Jennifer Friedenbach, a homelessness advocate and nonprofit leader who was the main architect of the 2018 Proposition C to increase funding for homeless services, lost a vote on Monday to retain her seat at the table.
Proposition C, dubbed “Our City, Our Home,” created a new tax on businesses with more than $50 million in annual gross receipts to fund the city’s homelessness services and housing programs.
The measure, spearheaded by Friedenbach and largely funded by Marc Benioff and Salesforce, was approved citywide with 61 percent of the vote in November 2018 and has generated more than $1 billion toward homeless and housing services. The funds are overseen by the Our City Our Home Oversight Committee, which Prop. C created.
Supervisors Rafael Mandelman, Shamann Walton and Stephen Sherrill voted unanimously today at the Rules Committee to recommend that Billy Lemon, an ally of Mandelman and the executive director of the Castro Country Club, a sober space in the Castro, take her place.
If approved by the full Board of Supervisors, Lemon will take over the seat from Friedenbach, who already termed out in April 2025 but has remained on the body pending a final vote on the Board of Supervisors on Nov. 11.
Friedenbach said she is holding out hope that she’ll retain her post. “We’ll see,” she said. “It still has to go to the full board.”
Friedenbach is one of the four Board of Supervisors appointees on the nine-member committee. She was originally tapped for the post on Sept. 7, 2021, and reappointed with a term ending April 22, 2025.
In June, Mayor Daniel Lurie proposed changes to the Our City, Our Home fund to redirect about $34 million away from permanent homeless housing to temporary shelter. At the time, Friedenbach was one of the most vocal opponents of that change, which eventually passed as part of Lurie’s budget proposal.
Supervisor Matt Dorsey, a supporter of Lurie’s changes to the fund, attended the hearing — even though he is not on the committee — and gave a speech in support of Lemon.
“It is no exaggeration for me to say that it [the Castro Country Club] has helped to save lives,” said Dorsey, who is a recovering addict. Dorsey did not mention Friedenbach in his speech.
Walton, the only member on the Rules Committee who supported Friedenbach, voted with the majority in the end.
Of 23 people who gave public comment, 15 spoke in favor of Friedenbach, including Carolyn Goossen, head of local policy at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, on behalf of Public Defender Mano Raju.
“Prop. C would never have been drafted or passed without Jennifer Friedenbach, which means this committee would not exist without Jennifer Friedenbach,” Goossen said.
Bevan Dufty, a former supervisor and homelessness czar who now serves on the Homelessness Oversight Commission, said if Lemon were to take the seat, he would consider leaving the body.
“I recognize how singularly Jennifer made the difference for Prop. C,” Dufty said. “She is the golden mother hen for ‘OCOH’ [Our City, Our Home].”
So she termed out 6+ months ago but is still “holding out hopes” that she can squat in the seat for even longer? Make it make sense
“Bevan Dufty, a former supervisor and homelessness czar who now serves on the Homelessness Oversight Commission, said if Lemon were to take the seat, he would consider leaving the body.”
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
“Bevan Dufty, a former supervisor and homelessness czar who now serves on the Homelessness Oversight Commission, said if Lemon were to take the seat, he would consider leaving the body.”
That would be an awesome “twofer”!
She did nothing but continue to feed and grow the Homeless Inc. complex.
Termed out. Bye!
A horrible day for the City Crime Family and the grifters who have looted off the emotions and goodwill of our taxpayers for far too long.
San Franciscans will never forget how bad things got under the Nonprofit Scam. We are never going back.
I appreciate Jennifer Friedenbach’s dedication to the work. But Prop C and the oversight committee have made almost no difference to the homeless population squatting the streets of San Francisco. A point-in-time count conducted in the ’90s would average around 8000 people sleeping on the streets. That same count today averages about the same. The vision is skewed, and the solutions are flawed.
“I appreciate Jennifer Friedenbach’s dedication to the work.”
Based on..
I don’t have any particular views about B Dufty but I do remember a BART board candidacy in like… 2012? I guess I don’t have the formula for the proper degree of ambition in Bay Area politics but this seems pretty thirsty if you ask me… but I suppose one person’s thirsty careerism is another person’s dedication to public service…
Dufty spent the interregenum between being termed out as Caltrain’s intergovernmental rep.
Bevan’s shelf life has long since expired.
