Let's back up. The Free City program launched in 2017, making CCSF tuition-free for all San Francisco residents regardless of income. On paper, it sounds great. In practice, it's a blanket subsidy that costs the city millions annually — money that goes to wealthy residents and struggling students alike, with no means-testing whatsoever.

Here's the thing about "free": it's never actually free. Someone pays. In this case, San Francisco taxpayers foot the bill, including many who never set foot on a CCSF campus. And enrollment numbers at CCSF have been on a long, painful decline for years, suggesting that free tuition alone isn't enough to fix what ails community college education in this city.

That doesn't mean we should pull the rug out from under students who genuinely need financial help. But there's a massive difference between targeted financial aid for low-income students and a universal giveaway that subsidizes everyone from a struggling single parent in the Tenderloin to a tech worker's kid in Pacific Heights.

If Lurie is pushing for reforms that make the program more fiscally sustainable and better targeted, that's not "undermining" — that's governing. The reflexive outrage machine in SF treats any attempt to scrutinize public spending as an attack on the vulnerable. It's not. It's called accountability.

As one Bay Area resident put it, what voters really want to know is where leaders stand on the big-picture issues: "fiscal policy, healthcare costs" — the stuff that actually determines whether programs like these survive long-term.

Free college for those who need it? Absolutely. Free college for everyone because it polls well? That's not compassion. That's just expensive.