Friends,
I always tell people who regret my not publishing more stuff:
“This isn’t my generation, the next generation if my generation.’
Shit, I didn’t expect to live for another couple of generations at the time !!
lol
This is my 5th generation 2 years in style …
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POSTED INELECTION COVERAGE
Real-estate money floods fight against San Francisco ‘social housing’ measure
Proposition I is being outspent 4-to-1
by ANDREA JIMÉNEZOctober 29, 2026, 4:00 am
A senior apartment building is under construction at 4200 Geary Blvd on Sixth Avenue in the Richmond District, San Francisco. Photo by Junyao Yang on Mar. 14, 2024.Play
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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 supporters are outspent 4-to-1Yes on C, No on I$2.7MFair Housing, Yes on I$687KChart reflects data as of Oct. 28, 2026Chart: Andrea Jiménez Source:San Francisco Ethics CommissionCreated with Datawrapper
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.
- Micheal Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist developing high rises 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 lostin 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.
h. brownsays:
October 29, 2026, 1:54 pm at 1:54 pm
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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.
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