In news that sounds like it was generated by an AI trained exclusively on San Francisco elite social calendars, Nancy Pelosi is getting her very own garden at the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago — a gift courtesy of tech investor and longtime Democratic mega-donor Ron Conway.

The announcement came at an intimate soiree at the Conway residence, because in San Francisco, even philanthropy requires a cocktail party with a guest list that reads like a Fortune 500 fever dream. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, Google CFO Ruth Porat, and — because this city never stops being wonderfully absurd — MC Hammer were all in attendance.

Let's be clear: people can spend their money however they want. That's the beauty of a free society. Ron Conway earned his fortune through smart investments, and if he wants to dedicate a garden to Nancy Pelosi at the Obama Center, that's his prerogative. We're not here to begrudge anyone their philanthropic gestures.

But there's something almost too on-the-nose about San Francisco's ruling class gathering in a Pacific Heights living room to bestow honors upon each other while the city they claim to champion grapples with a $800 million budget deficit, crumbling infrastructure, and streets that could use — quite literally — a bit more gardening.

The same donor networks that fund these legacy projects have spent decades backing the very policies that turned San Francisco into a cautionary tale of progressive governance. Homelessness spending that produces no results. A transit system hemorrhaging riders. Housing costs that have pushed working families to the Central Valley.

A garden is lovely. But you know what would really honor public service? Accountability for the billions spent with little to show for it. A genuine reckoning with why a city this wealthy, this educated, and this well-resourced can't seem to keep its own house in order.

Plant your garden, Madam Speaker. The rest of us will keep tending to the weeds.