Thank you for covering the Rules Committee meeting where the Supervisors refused to re-appoint Jennifer Friedenbach to the Prop C Our City Our Home Oversight Committee. I served on the Steering Committee for the Prop C campaign because for once, we had an opportunity for real longterm solutions to our crisis of homelessness in one of the richest cities in the world. Jennifer Friedenbach was one of the key authors of this proposition, basing it on her years of direct experience working with unhoused individuals and families and surrounded by key scientists and researchers who brought the data and evidence of successful strategies from all over the world. The proportion passed overwhelmingly, despite the opposition of Mayor Breed and a significant number of Supervisors. It was held up in court for several years which allowed the fund to grow which is now in danger of becoming a slush fund for Mayor Lurie who has not surrounded himself by such effective advisors. Hence the need to get rid of Jenny. At a time when we should be approaching these issues with humility, the arrogance of our new Mayoral administration is subjecting us to the same Executive overreach than we experience out of Washington DC, with the same legislative complicity from our Board of Supervisors that we see out of Congress. I get that Mayor Lurie would like to appropriate the Prop C OCOH funds to do with what he wants, without accountability to those of us who wrote this legislation, got it passed by an overwhelming majority of the voters and are now working on its implementation. The rest of the Supervisors have a chance to weigh in on this and do the right thing at the Full Board and reappointJennifer Friedenbach to the OCOH Oversight Committee.
So you are responsible for gifting Breed and Lurie cash money to use practically unconditionally as they see fit while not making the slightest dent in visible homelessness and public squalor.
Did you all miss the mayoral unitary budgetary authority provisions in the City Charter or was this all to throw more cash through the city crime family’s sieve?
Given the current state of things, there are no ‘experts’ on homelessness. The last people I’m going to look to for policy guidance on homelessness are homeless people and the charity nonprofits that serve them.
I have mad respect for Jennifer Friedenbach. I have worked with her for years on various projects. She deserves much better than this. Our city owes her a debt of gratitude for helping to create Prop C / Our City Our Home (OCOH). OCOH has helped and continues to help many unhoused people find housing and stabilize their lives. Removing her from the OCOH oversight is just wrong any way I look at it. Seriously. This is just wrong. The SFBoS did something really wrong.
I warned Friedanbach that gifting conservative mayors $300m/yr would be used against them given unitary mayoral budget authority. She told me I was being negative.
I told Friedenbach that we’d be better off if we used Prop C proceeds to gift homeless people $50K in grants per year. She told me, and I shit you not, that if that’s what I wanted to do, I should run my own ballot measure. These were “their” funds. Turns out with a conservative mayor they were not “their” funds.
And progs are fixing to float even more revenue measures to throw into the sieve of corruption.
Hard to keep the bile down on this one, especially when it comes to that pathological and tragically transactional ghoul Mandelman. Rabid guy with a megaphone. No one should ever vote for him again. Jennifer Friedenbach has more clarity, intellect and spine than the putrid brain munching zombies on this committee of Lurie appoitees. Friedenbach is a local shero who’s endured the toxic darts of the misogynists who target progressive women. San Francisco’s current crop of proud lock stepping (with Lurie) electeds and appointees should be ashamed. Punching down on unhoused people is cruel. The locked and gated community Lurie is building while our most vulnerable suffer and die is sickening. A dark day for San Franciscans.
How many more bites at the apple does Friedenbach expect? I mean on her watch and before, CoH has lost seven of the exact same ballot measures from ATM panhandling to drug testing for GA. They did not change one thing.
Progressives clinging to “be compassionate, do nothing” as in housing first for housing that will never materialize floated on denigrating voters as privileged or rich for not wanting to violate the levitican injunction against the unclean is the leverage the right wing used to take over city government.
Progressive stalwart housing and land use policies are the achilles heels that sunk progressive politics in San Francisco. They were warned. I warned them. They cancelled me and refused to change course and took the whole fucking operation over a cliff, taking every other progressive priority down with them.
For decades, Friendenbach has stood for the best qualities of our City: integrity, creativity, persistence, emotional maturity, common sense and foresight. Unfortunately, too many of our politicians today love money and power more than their neighbors (who include displaced peoples). Such ruthless politicians ignore ordinary people’s legitimate needs; they empower corporations and developers to ravage our communities, thereby accelerating and intensifying the Climate Catastrophe, which they blithely ignore.
“The new creed of the Superpowers has become ‘the economy’, which is the soul of commercialization. Commercialization is more destructive than any nuclear bomb. The quality of commercialization is greed, which means making money while others starve.”
Maitreya
London
“Maitreya’s Teachings: The Laws of Life”
“the best qualities of our City: integrity, creativity, persistence, emotional maturity, common sense and foresight.”
You’re talking about San Francisco? I don’t necessarily think those are the most apt descriptors of what our City Family has bestowed upon its unwashed masses, and while I appreciate someone using a little flair to make their point, I’d say your flares burned out long ago. This is a corrupt city and the amount of money that has been (supposedly?) spent dealing with homelessness could have housed every single one of the 8-10 thousand individuals from the beginning and saved the rest of us huge headaches, with change. But it didn’t go like that.
Instead, homelessness became an “industry” – and I blame many parties and perhaps do not have all the research at fingertip to point same, but public perception is not “wrong” that people got rich from a reasonably solvable problem (locally) that was never solved, “care not cash” et all.