City Hall

Laws, lobbyists, ballots, and budgets.

Culture & History

4 of San Francisco’s 10 Cultural Districts Predate the City’s Funding for Them

The Board of Supervisors began naming protected cultural corridors in 2013. The city did not fund or staff a program to run them until voters passed Proposition E in 2018.

Sep 16, 2026

City Hall

One Lobbyist Filed 6% of Every City Contact, Nearly All to Planning

Melinda Sarjapur, a partner at the land-use firm Reuben, Junius & Rose, has logged more contacts with San Francisco officials than any other lobbyist since public disclosure began in 2010. Her pace has since collapsed.

Sep 3, 2026

City Hall

San Francisco's 2004 chain-store law banned El Farolito's 12th shop

The ordinance that invented "formula retail" still bans chains outright in three neighborhoods. Seventeen years after writing North Beach's version of that ban, the former supervisor who wrote it found a way around his own law to let a Mission taquería in.

Aug 24, 2026

City Hall

San Francisco's Sanitation and Streets Department lasted just one budget: $116.7 million

Voters created the agency in November 2020 and eliminated it two years later, before it produced a second year of spending.

Aug 21, 2026

Culture & History

In 1907, San Francisco paid only 7 cents

San Francisco has voted on 1,998 ballot measures since 1907, and 1,212 of them were amendments to its own charter, the document that used to hold the pay of every clerk in the building. One election in 1995 closed that ballot down.

Aug 11, 2026

City Hall

Five hundred and fifteen asks, and no answer

One Planning file, the Flower Mart on Brannan Street, has drawn more logged lobbying than any other municipal decision in San Francisco’s sixteen-year disclosure record. The median file draws five contacts. Nine years on, the department’s own status for the case reads On Hold.

Aug 9, 2026

City Hall

A Yes vote is the beginning of a decade

San Francisco has better than four billion dollars of voter-approved bond work on its books. The old bonds are nearly all spent; the new ones have barely been touched — and the flagship among them, the 2018 seawall, is eight years past its Yes vote and still being drawn.

Aug 1, 2026

City Hall

4 of San Francisco’s 10 Cultural Districts Predate the City’s Funding for Them

One Lobbyist Filed 6% of Every City Contact, Nearly All to Planning

San Francisco's 2004 chain-store law banned El Farolito's 12th shop

San Francisco's Sanitation and Streets Department lasted just one budget: $116.7 million

In 1907, San Francisco paid only 7 cents

Five hundred and fifteen asks, and no answer

A Yes vote is the beginning of a decade

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