Two years after San Francisco officially endorsed its intent to stand up a city-owned and -operated public bank, one supervisor is urging it to follow through.
On Tuesday, District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder will introduce a non-binding resolution asking Mayor Daniel Lurie and city departments to explore and fund a “green bank.”
Like a public bank, a green bank would be controlled by city officials to provide low-interest loans for renewable energy projects, small businesses, and new affordable housing.
City officials already approved a plan to do just that in 2023. At the time, the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a plan to create a public bank that would, among other things, leverage funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and other sources to provide low-cost loans for projects that reduce emissions, address environmental injustices, or otherwise improve environmental outcomes.
Despite the unanimous approval, that plan, sponsored by then-Supervisor Dean Preston, still awaits implementation. The plan estimated that the process of creating a public bank in compliance with local, state, and federal laws and regulations would cost about $1 million.
According to the plan, the process of creating a public bank would start with the creation of a three-year municipal financial corporation that doesn’t take deposits. After three years, that entity would become a full-service, FDIC-approved chartered public bank.
In 2019, a California state law passed that enables local governments to charter public banks. If San Francisco successfully creates a public bank, it would be the first in the state.
Public banks, which are owned and operated by the government, are exceedingly rare in the United States. The only one in the country handles funds for the state of North Dakota, and has been around since 1919.
Several other cities in California, like Los Angeles, have plans to form public banks, but have yet to actually do so.
The concept is broadly popular in San Francisco, says Fielder. A poll released Oct. 6 showed that 70 percent of participating San Francisco voters were in favor of having a green bank, and 67 percent favored a public bank.
The poll was commissioned by the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition, a group co-founded by Fielder, a longtime public-bank advocate, back in 2017.
This is the first time Fielder is pushing for the public bank as an elected official.
“A green bank is how we take our money back from Wall Street and reinvest it into housing, clean energy and small businesses right here at home,” Fielder said in a statement on Monday. “I hope to see widespread support for it on the Board of Supervisors.”
Preston’s effort to support a public bank was supported by six other supervisors, including Connie Chan, Shamann Walton and Myna Melgar, who still sit on the board.
“It feels really exciting with this new board to have another opportunity to reify this commitment,” said Misha Steier, a lead organizer for the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition.
Steier added that the coalition is also eyeing a ballot measure in 2026.
“We really just feel like the time is now. There’s so many other reasons to do it,” Steier said. “We’ve got this AI boom in San Francisco. I say we bank the boom.”
Fielder told Mission Local in January that she wanted to take the public bank “over the finish line” during her time in office.
“As working San Franciscans struggle with the rising cost of living and the growing threat of climate crisis, we need public institutions that aspire to reimagine how we can invest in our communities and in solutions that address climate change,” Fielder said.
On principle, Supervisor Fielder’s concept makes a lot of sense. An alpha city like SF should have the ability to self-finance large projects, transportation and housing that benefits our local residents.
My fear, and I think the fear many people rightfully have, is how this bank will be used by our City Crime Family. Will the funds be used to build co-op housing, MUNI lines, parks, and provide jobs? Or, will it be used to fund more Jon Jacobos, TODCOs, SF Park Alliances, Urban Alchemys, Dreamkeeper Initiatives, and slush funds for the forces who have profited off this city’s decline? I really hope that there are serious guardrails involved here.
I’ve been in meetings where reps of the S.F. Public Bank coalition have been talking to state regulators. They have no clue how a bank works, the regulators were aghast.
They know nothing about banking or finance. They do know they will figure out a way to turn it into an unaccountable slush fund for unpopular initiatives they couldn’t fund through normal means.
Are you pretending to know anything about banking or finance, for contrast? Nice try. What you describe is actually impossible under the ordinance.
https://www.sfpublicbank.org/uploads/1/3/9/3/139355791/governing_a_san_francisco_public_bank.pdf
“Over the years, San Francisco has faced a number of corruption scandals that have
unfortunately eroded the faith of residents in the local government. The reasoning behind allocating seat appointments on the Banking Oversight Commission disproportionately to the Board of Supervisors, and having such a large number of seats on the Commission to begin with, is rooted in the belief that a large body subject to the influence of a variety of elected officials and public hearings would be much harder for corruption to gain a foothold than a small body with disproportionate appointment power concentrated in any one elected office.”
18 of 25 seats are for the Board of Sups, 7 for the mayor. Not including other qualifiers/other details.
Typically, the mayor has more seats to appoint that the Board, which ends up consolidating too much power in the mayor’s office, of which we have a “strong mayor” system.
Diluting power between 12 supervisors and the mayor is probably the best you’ll get out of a representative system.
Aside from that, it’s different from private, explicit use cases within the city, beholden directly to resident interests, and most importantly, cutting a lot of red tape that kills local lifelines compared to big banks.
