give less, taxpayers pay more, and elections come out the same. Vote no on Prop 4.

In 2021, 46 candidates ran to replace Governor Newsom. Larry Elder led that field with 3.6 million votes, 48% of those cast for a replacement, while 7.9 million voted to keep Newsom. Had the recall passed by a single vote, Elder would have become governor with fewer than half the votes Newsom got to keep his job. That prize is why interest groups treat state recalls as a do-over of the election they just lost. San Francisco already runs recalls the way Prop 5 proposes. In 2022 we removed three school board members and our District Attorney in single yes-or-no votes, the mayor appointed replacements, and the city moved on. When recalled school board president Gabriela López ran again that November, she lost decisively, which settled any argument about whether the recall spoke for the voters. This is an easy fix and an easy yes.

Prop 37 will help restart condo construction, which has fallen to just 3% of new multifamily construction. Condos are the starter homes families can actually afford, and a critical problem stopped their construction: construction defect liability. Insuring a condo project costs three to four times what a rental costs, so builders build rentals instead. Prop 37 fixes this for homes in its program. Builders who join get a reformed defect process: they can repair problems directly and get a signed release when repairs are done, instead of spending years in court. The down payment loans then supply buyers for the new starter homes. We are normally skeptical of down payment subsidies because helping buyers bid on a fixed stock of homes simply raises prices for everyone. But Prop 37's loans work only on new construction, so the demand lands where supply can respond. We would have preferred this fix by legislation in Sacramento, and it almost got there. AB 1903 passed the Assembly 68 to 0 and cleared the Senate, then died when the session ended before a final vote. Until Sacramento tries again, Prop 37 is the only relief available. It's an experiment, and the Legislative Analyst's Office cannot say whether it will spur construction. But borrowers repay the loans, and if the program fails, taxpayers won't owe anything. Let's give it a shot and see if it works.

Prop 38 was filed by billionaire Gary Michelson, and every dollar on the FPPC's list of top donors to the Yes campaign comes from him or from Meyer Luskin, both co-founders of the institute it would fund. The eligibility criteria for the $4.2B institute half describe the nonprofit institute at UCLA that Michelson co-founded and chairs, down to the two programs his gift created: a nonprofit existing by January 1, 2025, at least 200,000 square feet, $250M in pledges, and $50M each for vaccine and microbiome programs. A UCLA spokesperson confirmed that no other institution qualifies. If Washington cuts research funding, the Legislature can fund scientific research in any year's budget and award it competitively. It does not take a bond. And California already ran this experiment with $8.5B for stem cell research in 2004 and 2020: the only FDA-approved treatment that arose arrived after 21 years, for an ultra-rare disease, while 92% of awards through 2012 went to institutions tied to the agency's board. Immunotherapy is not a field short of money. One immunotherapy drug, Keytruda, sold $31.7B in 2025, and private investors chase every promising lead in this field. Public money is not needed where private money is abundant. Prop 38 would cost $500M to $600M per year for about 20 years from a General Fund that the Legislative Analyst says is running a structural imbalance this year, with deficits projected every year after. Research is a good cause and it's great that the state and federal government fund it, and that is exactly why it deserves better than a bond one donor wrote around his own institute. Vote no.

In-person impersonation, the only fraud a photo ID check can stop, is about the rarest event in American elections: a Brennan Center review of the Heritage Foundation's database of proven fraud cases found just 10 cases across billions of votes. Prop 39's citizenship checks ask only for officials' "best efforts" against government data, and the state already verifies your identity against DMV and Social Security records when you register to vote. The real change lands on the four out of five Californians who vote by mail. Prop 39 makes you write four digits of an ID number on your return envelope, and they must match the ID number sitting in your registration file. Forget which number you registered with, or transpose a digit, and your valid ballot has a brand-new way to get rejected, on top of the signature check that already works. For this, the Legislative Analyst's Office estimates it will cost in the tens of millions to low hundreds of millions of dollars per year, all to chase a non-existent problem, all while making your own ballot easier to reject. Vote no.

