San Francisco’s big real-estate players have raised more than $2.7 million to defeat an affordable-housing ballot measure that proponents say would fund the kind of European-style “social housing” rare in American cities.
The outlay against the initiative, Proposition I, is the largest source of spending to oppose any measure on the November ballot — a full $1.9 million more than was raised this year to defeat Prop. G, which would bring cars back to the Great Highway.
Supporters of Prop. I are heavily outspent; they have raised $687,000, a quarter of their opponents’ war chest.
Prop. I would dedicate 50% of the city’s “transfer tax” — levied on sales of properties valued at $10 million or more — to various forms of affordable housing, including social housing where residents “have the right to participate directly and meaningfully” in running their building, according to the measure’s text.
Prop. I would also lock in the city’s current tax rate, among the nation’s highest, and ensure it can only be changed by voters — not city supervisors — going forward.
Locking in the high tax rate and forcing a vote of the people to lower it has the real-estate lobby worried. The list of 73 donors against Prop. I is a who’s-who of developers, real-estate tycoons, investors and others active in the city’s construction scene:
- The San Francisco Apartment Association, the landlord lobbying group, donated $211,000 and is the largest donor to the measure.
- Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist and real-estate investor in San Francisco and financial backer of the San Francisco Standard, has donated $200,000. Moritz is a key ally of Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has called the measure a “slush fund,” even though his office would administer it.
- Related California, the real estate development and investment juggernaut that has built thousands of units in the city, also donated $200,000.
The funds are going to the “Yes on C, No on I” committee, which is fighting Prop. I and also backing a separate affordable-housing measure on the ballot.
The committee did not make anyone available for an interview.
John Doherty of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, one of the groups fighting Prop. I, wrote in a statement, “Labor and business have come together on Yes on C and No on I because working families need housing they can afford and neighborhoods that are clean and safe.”
Other donors against Prop. I include the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce ($185,000); the Fisher family, the clan behind the Gap dynasty ($125,000); and Kilroy Realty, the real estate giant that has been one of the biggest spenders to local political pressure groups ($100,000).
Prop. I, by contrast, is relying heavily on a few wealthy, progressive donors:
- Saikat Chakrabarti, the congressional candidate who lost in the primary to Connie Chan and Scott Wiener, is the campaign’s top donor and has given $150,000. Chakrabarti is much more involved in city politics since his primary loss: He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to progressive ballot measures this cycle, and is pledging money and support to Chan in her congressional race.
- Dean Preston, the former District 5 supervisor who authored the original 2020 ballot measure that doubled the city’s transfer tax (also Prop. I), has donated $118,000. Preston, a tenants attorney, is a longtime tenant and housing rights activist.
- Dylan Hirsch-Shell, a former mayoral candidate and social housing advocate, has donated $105,000.
Christin Evans, a member of the Prop. I campaign, said the measure’s opponents see their opposition spending “like an investment.”
“It’s essentially spending $100,000 to potentially get millions in tax cuts in the future,” she said.
The backstory goes back years. In 2020, voters passed a separate Prop. I to double the city’s transfer tax rate on sellers of properties valued at $10 million or more, moving it from about 3% to about 6%, depending on the value of the property.
Those selling luxury homes or large apartment or office buildings subsequently saw the city cut into their profits during sale.
The funds collected by the 2020 tax adjustment were meant to be earmarked for affordable housing, but legal questions surrounding whether that could be written into the measure allowed then-Mayor London Breed to use the money for the city’s general fund. Mayor Lurie has followed suit, also allocating the tax revenue to the general fund.
The tax has raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
Prop. I of 2026 would amend the 2020 measure and reserve half of the revenue received from San Francisco’s transfer tax to affordable housing, social-housing developments, homelessness-prevention programs and housing assistance. The measure would also lock in the transfer tax rate at between 5.5% and 6%.
The real fight is over who gets to control that transfer tax rate. If Prop I. wins, the rate is not only locked in, but put under the purview of voters instead of the Board of Supervisors.
That is far more restrictive for owners of large real estate, and the mayor — Lurie has come out against the measure, seeking to preserve his control over the funds.
The mayor is instead backing Prop. C, a consensus measure to boost the city’s affordable housing fund to $125 million or more starting in 2028, and to build potentially tens of thousands of units with the funds.
Lurie, for his part, has had other designs over the transfer tax.
