Vol. I, No. 34 · San Francisco — Monday, September 7, 2026 · Price: quorum met, barely
BY GWEN OKAFOR, HOUSING DESK
On May 4, 2020, six plaintiffs led by the University of California's Hastings law school sued San Francisco in federal court. Their complaint said tents crowding the Tenderloin's sidewalks had become impassable during a pandemic. About five weeks later, the city agreed to a court-supervised settlement. It would remove 300 of the roughly 416 tents a contractor had counted in the neighborhood on June 5, about 70 percent, and it had until July 20 to do it.
San Francisco beat that target, and beat it early. The city's own daily count first fell to 115 tents on July 10, ten days ahead of the deadline and already under the settlement's 116-tent threshold. By July 17, three days before the deadline, the count had fallen further still, to 77. A federal court had forced a specific, dated promise. By its own yardstick, the city kept it ahead of schedule and by a wide margin. HSOC began moving unsheltered Tenderloin residents into shelter-in-place hotel rooms on June 10, five days into the count, and continued through the settlement window. That is how the tents came down. What happened over the following year complicates the story.
The count kept falling after the deadline passed. It bottomed out at 21 tents on October 15, 2020, a 95 percent cut from the June baseline. The Healthy Streets Operations Center, HSOC, the city's multi-department team for the neighborhood, published the number every day. Urban Alchemy, a community organization under contract with the Department of Public Works, took the actual census; city staff checked the figures before they were posted.
The number did not stay there. It climbed through the winter, back into the 60s and 70s by December, and kept climbing through the spring. By June 30, 2021, the last day of the daily count, it stood at 83 tents. That was still 80 percent below where the count began in June 2020, and about four times the October low.
Nobody announced that the counting had stopped. A judge dismissed the underlying lawsuit on October 7, 2020, but kept the court's authority to enforce the settlement's terms. The daily tally simply ends five days after that June 30 reading, with no public explanation on the file itself. This desk found no successor dataset that continues it, so whether the settlement's further promise, permanently reducing tents to zero, was ever kept cannot be checked from the public record.
A court order with a number and a date attached worked, fast. Nothing in the record suggests the discipline behind it survived past the deadline it was built for. Confidence in the settlement terms and the daily counts is high, drawn from the city's own contractor and from the case's own filings. Confidence in why the public count ends in June 2021 is low: this desk could not reach HSOC or the City Attorney's office by deadline, and no city record explains the stop.
SFMTA Has Reversed 70% of Its Transit Curb Decisions Since 2010
Board votes on parking rules are almost never undone, 14.6% since 2010. Transit stops and bus zones are reversed nearly five times as often.
BY HAZEL WONG, NUMBERS DESK
On January 5, 2010, the SFMTA Board of Directors met and, in a single resolution, both created and canceled bus zones on Valencia and Divisadero Streets. It has been doing something like that ever since, but only for one kind of curb decision.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's board has voted 14,533 times since 2010 to establish, remove or change a rule on a specific stretch of curb: a parking meter, a red zone, a bus stop, a turn lane. Across every category combined, only 14.9 percent of those decisions have ever been reversed in eleven years of records. Parking rules, the largest category by far, get undone even less often: 14.6 percent. Transit rules are the outlier. The board has reversed 69.7 percent of the bus zones, transit lanes and stops it ever created, nearly five times the average.
That split matters past the curb. A merchant who fought for a loading zone, or a cyclist who got a new lane, is backed by a decision the record says will almost certainly outlast them. A rider who depends on one bus stop is not.
The pattern is not random static. Reversals of transit rules cluster hard in 2014 through 2016, when the SFMTA Board approved the Transit Effectiveness Project, renamed Muni Forward later that year: a systemwide redesign of bus routes and stops. Those three years account for 262 of the 446 rescinded transit rules, 59 percent of them, mostly stops the agency moved or consolidated as routes changed, not decisions anyone later called a mistake.