Prop 40 is a one-time tax collected to fund programs that run forever, and the money is smaller and less certain than the campaign claims. The Legislative Analyst's Office expects tens of billions of dollars, not the campaign's $100B, plus an ongoing loss of income tax revenue of less than $1B per year as wealthy taxpayers leave. Six billionaires already left before the residency date arrived, taking an estimated $27B of the projected haul with them along with the yearly income taxes we no longer get. The federal Medicaid cuts are real and hospitals do need the money, which is exactly why they need money that will actually arrive. The money may also show up late or never. No state has taxed net worth this way, and the measure schedules its own court fight to run into late 2027. A clinic cannot make payroll with revenue that is tied up in court. You do not have to take our word for it. The California Teachers Association, Planned Parenthood, the California Medical Association, and the state's hospitals, the groups this money is supposed to rescue, oppose it, and so does Governor Newsom. This same ballot carries a durable alternative we endorse: Prop 3, which keeps the existing tax rates on high earners. Fund health care with money that shows up. Vote no on Prop 40, and yes on Prop 3.

California's constitution caps how much tax revenue the state can spend each year. The cap is called the Gann limit, after the 1979 ballot measure that created it. But a ballot measure can exempt itself: declare that its tax revenue does not count against the cap, and the limit never applies. Prop 40, on this same ballot, does exactly that. Prop 41 closes the loophole: no new state tax may exempt itself from the limit. A constitutional limit that any measure can evade in a definitions section is not law, it is decoration. We are not fans of the Gann limit. Since 1978, California has capped property taxes, capped spending, and leaned on volatile income and capital gains taxes to fill the gap, which is why the budget lurches from surplus to deficit. We would happily see that system rebuilt. But the way to change a constitutional limit is to put the change to voters directly, as Prop 2 on this ballot does with the limit's savings rules. It is not to leave a loophole open for whichever campaign hires the cleverest lawyers. One thing to know before voting yes: the audit half is weak machinery. The State Auditor must recommend 10% annual savings from every audited program whether or not the waste exists, nothing compels a program to adopt any recommendation, and the Legislative Analyst's Office calls the savings unknown. Constitutional limits bind until voters change them. Fix the Gann limit; don't evade it. Vote yes.

Prop 42 closes a door that should never have been open: taxing Californians on wealth they have not realized and may never see. It bars new state taxes on owning savings and assets and bars retroactive taxes that reach back to conduct or residency before a law takes effect. Every existing tax stays: when you sell stock, collect royalties, or cash out a business, California taxes you today and will tax you the same way after Prop 42. Ownership taxes fail on their own mechanics. Assets without market prices cannot be fairly valued, illiquid holdings force owners to sell or borrow to pay bills on paper gains that may evaporate, and retroactive taxes break the basic bargain that rules are known before they bind. These defects are not hypothetical: they are why Prop 40, this ballot's one-time wealth tax, needs installment schedules, deferral mechanisms, and appraisal fights just to function. This is a constitutional lockout, and we are generally wary of those. But defining what kind of thing the state may tax is exactly what constitutions are for: the federal income tax required an amendment to exist, Prop 13 already caps property tax rates, and a future majority can amend this the same way this majority enacts it. Know what you are voting on, though. Prop 42 was funded almost entirely by Building a Better California, the committee backed by Sergey Brin and other tech founders, and its protected-asset list (business interests, digital assets, intellectual property) reads like their portfolios. It also carries a clause that voids Prop 40 outright if Prop 42 gets more yes votes. We oppose Prop 40 on its own merits, so neither changes our vote. Judge the text, not the donors. Prop 42 keeps every tax California has and stops only the ones that tax you for owning what you already earned. Vote yes.

