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By Christin Evans, HANC Board

The 2018 ballot measure, Our City Our Home, which taxes San Francisco’s largest businesses to fund housing, shelter and other solutions for people experiencing homelessness has finally started to trickle out to reach those in need.  Delayed by a court challenge, the first Prop C funds were unlocked in late 2020 by a California Supreme Court decision. While some funds were allowed to be spent, primarily on emergency shelter, at the height of pandemic, the bulk of the stockpiled funds were allocated by Mayor Breed and the Board of Supervisors in July 2021.

Headlines proclaimed the city’s spending had swelled to over $1 billion to address homelessness, which became a bit of a political issue in the state assembly race. Of course, the large figure was misleading as it was a projected two year spending figure and included several one-time revenue sources including one-time Covid relief funds for Shelter in Place hotels which would not reoccur.

Fast forward to this year’s budget cycle and a more realistic picture of what impact Prop C is having took shape.  The revenues generated from the gross receipts tax on sales over $50 million has consistently delivered over $300 million annually in new funds, doubling the city’s annual budget for homelessness and supportive housing solutions. 

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The Doolan-Larson building is the big white building at the northwest corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets.  Its former owner, Norman Larson, donated the building to San Francisco Heritage upon his death in 2018.

San Francisco Heritage launched a pilot program in late 2020 exploring the potential of the Doolan-Larson building as a center of artistic expression.   Individual artists and groups have lived, worked, and performed in and around the building since then.  More information on the program can be found here:  https://www.haightandashbury.org/residencies .  Information about some of the artists who have participated is here:  https://www.haightandashbury.org/artists .

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In March, 2022, San Francisco passed an ordinance extending the eviction moratorium until the state of emergency ends.  That never went into effect because it was preempted by weaker State legislation.  The State legislation expired on June 30, so as of July 1, the San Francisco ordinance has been in effect.  Here is what it does:

• Landlords are prohibited from evicting SF residential tenants for non-payment of rent that came due on or after July 1, 2022 and was not paid due to the COVID-19 pandemic (note this does not protect tenants against eviction if the rental debt was incurred prior to July 1, 2022).
• Landlords are also prohibited from imposing late fees or penalties on this rent.
• Landlords can seek to collect rent through civil court, but cannot evict for it.
• There is no specific notification requirement for tenants.
• These protections continue until Mayor London Breed terminates her COVID-19 Emergency Proclamation.

As a reminder, the state rent relief program has closed, but the local Emergency Rental Assistance Program remains open. Go to sf.gov/renthelp to apply!

By Calvin Welch, HANC Board

Going into the June primary, election media coverage almost  exclusively focused on the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin.  The stories written immediately after the election reported a massive vote in favor of the recall.  But those reports were, in fact , factually wrong as they were based on Election Day reports, which were less than half the votes actually cast.  In fact these early reports were based on returns from the more conservative portions of the City that supported the recall. For example the deeply conservative voting District 2 (Marina, Pacific Heights)  had fully half of its total vote reported in these  early returns while our district ( District 5) had but 43% of its total vote reported at the end of Election Day.  It took another fifteen days during which another 120,000 votes were counted.  Unreported by the media was that in these late counted votes the DA recall actually narrowly LOST 59,217 to 57,686.

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