Good Morning, San Francisco

Weather's playing coy this morning — the forecast desk came up empty, so trust your own window and bring the layers SF always demands. The bigger story: the World Cup has landed in the Bay, and so has every hustle, security cordon, and ticketing scam that comes with a $3 billion tournament.

City Hall Diverted $504 Million Voters Earmarked for Housing — Now Activists Want a Constitutional Lock

Here's a number that should make every San Franciscan sit up: $504 million. That's how much transfer-tax revenue Prop. I has generated since 2021 — money voters approved in 2020 with the understanding it would fund housing — and a DSA-backed coalition says City Hall quietly spent a big chunk of it on other things. Now those activists are racing to qualify a November ballot initiative, the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act, that would constitutionally earmark that revenue so politicians can't raid it again.

Let's be clear about what's actually happening here, because it cuts across the usual lines. The people pushing this are well to our left. But the core grievance — that City Hall took money voters dedicated to one purpose and used it for whatever was convenient — is exactly the kind of accountability failure we harp on constantly. You don't get to ask voters for a tax "for housing," collect half a billion dollars, and then treat that mandate as a polite suggestion. That's not progressive or conservative. That's just government doing what unsupervised government does.

The wrinkle is the proposed fix. Constitutionally earmarking revenue is a blunt instrument — ballot-box budgeting is how you end up with a city budget that's 80% on autopilot and impossible to steer when priorities shift. Meanwhile Mayor Lurie and Supervisor Mahmood have pivoted to a competing November foreclosure-tax measure, which rather conveniently changes the subject from "where did the existing money go" to "let's raise new money." We'd rather hear an honest accounting of the first $504 million before anyone asks for the next dollar.

So we're sympathetic to the diagnosis and skeptical of the cure. The real lesson isn't that San Francisco needs more housing taxes — it's that it needs to spend the ones it already has the way it promised. Watch this one closely; it's a referendum on whether City Hall's word means anything.

The Rundown

Public Safety

A Nob Hill shoplifting call turned fatal Friday when a gray Lexus struck and killed a fleeing suspect outside the Trader Joe's on California near Hyde, pinning one of two pursuing officers under the bumper. Both officers — a recruit and his field training officer — are hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. A petty-theft stop should never end with a body in the street, and the fact that a trainee was in the middle of it raises real questions about how SFPD runs foot pursuits.

The DA charged Norris Reed III with 14 felonies, including two counts of attempted murder, for the May 31 Bayview gun battle that critically wounded Officer Brittney Taylor. Commentators are calling it a "complete failure of the parole system" — but state corrections officials dispute that framing, and the details are messier than the soundbite. A man with a kidnapping strike was back on the street; how and why is the question that matters, and it deserves facts, not a talking point.

Two teens were arrested after pepper-spraying a seller and stealing his Pokémon card collection near Holyoke and Felton on May 28 — part of a growing Bay Area pattern of trading-card robberies. When individual cards fetch hundreds or thousands of dollars, the hobby becomes a target. Collectors and shops are right to be rattled.

Housing & Neighborhoods

Two longtime Inner Richmond produce markets went dark — Apple Land on Clement and Mainland on Geary — with no permits filed at either. Small grocers are the connective tissue of a walkable neighborhood, and when two vanish in a week with no paper trail, it's worth asking what's making it so hard to keep a produce stand open in this city.

The Tenderloin's Turk-and-Hyde "oasis" is losing its city-funded caretaker June 21, and two newsrooms have now tied the closure directly to Lurie's budget as the city scrambles to close a $600 million-plus deficit. A converted parking lot where residents can actually sit and eat lunch is exactly the kind of small, high-impact program that gets cut while the bureaucracy protects itself. Meanwhile, the Tenderloin children's "safe zone" plan has moved into active negotiation between Lurie's and DA Jenkins' offices, and Ellis Street closes Sunday for the return of Sunday Streets.

A family alleges Uptown Ford of Oakland took $7,000 down but recorded only $5,000 on a 2024 Escape sold to a 77-year-old buyer — and won't return the difference. The dealership holds an F from the BBB and hasn't answered any of its six complaints. The allegation is unconfirmed, but the pattern is ugly, and predatory car deals on elderly buyers deserve daylight.

Education

UC is forming a faculty work group on bringing back the SAT, after more than 1,400 professors signed on warning that too many students arrive unable to handle college math. UC dropped the tests in 2020 on equity grounds; now the faculty actually teaching STEM are saying the emperor has no calculus. Any change is years out, but the revolt is a useful reminder that abolishing a standard doesn't abolish the thing it measured.

One More Thing

The World Cup is officially a Bay Area problem now — in the best and worst ways. The good: 2,500 fans packed Thrive City Friday for USA's 4-1 thumping of Paraguay, free watch parties run through July 19, and the East Bay fan-zone circuit kicks off today from Walnut Creek to Richmond. The ugly: FIFA sold Bay Area dad Paul Dufresne two legit $720 tickets, canceled them for unproven "fraudulent activity," then resold the same seats — one of at least 461 buyers caught in a dynamic-pricing machine that skims 30% per resale. Four attorneys general are now asking whether that's a bug or the business model.

So if you're headed to Levi's for Qatar–Switzerland at 4 p.m.: leave the drone at home — the FBI's "Operation Goal Kick" has 20-plus agencies on site — and double-check where you bought that ticket. In SF, even the beautiful game comes with fine print.