Since the 2017 Upland court decision, special taxes (that is, taxes which can only be spent on specific purposes) have been treated differently depending on how they got on the ballot. For local special taxes, the threshold is 66.66% of voters if the local legislature proposes it, or just 50% of voters if a campaign pays to gather signatures instead. We think treating the same law differently based on how it gets on the ballot is unfair and inconsistent. Tax policy should be written by the legislators we elect to write it, with hearings and amendments, not by whichever campaign can afford signature gatherers. California already puts too many tax questions to voters directly. A tax that skips the legislature should at least have to win broad support. In deciding our position on Prop 43, we considered the fairness and consistency of the rules governing special taxes, the permanence of earmarks, and the impact on majority rule. Fundamentally, we think all taxes should be subject to the same rules, regardless of how they get on the ballot. We also strongly believe that taxes which land in the general fund should just require a simple majority. Special taxes, in contrast, restrict the use of revenue to specific purposes, limiting the flexibility of future majorities to allocate funds as they see fit, and therefore bind future decision-makers to the choices of the present. We think special taxes should require a supermajority to pass, ensuring that such permanent commitments have broad support. A slim majority of voters should not be able to impose permanent financial obligations on future generations. The strongest objection is majority rule: under a two-thirds threshold, 35% of local voters can block what 65% support. But a permanent earmark binds majorities too. A tax that no future majority can touch should have to win a supermajority once, and that protects majority rule over more years than it offends it in one election. Vote yes on Prop 43.

Prop 44 is SEIU-UHW's fourth try at regulating a healthcare industry by ballot measure, after voters rejected all three of its dialysis initiatives. The target this time is nonprofit community clinics, where operators say the union is organizing, and the tool is a rule that every clinic spend at least 90% of its revenue on "mission-related expenses." A 90% floor sounds reasonable. But everything else a clinic pays for has to fit into the other 10%, and the Legislative Analyst's Office found that clinics today average about 80%, so most community clinics in the state would owe a penalty. That penalty is the entire shortfall. The measure also never defines its central term: the Attorney General writes the definition after the election, so a clinic that pays for patient vans or community outreach could be penalized like a profiteer. An analysis commissioned by the clinics puts first-year penalties at $1.7B, and the clinics are suing in federal court to stop it. The people who actually run the safety net, the California Primary Care Association, the California Medical Association, and Planned Parenthood, all oppose it, at a moment when federal Medicaid cuts are already squeezing clinics that serve 4.2 million Medi-Cal patients. A labor dispute belongs at the bargaining table. Don't let it be settled by fining the clinics your neighbors depend on. Vote no.

Environmental review in California has no clock, and finishing it buys no certainty. An agency can take years to review a housing project or a solar farm, and once it's finally approved a single lawsuit can void it and send everyone back to the start. The only guaranteed winner is whoever wanted nothing built. Prop 45 puts the process on deadlines for essential projects: housing, water, clean energy, clinics, schools, broadband, and transit. Agencies get 30 days to deem an application complete, 90 business days to rule on an exemption, and 365 business days to finish an environmental report, and an applicant can force a decision when an agency blows a deadline. Lawsuits must finish, appeals included, within 270 days, and a court can halt the piece of a project that breaks the law but can no longer kill the whole thing. Nothing is exempted; every project still completes environmental review under the same laws. The Sierra Club objects that narrowing what opponents can sue over weakens enforcement, and that is the real trade: Prop 45 moves power from whoever can afford a lawsuit to whoever follows the written rules. We think that is the right trade, applicants can choose whether to use the faster process, and the Legislature can amend it by a two-thirds vote, which most initiatives never allow. The costs land where they should, too: the Legislative Analyst's Office expects start-up costs for private projects to be covered by applicant fees and reimbursements, and likely long-term net savings for government from the reduced workload. The Legislature proved the logic in 2025 when it exempted most infill housing from CEQA. Prop 45 extends the same logic to the rest of what California is short of. Delay is a policy choice, and you pay for it in rent, energy bills, and water rates. Vote yes.