Earlier this year, the mayor co-sponsored the “BUILD Act” with Supervisor Bilal Mahmood to cut the tax rate in order to incentivize more housing development in San Francisco, though it was unclear it would do so.
Cutting the transfer tax rate would have also been a boon to office developers, and the “BUILD Act” was not narrowly tailored to housing construction. The proposal was subsequently shelved because it did not have the votes on the board.
Evans says she, too, supports Prop. C — it is a long-term solution to the housing crisis, she said. Prop. I, she said, is a steady and predictable stream of funding for affordable housing.
“I think [Lurie] can understand why we feel it’s important that City Hall be held accountable to the original tax on properties over $10 million, and that those additional funds be used for housing,” Evans said.
Unfortunately, the people will fall for the propaganda and vote against it. People, you have to understand, if a rich man is in favor of something, that something is against your own interests.
It’s really telling how hated rich people are, but everyone really wants their money …
Bullshit. I’d rather they leave the state for good.
Correct. That’s why I’m against clean water and food safety, because rich people eat and drink water.
Rich people have never been for clean water and food safety for non-rich people. Not if there’s any possible money to be made by harming these things.
Dean Preston and Saikat Chakrabarti are both rich people who are supporting Prop I. Are they also hydrocidal maniacs? They might be. Let’s see their portfolios.
Prop. I is a true consensus measure: it not only funds affordable housing, but also cuts the transfer tax for newly built housing. It’s good for affordability and it’s good for supply.
There’s just no good argument against it, which is why the landlord-funded opponents are twisting themselves in pretzels. Their talking points are nonsense.
The mayor says it’s a “slush fund” – but he himself would direct the housing office in charge of it, same as Prop. C. Is he saying he can’t be trusted and we need a new mayor?
Opponents say it takes the money out of the general fund where it could fund other public services. But the whole point of their opposition is to be able to repeal the tax, like the BUILD Act tried to do. So the money is leaving the general fund either way. The question is, do we want it to be spent on affordable housing, or landlord profits?
If you think that the way SF should spend $100m a year is to deliver more profits to buyers and sellers of mega-mansions and skyscrapers, voting no makes sense. But if, like me, you’d rather spend that $100m a year of our money on affordable housing, vote yes on I!
Prop I is the last gasp of the feeding frenzy of labor and nonprofit revenue measures that have shat the bed for all revenue measures moving forward, such as 2003’s Prop L that set a living wage indexed for inflation, non-means tested, that’s shifted billions into the pockets of working people.
Forcing revenue measures onto a mayor with unitary budgetary authority that is hostile to your project because the affordable housing programming hardwired into Prop I has proven itself incapable of scaling due to structural maintenance and operations deficits. I tried to raise this issue at the DSA event at Folsom Street Events space, but you channelled your inner Stalin and shut down that critique which is going to take Prop I down. Because you know better, lol.
Painting a few hundred means tested units per year as an affordability measure is an insult to San Franciscans. Prop I will be a fitting epitaph to the era of ready access to the ballot via signatures.
Hopefully, there will be some housecleaning at the all too gullible DSA SF, for hitching their wagon to this nonprofit means tested garbage, while in contrast, DSA candidates nationwide are gaining traction with a broad based, universal non-means tested affordability agenda.
Who in their right mind puts a measure on the ballot to try to compel a mayor with unitary budgetary authority to spend on their pet projects when they know full well the mayor will either not spend those dollars or get the City Attorney to construe the measure to allow him to spend resources on other similar projects?
I support land trusts and social housing. That’s why I participated in the policy work that led to the founding of the CLT. But it turns out that we did not balance the equations.
As MEDA showed, small sites has sustainability and scalability faults that need to be addressed before codifying into law spending that will only incur more unfunded expenses moving forward.
Affordable housing finance is a closely held, secretive operation that reflects internal city priorities and views residents as hostile to their projects. To a certain extent, it is a slush fund.
The problem here is that progressive politics has devolved to interests with claims on city revenue streams writing ballot measures to create new revenue streams and hook them up to those nonprofits and unions.
I warned Preston midway through their revenue measure ballot feeding frenzy that this could only go on for so long before a backlash developed that could not be defended against because of lack of tangible outcomes.
But since they decided to go down swinging on a measure that’s essentially pushing on a string, costing both ballot access and constraints on a mayor who is able to evade them, this has to be an op.
Does anyone know what hospice progressives are going to be entering on 4 November?
“Does anyone know what hospice progressives are going to be entering on 4 November?”