You may not like the Board of Supervisors or the mayor, but they are by far less corrupt than the likes of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, etc who’d love taking your money and pocketing the difference to invest and fund all the things you’d find reprehensible in every way imaginable that they’re doing already, and have been for centuries.
A public bank is not immune to corruption, but it is at minimum directly accountable, a private one is not and will drown you the moment it gets the chance (See Predatory Lending).
I take issue with your claim that the city of San Francisco is “far less corrupt” than corporate banks. That is your ignorant opinion. I was actually EXTORTED by the Planning Department when they tried to force me to attach a deed restriction to my property, after they failed to properly do it themselves, many years earlier. They threatened me with a $200 a day fine, if I did not submit to their ‘POWER’. No bank has ever acted towards me in such a straight up criminal manor. Luckily one of my neighbors was wealthy enough to sue them and won and the settlement applied to me also.
Wells Fargo created accounts without people’s knowledge just to rack up fees, and that’s a single example of hundreds, so yeah, they are plenty corrupt. Both can be true obviously.
No thank you.
Enough shenanigans in S.F.
@Javkie fielder – clean up the Mission, do your real job!
A SINGLE SUPERVISOR DOES NOT HAVE THAT POWER.
Next moron giving orders?
A single supervisor can write up legislation and persuade colleagues to vote for it and send to mayor to enact. Is that untrue? If so, I may be an idiot.
A single supervisor can’t pass anything, so I think your latter condition is fully met by expecting a single supervisor to amass the power of the entire BOS just by force of will.
Welcome to SF, you must be new here.
Seems like a way to secure funding for project without the inconvenience of the ordinary budget and/or legislative processes and, therefore, the will of the voters. If programs are worth funding, why do t we just allocate funds to them. Why do we need to create a bank to administer the funds. No one ever clarifies this. It’s always just a list of WHAT the bank could do but nothing about WHY a bank is needed to do them.
The last thing this city needs to do is to branch out into other areas of business. The city cannot even handle what is already on its plate, without taking on ideological forays like this.
The city should do less and do it better. This is just a distraction from its rea business.
If vague complaining were a business you’d be a Billionaire.
Public banks have a horrible track record in the United States, even at the federal level, where controls (at least pre-Trump) have been vastly superior to San Francisco. Even if you can avoid corruption — which I’m skeptical about — they can backfire easily. For instance, the federal government losing money on its loan to Solyndra set back the efforts to support green energy more than the federal loan office and/or loan guarantee program ever helped. The market for lending is quite dynamic, and good risks are generally underwritten by private lenders. So the only real purpose of a public bank is to lose money. If the government wants to subsidize losses for causes that aren’t profitable, that’s fine, but the majority of credit losses need to stay in private lands to avoid corruption and the appearance of it.
So this is what she’s up to instead of getting anything done to improve conditions at 16th and Mission.
Another NON BINDING resolution that does nothing but give lip service. And that is what so many idiots in San Francisco want over actual ideas that are tried. Scott wiener would have written binding legislation and then stump to get it passed. Jackie won’t lead on any issue. She will only say things but won’t do the work to actually pass laws she says will make lives better. Total phony
One supervisor has just about zero power singularly, even an idiot knows that but somehow you keep insisting it’s a viable critique…
Good supervisors lead. They come up with ideas and put forth legislation. Then they persuade their colleagues to vote for said legislation. We elect them to represent us and make laws. That is literally their job. Jackie doesn’t do this. She just says things that are popular but she knows if she tried to implement those things that are popular, she would have to make unpopular decisions. It’s a calculation on her part that the voting public won’t figure out her schtick. She has calculated correctly….
Actually she does. You just whine about everything she does regardless, because you’re a dishonest and clearly biased political hack vs her elected position of doing her actual job, which she does daily.
Her > You.
No thanks; that’ll be a hard NO.
Misha Steier is another “made man,” one once hired onto a nonprofit, gets rotated from nonprofit to nonprofit in the cartel, entitled to a job for life.
Of course SF should create a public bank. The only real show stopper is that SF is not ND, the corruption here is part of the city’s municipal DNA. The governance controls required to defend fractional reserve lending from the inevitable feeding frenzy need to be significant and severe.
> Misha Steier is another “made man,” one once hired onto a nonprofit, gets rotated from nonprofit to nonprofit in the cartel, entitled to a job for life.
What you’re describing sounds like a “career”.
The difference of course is that in a career if you claimed to be working in the same thing for 8 years with nothing to show for it besides another non binding resolution, you’d be looking for a new career.
What’s your career if not unreasonable whinging? You claim they have nothing to show for it, but you’re not one who does their homework on any issue.
The same people, often newcomers who do not live in San Francisco, rotate endlessly between the same cartel of city funded nonprofits because they have proven their reliability to the crime family.