Prop A is a common-sense solution to an obvious problem: City Hall has too much bureaucracy that slows everything down. Complex organizations with tens of thousands of employees need Directly Responsible Individuals who can be held accountable for failures. The ultimate Directly Responsible Individual is the Mayor, and voters decide if he or she has done a good job. But currently the Mayor lacks the power to hold individuals accountable in many departments because they are shielded by commissions that don't answer to the Mayor. What we get instead is diffusion of responsibility, chaos, and failure. Prop A fixes that. A San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report counted 152 commissions cluttering City Hall. Every commission and unaccountable layer of bureaucracy blurs responsibility, so when something fails nobody is responsible and nothing is fixed. Two decades of well-intentioned but poorly executed ballot measures built this broken system, and it's time to fix it. Prop A restores a functional chain of command so that individuals are clearly responsible for success or failure. Departments will answer to elected individuals, not unelected commissioners, so voters can actually hold them accountable. Every link in the chain of command will now end with you. Vote yes on Prop A.

San Francisco currently pays for subsidized low-income homes (often misleadingly called "affordable homes") by taxing the construction of new homes. The tax is called inclusionary housing: builders must rent or sell a share of the homes in every new building below market, or pay a fee instead, and that loss comes out of the project just as a tax would. New UC Irvine research found that these taxation schemes cut new home construction by nearly a third. And since subsidized low-income homes only get built when the regular market-rate projects around them do, the tax suppresses both kinds. The current tax scheme raises rents for everyone. Adding up the higher rents everyone pays because of that lost housing, each subsidized low-income home the policy produces costs renters about $800,000. Building one directly, without this tax, only costs about $441,000. In May 2026, Supervisor Melgar and Mayor Lurie made a deal with the nonprofits who build low-income housing: the nonprofits would stop fighting a cut to the tax, and in exchange the City would grow the Housing Trust Fund. The Board delivered the first half on July 14, 2026, when it cut the tax from 15% to 5%. Prop C is the second half. We think this is a good deal, and Prop C is how voters keep the City's end of it. The lower tax is what makes every kind of home cheaper to build, which puts downward pressure on rents across the city. The bigger fund replaces the subsidy the tax used to squeeze out of builders, and it does so the cheap way, by paying for homes directly instead of through lost housing. Strictly speaking, the cut is already law and does not depend on Prop C. But the nonprofits stood down on the strength of this fund, and if voters reject it, the fight over the rate starts right back up. We typically oppose set-asides, but this one is built well: growth caps at 3% per year once the fund reaches $125M, and the Board can freeze or trim contributions in bad budget years.

San Francisco is forced to vote on too many ballot measures. This year we have 10, in 2024 and 2022 we had 15, and in 2016 we voted on 24! Meanwhile, Oakland voted on just three in 2024. The problem is that San Francisco has the lowest number of required signatures in the state to put a measure on the ballot: just 2% of voters. Our peer cities range from 5% to 10%. Since it's so easy to run a ballot measure, the ballot has become an easy way for a small group of special interests to enact a law that can never be changed by our elected Board of Supervisors. Laws that are not easy to fix should not be this easy to enact. Beyond just shortening the ballot, we also like that it ends the ability of a minority of Supervisors to place a measure directly on the ballot and the ability for the Mayor to unilaterally place measures on the ballot. This will end the practice of using the ballot as a backstop to pass bad laws. Now our elected leaders will actually need a majority to enact new laws! Vote yes on Prop D to shorten your ballot.

San Francisco's tangled purchasing rules gave us the $1.7M toilet: a cheaper prefab model existed, but a City rule banned buying it from Nevada. That rule, which barred contracting with companies from 30 states, forced City departments to file 538 waivers in a single year, and it took seven years before the Board admitted failure and repealed it. Meanwhile, buying anything through City Hall still takes about $25,000 of process, six to twelve months, and up to 14 departments, under rules scattered across more than 100 sections of code. Nobody is in charge of the rules, so nobody can fix them. Prop E puts one person in charge: The City Administrator will write one purchasing rulebook, every department will follow it, and either the Board of Supervisors or the Mayor can reject bad rules. A 2024 law that simplified purchasing for small projects shows that better rules lead to better outcomes. Rec and Park says the new method cuts playground delivery from several years to 12 to 18 months, and its first project, Bernal Heights Playground, was renewed for $1.3M. Vote yes on Prop E.