Peak progressivism in this city was around the turn of the century, with the advent of district elections. Amongst the heavy hitters from that time were Ammiano, Gonzalez, Daly, Mirkarimi, Campos and Avalos. Although even back then they could never produce a mayor.
The modern variants, like Ronen, Fielder and Chan, are lightweight and ineffective pretenders.
Back in the day, we saw a progressive increase in citywide support from Ammiano at 40% in 1999 to Gonzalez at 47% with a commensurate increase in public participation in campaigns and policymaking.
With four Greens in office and Gonzalez almost taking Newsom out, The Empire Struck Back hard, making the Greens offers they could not refuse and battening down the operation to ensure that residents got nowhere near decision making. Nonprofit contracts and grants and public sector labor contracts and retirements were the choke collars used to ensure compliance.
The professional progressives paint themselves as hapless victims of the right wing elites, when in reality, labor and city funded nonprofits are complicit conspirators, collaborators, kapos with the elites.
San Franciscans are the victims in this picture.
Ron,
Hold the hospice, I’m still the guy out in the middle of traffic both vehicular and personal at 82 and you sure do sound like me.
Yeah, I agree on all except the part about our not producing a mayor.
I literally slept under my desk (not always alone thank god) for that entire campaign and remain convinced that Matt was the very last person in San Francisco to be robbed in a crooked paper ballot election.
I think Matt won easily and he was ahead in the final poll the friday before the election and Gavin even said “I guess matt won.” but that’s then (and I personally got on the ballot against Gavin twice) … but, it worked out. Matt puts his energy into being Catcher in the Rye for Mano Raju’s Office of the Public Defender and has sorted nearly half a million cases since that time while Gavin has passed to relative obscurity as Governor.
lol
h.
To be consistent, I voted “NO” on both C and I. I see them both as boondoggles and slush funds.
In respect of I, it really should need a two thirds majority to become effective. That is what the state’s Prop 43 would ensure and so I voted “YES” on 43.
So you support well-heeled Billionaire backed campaigns exclusively.
Just say that instead.
Do you really think that you can shame people into voting for nonprofit cash grabs like this?
Be honest, what jumped out at you ?
(Inside baseball people only)
I was stunned to read that one of the people I admired most in the political world and I’m talking about in all 82 years this person stands out and what stunned me was that a genuine hero man of the people, one of the top 10 locally and Matt Gonzalez is toppa that scroll … (how’s that for an intro?)
Can you believe that Dean Preston is rich enough to give over $118,000 to Prop I ?!?
I’m a known conspiracy bluff who believes that da machines dey was fixed for both of the elections Dean ‘lost’ cause no way Breed beats a natural successor to Gonzalez in that district 5 which has two thirds tenants served by Preston, the top tenants lawyer in the state and, of course I think Mahmood is a fraud cause when they took away the D-6’s Chris Daly turf poorest and mostly, Glide Memorial and Grace Cathedral swath of D-6 that voted most strongly Progressive and put them in D-5 I thought Sutton was conceding D-5 to Preston by giving him another slice of his natural voter base but then this guy Mahmood shows up and says he “wants to be an airline pilot” under occupation when he filed to run … no, it was “I am a brain or computer scientist” or something like that cause of one class he took in college … carpetbagger and backed by all the techie prick money and … he beats Dean Preston !?! … Nawwwwww.
I’ll go to my grave as they say believing that and, hell, that can be anytime with a mouthy codger like myself.
So, Lurie and his people don’t have enough money.
Let me tell you about this contingent.
Just a short story that almost got me killed.
I was pouring down glass after glass of free and decent red wine at one of Matt Gonzalez’s monthly art shows and open house and I was hitting on the women and picking arguments with everyone but making everyone laugh their asses off at my antics in those pursuits and this older woman comes up to me and it goes like this …
“Are you h. brown?” (Naomi Lauter)
“No one else would take the job.” (Dawg)
(Naomi) “I read everything you write.”
(Me) “Thannks, do you like I should write more ?”
(Her) “I don’t think you should write anything more at all.”
(Me) “What don’t you like that I wrote ?”
(Her) “You’re an anti-semite and what you write is a danger to the Jewish people.”
