Moderate Rule, Maximum Harm: A Year of SF’s Surrender to Oligarchy

As socialists score electoral wins across the US — most notably in New York City — San Francisco's billionaire backed "moderates" have seized government control, with disastrous results. For working-class San Franciscans, their rule has only made life harder. 

San Franciscans face an extreme affordability crisis. San Francisco rents are the highest in the Bay Area. Evictions are at their highest level in a decade. Only 7% of union members can afford housing in San Francisco. Rather than offer rent subsidies, affordable homes, or eviction bans, Mayor Lurie is instead moving forward a plan to incentivize the demolition of rent-controlled housing. He has also diverted affordable housing funds, and defunded social housing entirely. 

Economic security is eroding, too. AI is automating entry-level jobs, and unemployment is up for white collar jobs as well. Construction workers are out of work because rather than ramping up a social housing program, political leaders are busy deregulating for developers who aren’t building. Government positions are being eliminated for the benefit of privatization and contractors.

Bus service has been slashed with cuts to numerous lines, undoing years of work to restore service after the pandemic. Fares were raised this year, kicking Muni riders when they are down. This has been done while aggressively expanding private, for-profit alternatives to transit. A week after announcing that main bus lines would no longer travel down Market street, the Mayor announced Waymos and Uber X would be allowed to travel down this supposedly “car-free” transit corridor. 

Big promises have been abandoned. Lurie promised 1,500 new treatment beds in his first six months. He had no plan to accomplish that campaign promise, and has abandoned it completely. Instead, Lurie is banning RV’s where homeless families live, outlawing homeless shelters in large swaths of the city, and diverting supportive housing funds. 

Instead of expanding housing or treatment, Lurie has ramped up arrests of homeless people and residents with behavioral health needs. SF’s jail population has surged to 1,300 people daily. Our city’s progress in reducing the number of nonviolent offenders languishing in jails has been reversed. Just this week, Lurie announced a new criminalization plan to arrest drug users that will further swell incarceration and the punishment bureaucracy in our City.  

The Black community, in particular, has fared poorly under billionaire rule. Reparation recommendations adopted unanimously by the previous Board of Supervisors have been fully abandoned. The City has indefinitely delayed activation of the Fillmore Heritage Center. 

The Fillmore’s only grocery store has been shuttered, along with multiple neighborhood pharmacies. With support from City Hall, a developer unveiled a massive gentrification project that threatens what’s left of the Black community in the Fillmore. 

San Francisco shows what happens when we install inexperienced, tech-industry aligned neoliberals and conservatives to run all branches of government.

Oversight has been gutted. Independent experts are being purged from oversight commissions. Crypto-billionaire Chris Larson has purchased a surveillance unit co-housed with the police department. Friends of the mayor are being handed contracts. The SF Board of Supervisors serves as a rubber stamp for the Mayor, despite valiant efforts of the few leftist supervisors, especially DSA member and oversight committee chair, Jackie Fielder.

At a time when Democrats are being begged by constituents to stand for something in this country, the local Democratic party and City Hall leaders are proudly championing their “moderate” bona fides, standing for nothing. SF’s billionaire political class offers concerts and vibe shifts instead of addressing the needs of working people and those in poverty. They even celebrate the predatory speculators who are causing the working class’ pain. In so many ways, it feels like the dystopian fantasies of the Network State movement are being grafted onto our city. It’s a quiet embrace of Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of a techno-fascist San Francisco. 

San Francisco shows what happens when we install inexperienced, tech-industry aligned neoliberals and conservatives to run all branches of government. The City is in serious jeopardy because of the rising rents, evictions, unemployment, mass incarceration, income inequality, racism, inept governance, and privatization that billionaires are inflicting on our city. The longer this continues, the harder it will be to recover and win a better city for all.

Other cities are showing a galvanizing path forward. While San Francisco criminalizes poverty and celebrates billionaires, these cities are freezing rents, expanding public services, and championing the working class. Zohran Mamdani won in a landslide. Seattle elected a socialist mayor. Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Chicago elected socialists to their city councils. Boston’s Mayor Wu is pushing forward free transit; Chicago’s Mayor Johnson is investing in addressing root causes of crime and community-run public safety, with crime already falling; and Houston proved Housing First works so effectively to reduce homelessness in their city that the Trump Administration cut its funding. These cities are offering a more hopeful vision, a new era of shared prosperity, diversity, and housing stability to replace oligarchy. Leftist policies are delivering results across the country, which is why oligarchs fight them. Yet, San Francisco — a town whose latest gold rush is the technology industry — has leaders who don’t want to listen to the data stubbornly refusing these proven solutions. San Francisco needs to catch up.

San Francisco can choose that path. We can stop evictions and scale up a social housing program like in Vienna where 60% of the population lives in stable, affordable social housing. We can tax the rich, especially our city’s 58 billionaires, to guarantee universal health care coverage, fully fund public schools, grow our public transportation system, and make sure nobody goes to bed hungry. We can protect immigrants who are the heart of our city. All of this is doable and clear to a growing number of people across the nation, especially young voters. 

Let's end the oligarchs’ domination of San Francisco, and embrace the promise of a San Francisco for everybody, not just the rich.