When a City department fails, you expect the Mayor to fix it. But Mayor Lurie says he can hire and fire just 6% of the City's department heads, and that replacing a failing one can take six to twelve months. Most of the rest answer to unelected commissions, which pick the candidates and decide who keeps the job. The Mayor you elected can only make a recommendation. Prop F closes that gap. The Mayor would choose department heads, reorganize departments that aren't working, and answer to you for the results. As SPUR adviser and former City Controller Ed Harrington put it, "if you want the mayor to be held responsible, you have to give them authority to make decisions." The checks are real. The Board of Supervisors can still block any reorganization, and on police accountability the measure cuts the other way: appointing the police-accountability director moves from the Mayor to the Police Commission. Yes, this is Mayor Lurie's own measure, and it gives his office more power. It also gives you someone to hold responsible. Vote yes on Prop F.

San Francisco has voted on this twice. In 2022, we rejected a measure to keep cars on the Great Highway, 65% to 35%. In 2024, we passed Prop K, 55% to 45%, and built Sunset Dunes. Rec and Park's sensors recorded 1.7M visits in its first year, more than half of them on weekdays (the very days Prop G would give back to cars). We estimate that about 500,000 of those sensor detections were new, which is still a lot of park use. Prop G asks the whole city to vote on the same question a third time, and it would not be the last. It writes a weekday-and-weekend schedule into law that only voters can change: the Board of Supervisors could amend technical details with eight votes, but it couldn't move the Friday closing back to noon, where the old compromise had it. A schedule like that should be the Board's to adjust as conditions change. Instead, every tweak would mean another citywide election. Getting Prop G on the ballot took only about 10,600 signatures, 2% of registered voters. Prop D would raise that bar to 8%, so a small group can't keep putting a settled question back on your ballot. Vote no on Prop G. Let's all move on.

Muni is running out of money. Pandemic relief is gone, and the SFMTA projects a $307M deficit next year, growing to $434M within five years. The agency says that without new money it would cut up to 20 routes, run longer waits on the rest, and end regular service at 9 p.m. Muni has done its part. Since 2020 the SFMTA has cut $246M in costs, mostly by eliminating more than 500 vacant positions, and its new two-year budget eliminates 89 more and trims $20M in non-labor spending. It also cut some service in summer 2025 to help close a $50M gap. Even so, the balanced budget leans on a $200M state loan that only buys time. We're skeptical of that collapse story. City Hall would never actually let Muni cut a third of its service; it would quietly backfill from a General Fund the Controller projects will be $741.7M short in FY 2028-29, and the cuts would land on parks, street cleaning, and everything else instead. What Prop H really does is raise new revenue so City Hall can avoid that budget fight. That's fine, but we wish lawmakers were honest about it. The real choice is whether Muni gets its own funding or its deficit quietly eats the rest of the budget. Funding it directly is the better deal, and the price is reasonable: most homeowners pay $129 per year, and a rent-controlled tenant pays at most $65 per year. We don't love the senior exemption. Homeowners 65 and older pay nothing at all, and they are the same group that already pays the lowest property taxes in the city, because Prop 13 froze their assessments decades ago. Renters, young families, and recent buyers, the people already carrying the biggest tax bills, will fund the buses while the most protected taxpayers in California are exempted again. That's backwards. The tax is built to stay accountable: it sunsets in 2042, an independent efficiency review is due by April 2028, and the Board of Supervisors can amend or repeal it by majority vote if the SFMTA wastes the money.