Background here …
I was doing an early version of my Bulldog (picked that cause it is the nickname for the first copies off the press that go back to advertising to double check for errors cause I worked as vacation relief to 112 women in Telephone Sales along with one other guy and they jumped on the Bulldog and sniffed it all over cause one missed number can cost tens of thousands – it was “100,000 a page in 1979 – and I started my own thing here in the TL and Betsy Culp asked for me to write for The Call and I did to the end and then went online from ‘Overlooking Geary’ to ‘Overlooking Leavenworth’ which Pat Murphy published unedited til Naomi Lauter’s people turned up again and turned the screws on him and even converted him to Judaism and took over his rag (SF Sentinel) …
Now, that’s extreme but true.
So, in the midst of all of this I’m running for office in a different district every cycle just to build files for my writing and have saved stuff back 70 years and I’m trying to help stop the nuclear arms race (over 50k weapons atween DC and Moscow) by being secretary to a cab driver from Mars in the Future. Well, that’s what he said but it didn’t matter cause he had the receipts as in more knowledge about the locations and capacities of all of the nuclear weapons in the world and the composition and dispositions of same which we put into about a 30 page document that I mailed to the NYT and St. Louis Post Dispatch and LA Times and the President and delivered personally to the Russian Consulate on Green Street and there’s a story but what George’s conclusions (George Roth was the cabbie/Night Desk Clerk at Kenmore) were that it was impossible for either side to win a war which they’d both already agreed upon (we’re talking Reagan and Gorbachev) and NYT passed with no comment as I recall and Post sent greetings but reject from St. Louis and LA Times where I’d worked merited a letter from Tom Johnson saying ‘no’ but the Russians used it as a foundation resource for all future SALT talks.
So, what I’d written that got AIPAC involved in the person of Naomi was that I was sick and tired of listening to people as I put it “putting the Holocaust on their resume as a reason as to why they should be allowed to be shysters ” .. like Peter Thiel and when most of them weren’t even alive back then and anyway, they were the first to be recorded committing a genocide and that’s in the bible in the 2nd Book of Samuel as I recall she was surprised I knew the Old Testament better than she did but then, pop was a Loading dock/Ozark skies Pentecostal preacher and Jimmy Hoffa ally so I was sometimes smart enough to shut up and listened.
And, she went at me being an antisemite and one thing I recall telling her that I didn’t think I was a Communist cause I thought that families should be allowed to keep a hundred million dollars apiece and wasn’t that enough ?
And, she paused for a short moment and thought I know not what and smiled and said
“No.”
go Niners !!
h.
My read is that Preston worked for Randy Shaw long enough for him to get a reputation amongst TL voters.
Marcos,
I talked to Shaw about his time with Shaw and he assured me that he never sued to evict anyone and they soon parted ways.
You’re being smug saying TL residents remember him with Shaw.
You and me are the only ones who recall those days.
So, you are now on the record saying that you think Milal Mahmood beat Dean Preston straight up in an honest election ?
the ML world awaits your reply …
h.
Prop I is not “social housing” measure.
It’s a money grab based upon a counterproductive onerous transfer tax on apartment building creation and because of this it’ll actually make the housing crisis worse.
I’m not sure you understand the prop. It doesn’t make any new taxes, it simply says that part of it has to go to housing and NOT to the general fund where it can be used randomly by any mayor or the city administrator (like the one who’s husband was recently arrested for taking bribes from Walter Wong). Dedicating it to more affordable housing literally makes the housing crisis better. So, you must be either misunderstanding the bill.
D3, but the original proposition that created this tax money should have been written so that it needed a two thirds majority. Instead, its proponents took the easy path and dedicated the funds to the general fund so that it only needed to win 50% plus 1.
I am not going to vote now to bail out their failure to make this money dedicated to subsidized housing.
Based upon your comment, I am certain that you don’t understand my objection — which is that the transfer tax, itself, is the problem.
It was originally sold as “Mansion Tax”, but it was so broadly written (I believe on purpose) as to function as a massive tax on much-needed rental apartment development.
Accordingly, we should not be further codifying this idiocy via Prop I.
Prop I cuts the transfer tax for new developments
So you’re against the transfer tax, therefore this one that reduces it by half for companies building new housing? I mean, if you want to protest a bad policy, maybe voting to make it better is a good idea instead of being mad about what’s not even on the ballot? Honestly, I don’t care. I’ve bought and sold property in this city since 2001 and the transfer tax was just something you had to add into the price. I’d prefer it actually went to something good instead of the general ledger, where it can be used to pay for the mayor’s instagram staff or his latest new SUV.