Good Morning, San Francisco

No weather wire this morning — so look out the window and trust your own eyes, which is more than the city can say for its housing timeline in the Bayview. Today's big one: a waterfront park rising on schedule-ish while 1,575 promised homes sit on dirt eight years after approval. Let's get into it.

The Park Moves, the Housing Doesn't — and That's the Whole Story

Out on Innes Avenue, where the Bayview runs out of pavement and into the bay, you can watch two versions of city government happening at the same time. One pours concrete. The other pours press releases.

The concrete version is the final phase of the India Basin Waterfront Park, which broke ground last August and has spent the months since on the deeply unsexy work — PG&E pit digs, soil stabilization, pilings for a boathouse. It's running about six months late, which in public-works terms is practically punctual. The shoreline that was supposed to open in 2027 now opens in early 2028, and nobody will tell you exactly why. Fine. Parks are good. A clean, public waterfront in a neighborhood that's been handed the city's worst land deals for a century is genuinely worth celebrating.

Here's the part that should make your eye twitch. That park was never supposed to arrive alone. It was the amenity — the sweetener — attached to a 1,575-unit housing development approved back in 2018. Eight years later, the homes haven't broken ground. Not delayed-by-six-months haven't-broken-ground. Haven't-started haven't-broken-ground. The city found the will, the money, and the contractors to build the nice walking path along the water, and somehow that same machinery has produced exactly zero of the housing units that were the entire public-interest justification for the project in the first place.

This is the tell, every time. San Francisco loves the deliverable it can cut a ribbon on and quietly defers the one that's hard, contested, and actually addresses why people can't afford to live here. A park is a photo op. Sixteen hundred homes is a fight — with neighbors, with financing, with a permitting process that treats a renovation permit and an eviction notice as routine paperwork a few blocks inland while the marquee project gathers dust. The residents of the Bayview were promised both. They're getting the amenity and the wait. Accountability would mean someone at City Hall stating, on the record, why the housing half of a single approved project can stall for the better part of a decade while the landscaping proceeds. Don't hold your breath through early 2028.

The Rundown

Housing & Transit

• The Innes Avenue split-screen deserves one more line in this section because it's not a one-off. When the easy half of a public deal ships and the hard half evaporates, that's not bad luck — that's revealed priorities. Watch whether anyone on the Board treats the 1,575 units as a deadline or a suggestion. So far, suggestion.

Culture & Food

• Sundown Cinema is back from the dead. SF's free outdoor movie series went dark last year after two decades, limped back scaled-down, and now returns for a full five-date 2026 season. Proof that the good stuff in this city usually survives on stubbornness and volunteer hours, not a line item. More on Friday's opener below — it's the rare piece of civic good news that cost the taxpayer nothing.

Sports

• The loneliest stat line in basketball. Victor Wembanyama put up 26, 12, and 3 blocks in the NBA Finals and the Spurs lost anyway — the best player on the floor dragged down by a team shooting 11-for-43 from three and a point guard who managed five assists. It's the oldest cruelty in the sport: individual greatness is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. Great players have survived this stage before, but only by outlasting it.

• Meanwhile, the number won't learn its lesson. Spurs-Knicks keeps playing well under the total — Game 1 landed on 200, Game 2 on 209 — and the market still hung Game 3 at 216.5 like a track meet is coming. It isn't. The tactical spine of this series is Karl-Anthony Towns chasing Wembanyama around, and that grind doesn't suddenly turn into a shootout because Vegas wants it to. The scoreboard has told you what it is. Believe it before the line does.

One More Thing

Friday, June 12, the lawn at Dolores Park, The Princess Bride at sundown — free, all-ages, no ticket, blanket encouraged and tall chairs deeply not. Inconceivable that anything in this city is still free and still works, and yet here we are. Bring a friend who's never seen it; storming the castle is best experienced on grass.