Good Morning, San Francisco

Scattered clouds, 55 degrees, and a wind so gentle it barely qualifies — classic late-June gray that'll burn off if it feels like it. Top of the fold today: the city has a jail system at a "breaking point" and a watchdog committee that has literally never bothered to show up.

The City Required Itself to Watch the Jails. It Never Did.

A year-long civil grand jury investigation just handed San Francisco a 50-page indictment of its own county jail system — overcrowded, dangerously understaffed, and running on booking software so ancient that administrators are scared to reboot it in case it never comes back on. Misdemeanor drug arrests have surged. The jail has quietly become the city's largest medical withdrawal facility, a job nobody designed it to do. And here's the kicker: there's a committee the city is legally obligated to convene the moment jails hit overcrowding thresholds. It has never once been called to order.

Sit with that. Not "met rarely." Not "underfunded." Never. The law is on the books, the threshold has been crossed, and the response from City Hall was to do precisely nothing — which, in fairness, is the one thing bureaucracies can always be counted on to deliver on time.

This is what accountability theater looks like. We pass the rule that makes us feel responsible, then we never staff the body that would force us to act on it. And the bill comes due in the worst possible place: a jail where understaffing and broken systems aren't abstractions, they're safety risks for inmates and the deputies guarding them. Worth remembering, too, that the Board of Supervisors voted down a state grant back in 2015 that could have funded a 384-bed replacement facility — then left the sheriff to manage the consequences for a decade.

You don't fix this with another task force. You fix it by convening the committee the law already demands, funding the staffing the grand jury already identified, and replacing the software before someone has to learn the hard way what happens when it doesn't turn back on. The roadmap exists. What's missing is anyone willing to read it.

The Rundown

City Hall & Politics

Newsom's billionaire tax two-step. The governor unveiled a sweeping call for a federal minimum tax on net worth above $100 million — while actively fighting the California ballot measure that would do roughly the same thing right now. Rep. Ro Khanna called it what it looks like: cover for siding with billionaires at home while posturing nationally ahead of 2028. A bold national plan you'll never have to deliver is the cheapest currency in politics.

The RESET Center's victory-lap math. SF's Sixth Street sobering center has processed about 600 people since May, and Sheriff Miyamoto already wants to build more. The problem: his win metric counts how many people got a referral, not whether anyone actually got better — and advocates say nobody's tracking the second part. Before we scale a program, maybe we measure whether it works. Novel concept.

Oakland's "balanced" budget, asterisk included. OUSD's board approved what its president called the district's first balanced budget in 22 years — without mentioning that the two officials best equipped to build a credible plan were pushed out by December, after the superintendent secretly drafted her own numbers. The catch: it still needs $30 million in unidentified cuts to actually hold. A budget that balances on paper and on staff exits isn't balanced. It's deferred.

Public Safety

Three months, no answers at Lake Merritt. About 50 people walked the lake for Amy Hillyard, the Farley's Coffee co-owner missing from Oakland since March 25. Private investigators have ruled out one video lead and are pushing through surveillance footage pulled via search warrant. A community that keeps showing up is the opposite of a city that forgets.

Tech & Startups

Murdoch buys the front door. Fox Corp's $22 billion acquisition of San Jose's Roku hands Rupert Murdoch direct control of the operating system in 100 million-plus American living rooms — most of whom never went looking for Fox. Pair it with a new LA tabloid and a former Fox host in California's governor's race, and it's a patient, three-pronged play to shift what shows up the second you turn on the TV. Whatever your politics, owning the screen itself is a different kind of power than owning a channel.

Culture & Food

A food truck becomes a lifeline. Aquenono, a Venezuelan truck in San Jose, has turned into a relief staging point after twin earthquakes killed at least 1,450 people back home. Forty-five neighbors have dropped off gloves, walkers, even dog food, bound for Oakland and then Venezuela. This is mutual aid at its purest — no committee, no grant, just people who saw a need and filled it.

Pink Triangle, folded till '27. Hundreds of volunteers spent three-plus hours Sunday folding up the 31-year-old Twin Peaks landmark — 240 feet a side, 5,000 steel spikes — until Pride 2027. A reminder that the city's most enduring traditions run on volunteer muscle, not municipal budgets.

Pride's reset. The 56th parade stepped off clean Sunday — 300-plus contingents, up to 40,000 marchers, a weekend the city pegged at over a million. The headline moment: Sen. Scott Wiener, heckled off the Trans March stage Friday, rode back to cheers two days later. Politics is rarely that forgiving twice in one weekend.

A braille champion from Berkeley. Thirteen-year-old Kai Wang, the only Californian to make the National Braille Challenge finals, came home from LA with first place in Charts and Graphs. Quiet excellence, no press conference required.

Housing & Transit

The Prop 13 time capsule on Happy Valley Road. A 1960 Lafayette home — listing for the first time since 1967 at $4.45 million — carries an annual property tax bill of $3,485. That's not a typo; it's six decades of an assessment frozen in amber. Whatever you think of Prop 13, a multimillion-dollar property taxed like a starter home is the kind of distortion worth arguing about out loud.

One More Thing

Also on that Lafayette listing: the swimming pool reportedly starts in the dining room and flows out to the backyard. Four-and-a-half million buys you a lot of things in this market — but a house where you can cannonball mid-dinner party is, genuinely, one of one.