San Francisco has a proud tradition of solving problems that don't exist while ignoring the ones that do. The latest entry in that canon: seriously entertaining the idea of renaming Cesar Chavez Street.

Let's set aside the politics for a second — because honestly, the logistics alone should kill this conversation before it starts.

We're talking about one of the city's major east-west corridors. Signs. Street engravings embedded in concrete. Business addresses. GPS databases. Emergency services routing. Every city map, every food delivery app, every piece of official paperwork that lists a Cesar Chavez address. You don't just swap out a nameplate. You touch a thousand systems, and someone — spoiler: it's you, the taxpayer — foots the bill.

Remember when the School Board voted to rename 44 schools during the height of the pandemic, burning through nearly $1 million in staff time before the whole embarrassing episode got reversed? This has that same energy.

We walked the length of the street and talked to the people who actually live and work there. The overwhelming response? Confusion, mild annoyance, and a lot of why is this a priority right now? These are people running taquerias, fixing cars, and raising kids — not exactly clamoring for a civic rebranding exercise.

Cesar Chavez was a genuine American hero who organized some of the most vulnerable workers in the country. The name isn't the problem. And the people pushing this conversation should probably ask themselves: what problem, exactly, are we solving?

San Francisco has a housing crisis, a transit system hemorrhaging riders, and streets that feel less safe than they did five years ago. If the Board of Supervisors has bandwidth for street renaming debates, they have too much bandwidth.

Some fights are worth having. This isn't one of them.