Prop I would remove $120M per year from the City's General Fund (the account that pays for most city services), and dedicate it to a small list of preferred housing programs. The City already projects a $741.7M deficit, so every rerouted dollar is a cut to parks, street cleaning, or public safety. It would be the City's 24th voter-mandated spending requirement. Prop I also locks in San Francisco's transfer tax (the second highest in the state!). Today the Board of Supervisors can lower it by ordinance. Under Prop I, only voters could, and the measure even reverses any cut the Board makes before it takes effect. When Los Angeles taxed big property sales this way, sales fell 38%, and the lost property taxes offset much of what it raised. The rates in question are only six years old: in November 2020, voters passed a measure written by former Supervisor Dean Preston that doubled the transfer tax on sales of $10M or more, from 2.75% to 5.5% and from 3% to 6%. Preston has championed this measure, which would put those rates beyond the Board's reach. We support real money for subsidized housing. That's why we endorsed Prop C, which grows the Housing Trust Fund to $125M per year and lets the Board pause contributions in bad budget years. Vote no on Prop I.

When you sell your condo, San Francisco taxes the full sale price, whether you made money or lost it. When Madison Capital bought the defaulted loan on the 34-story tower at 45 Fremont for $238M this year and took the building, it paid no transfer tax. Under Prop J it would have owed 6% of what the building is worth, roughly $14M at the price it paid. The exemption was written in 1967 for a bank stuck with a building it never wanted, and for decades it mostly covered homes. Then investors learned to buy the loan instead of the building, and the Assessor now counts $450M in foreclosure exemptions claimed in the last three years, against $50M in the fifteen years before that. The tax they skip is the one every ordinary buyer pays, and homes and small buildings keep the exemption either way. The San Francisco Taxpayers Association argues Prop J would make lending here "significantly riskier and more expensive than anywhere else in the state", and we raised the same worry in June. But a lender pays only when a loan has failed and the building changes hands, a small extra cost on a loss it is taking anyway, so the premium is the tax times the odds of that happening. Our worst-case estimate, under Fiscal impacts above, is that Prop J adds about 0.14 points per year to a $100M office loan that carries about 2 points of risk premium, and less in practice, since the tax falls on what the building is worth by then, not on the loan. New York and Florida have taxed foreclosures and deeds in lieu for decades, on the full unpaid debt rather than on what the building is worth, and banks still lend there. But those rules are statewide, so no city there loses a loan to the town next door. California exempts foreclosures statewide, and San Francisco would be the only major city in the state taxing them, unless Oakland passes the same fix this November. Prop J started as half of a plan.

If BART runs out of money, there is no backup plan. Muni is a City department, so City Hall can always move money to it (which is the backstop Prop H is really about). BART is an independent district that lives on fares and its own dedicated sales tax. It can raise fares, but it cannot raise taxes on its own, and no county budget stands behind it. BART says it won't even draw on the state's emergency loan if this measure fails, because it would have no way to pay the loan back. BART has already done the hard work. Since 2019 the region's big operators have documented more than $1B in savings, and BART runs at $375 per train hour, cheaper than Washington's Metro or Atlanta's MARTA. It is still $378M short next year, a number an independent review validated. Muni has done its part too. Since 2020 the SFMTA has cut $246M in costs, mostly by eliminating more than 500 vacant positions, and its balanced budget still needs a $200M state loan to get through next year. Here is what "no" looks like, in BART's own words. Starting January 2027: a 63% cut in train hours, three lines instead of five, a train every 30 minutes, closing at 9 p.m. seven days a week, and fares up 30%. If that isn't enough, July 2027 brings up to 15 station closures, fares up a cumulative 50%, and 1,200 layoffs. The last item on BART's contingency list is "stop passenger service." Nobody wants to pay more sales tax, and it's unfortunate that this one falls hardest on lower-income residents, who already spend a larger share of their income on necessities, and that San Francisco pays double the other counties' rate. But we don't get to choose between a great plan and an OK plan. The choice is between a 63% service cut with 30% higher fares, or a modest sales tax that keeps transit running and riders moving. The tax comes with guardrails.