The Land Use and Transportation Committee will hear Monday/3 an obscure piece of legislation that could undermine the city’s limits on chain stores in neighborhood commercial areas.
The measure, sponsored by Mayor Daniel Lurie, sounds innocent enough. It’s called “Adaptive Reuse of Historic Buildings.” From the summary:
“Ordinance amending the Planning Code to allow additional uses as principally or conditionally permitted in Historic Buildings citywide.”
When you read the actual language, it would allow anyone who owns an historic building, as defined by the Planning Code, to rent space to any type of business, including businesses that are not allowed or require special permission in neighborhood commercial strips.
Former Sup. Aaron Peskin, who has reviewed the legislation, said that North Beach generally doesn’t allow chain stores, which are known in the code as “formula retail.”
“If this passes, you could put in a Starbucks,” he said. “In the Sunset, you could put in a cannabis dispensary without any public hearing.”
In some cases, the building owner wouldn’t even have to go through the Historic Preservation Commission; the planning director has the right to approve “temporary” retail uses.
Former Sup. Matt Gonzalez, who wrote the original legislation back in 2004 that required a conditional use hearing for formula retail outlets, told me Lurie’s bill could create an incentive for owners to push out local businesses and replace them with higher-paying chains.
Another element: In San Francisco, building a hotel requires the cooperation of labor, what’s known as “card-check neutrality.” If the workers want a union, management can’t interfere.
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“That goes out the window with this bill,” Peskin told me. Put a hotel in an historic building and all the rules are off.
The immediate impact won’t be that dramatic; fewer than one percent of the buildings in San Francisco qualify as “historic” (although with this bill, more owners might seek that nod).
But it’s another piece of Lurie’s attempt to deregulate land use in the city—no matter what the consequences.
That hearing begins at 1:30pm. If the measure clears the committee, it will be heard at the full board Tuesday/4.
Most San Franciscans probably don’t know that a giant private prison company that does business with ICE runs a halfway house in the Tenderloin. But the Geo Group operates at 111 Taylor Street, and conditions there have been deeply problematic for years.
From our earlier reporting:
Residents are not allowed to leave the facility except when they have a permission slip to go to work. They are housed in congregate settings; everyone has at least one roommate and sometimes more.
The feds and the state both pay the Geo Group to house people at the center, although the state Legislature has banned future contracts with private prisons.
SF Weekly reported in 2016 on another Geo Group center in Soma, and under that contract, the center is paid a base of $98,000 a month as well as between $48 and $60 a day for every parolee or inmate. If the same basic terms apply to the Taylor Center deal, it means Geo Group has an incentive to keep people locked in the facility; anyone who leaves costs the giant national company as much as $420 a week.
The Geo Group is a billion-dollar corporation listed on Wall Street that operates 129 private prisons in the US and the United Kingdom, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Government Audit and Oversight Committee will hold a hearing Thursday/6
to address concerns raised by community members of neglect, abuse, and civil rights violations at the Taylor Street Facility located at 111 Taylor Street, operated by the GEO Group, Inc.; and requesting the GEO Group, Inc., Office of the Public Defender, Adult Probation Department, and California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to report.
Casimir Kotarski, an actor who plays a role in the Compton’s theater production, notes in a letter to the committee that the location of the private prison facility is at the same corner as the now-famous cafeteria that played a key role in sparking the LGBTQ rights movement:
We cannot oversee what we cannot see. Require GEO Group and CDCR to release inspection reports, incident logs, staffing ratios, occupancy levels, and grievance outcomes each month. Publish them online. If they refuse, bring them back for a follow-up hearing. Sunlight is step one. And as an actor that has been privileged to getting to tell the story of Compton’s Cafeteria Riot through immersive storytelling, it’s an absolute disgrace on behalf of history that a carceral facility operates at the cross section of Turk and Taylor.
If the Geo Group sends a representative, maybe the supes can ask for a copy of the company’s contracts with the feds and the state; so far, neither the federal or the state government has complied with my efforts to get those documents.
The mayor’s Rich Family Zoning Plan, which will threaten neighborhoods but do nothing to bring down housing prices, comes back to the Land Use and Transportation Committee Monday/3 after several supervisors proposed a wide range of amendments. Some of the amendments would protect rent-controlled housing from demolition; Sup. Myrna Melgar has proposed to protect buildings of three or more units, and Sup. Connie Chan wants to protect all rent-controlled units. Sup. Rafael Mandelman wants to protect historic structures.
This is all taking place in an ugly and difficult political context: Thanks to state Sen. Scott Wiener and his Yimby allies in Sacramento, San Francisco must allow a lot more luxury housing—or effectively lose all controls over land use.
If Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointees don’t approve the city’s rezoning plan, they could force the so-called “builders’ remedy” on the city, meaning developers could demolish any existing housing, build anything they want, and there’s nothing anyone could do about it.
This process could start as soon at 2026, when Wiener will be running for Congress.
Can the city protect rent-controlled housing at all? Can it protect any historic buildings? Or do the supes simply have to rubber-stamp the Lurie plan to prevent Wiener’s allies from imposing something far worse?
That’s not up to the voters in San Francisco. It’s up to the state Department of Housing and Community Development, which is accountable to nobody but Newsom, who is running for president.
Labor leaders in California are organizing a campaign for a ballot measure that would impose a one-time, five percent wealth tax on people with net assets of $1 billion or more. If it makes the ballot, it would put the state in the forefront of the movement for wealth taxes. It would also bring in about $100 billion for health care and education by taxing only the 400 richest Californians.
This could be one of the most important, and contentious, measure on the fall 2026 ballot. Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris will have to take a stand on it while they both ramp up presidential campaigns. Candidates for Congress, like Scott Wiener, who has refused to support higher taxes on the rich, will have to take a stand on it. Mayor Lurie, whose family would have to pay the tax, will have to take a stand on it.
So will the Board of Supes—this week.
Sups. Connie Chan, Chyanne Chen, and Shamann Walton have a resolution Tuesday/4 asking the board to endorse the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act, and it comes up for adoption without committee reference. If one supe opposed it, the measure will be sent to committee.
Who is on the side of the billionaires?
The board meeting starts at 2pm.