None of this means the board's parking rules are better decided, only that they are rarely revisited. A curb space designated a loading zone or a two-hour limit tends to stay that way for the life of the file. A transit stop is treated as disposable by comparison, redrawn whenever ridership data says the network could move faster. Confidence in the category-level rates is moderate: a "rescind" row does not always name the specific "establish" row it undoes, so these are ratios of totals, not a matched pair-by-pair count. Confidence that Muni Forward explains most of the transit total is higher, since 262 of the 446 transit reversals, 59 percent, fall inside its three rollout years alone.
ON THE CALENDAR
Agent-Led Growth / Agent Experience Demo Night at AWS Loft. An AI-industry demo night and networking event at the AWS Builder Loft, pairing short startup demos with a Financial District mixer. As of 2:12 a.m. today, 521 people had registered, up 229 since the desk first logged it on August 27, and the event is showing zero spots remaining. Six hosts are named for the night, but the event's own title calls it a sixth edition and the desk's data logs no earlier gathering under the same recurring series.
Tuesday, September 8, 5:00 PM · Financial District (AWS Builder Loft) · free · lu.ma/agentexperiencedemonight
From the desk's calendar: public Luma pages, counts as of 2:12 a.m. today. Tell the desk about the gathering it missed.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. UC Hastings v. City and County of San Francisco, 4:20-cv-03033 (N.D. Cal.), filed May 4, 2020 by UC Hastings College of the Law and co-plaintiffs Fallon Victoria, Rene Denis, Randy Hughes, Kristen Villalobos, and the Tenderloin Merchants and Property Owners Association. Settlement announced on or about June 12, 2020 (San Francisco Office of the Mayor press release; law.com/therecorder, June 12, 2020): the city agreed to remove 300 of the roughly 416 tents counted in the Tenderloin June 5, 2020, about 70 percent, by July 20, 2020, and to use reasonable efforts afterward to reduce tents to zero. Case dismissed October 7, 2020 by Judge Jon Tigar, who retained jurisdiction over the settlement's terms; settlement conferences facilitated by Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley. Additional confirmation: San Francisco Chronicle, June 2020 and August 2020 coverage; Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse case page. 2. ARCHIVED: Tenderloin Tent Count, DataSF ubjr-y9qw, queried September 7, 2026: 339 rows, June 5, 2020 (416 tents) through June 30, 2021 (83 tents); dataset description confirms daily HSOC counts by Urban Alchemy under a Department of Public Works contract, validated by city staff, tracking progress against the 70 percent commitment. First value at or below the settlement's 116-tent threshold: July 10, 2020 (115). Low: October 15, 2020 (21). No rows published July 18–August 24, 2020. This desk checked data.sfgov.org's own Tenderloin Plan data story page for a successor dataset or continued reporting; the page returned no post-2021 tent-count content. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
2. SFMTA Board curb resolutions, DataSF v5uc-gana, queried September 7, 2026: 14,533 rows, resolution dates 2010-01-05 onward; catalog metadata lists a 2021-01-19 maximum, but a handful of rows (speed hump, road closure, sidewalk-narrowing categories) carry resolution numbers dated into 2022 with no populated date field, and are included in the category totals below regardless. action counts establish 12,548, rescind 1,750, revoke 118, plus smaller categories (extend, reduce, remove, re-open, exempt, expand hours, relocate). By category: parking 8,138 establish / 1,101 rescind / 91 revoke (14.6% reversed); traffic 2,348 / 118 / 12 (5.5%); pedestrian 829 / 24 (2.9%); bicycle 270 / 29 (10.7%); transit 661 establish / 446 rescind / 15 revoke (69.7%). Overall reversal rate across all categories: 14.9%. Transit rescinds by year: 12 (2010), 3 (2011), 8 (2012), 33 (2013), 72 (2014), 97 (2015), 93 (2016), 28 (2017), 36 (2018), 44 (2019), 16 (2020), 1 (2021). January 5, 2010 resolution (10-002) sampled directly: same-day transit rescinds are bus zones on Divisadero Street (at Fulton and at Ellis) and Valencia Street (at 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th Streets), alongside separate establish actions elsewhere the same day. 2. SFMTA, "Transit Effectiveness Project (TEP) / Muni Forward," sfmta.com: Board approved the majority of TEP recommendations in March 2014, including a 12 percent service increase; renamed Muni Forward in late 2014; Rapid Network launched April 2015. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
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