Dense, thriving cities where people live close to their work, schools, shops and other amenities are an essential way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and ensure a sustainable and equitable future for our planet. Prop C is a significant step in the right direction to help achieve that vision. 

San Francisco’s downtown, the once bustling hub of our City, has become a ghost town since the pandemic, due to the shift to work from home and the outsize reliance on offices in the downtown mix. Prop C is part of an effort to revitalize our downtown and address our housing shortage by incentivizing the conversion of vacant office buildings to housing. Doing so could help our downtown to rebound, make it more diversified and thus resilient to such shocks in the future, and create more badly needed housing.

San Francisco League of Conservation Voters urges a YES vote on Proposition A – the Affordable Housing Bond. Your vote in favor of Proposition A may be one of the most important environmental votes you make in this election because the proposition must receive ⅔ “yes” votes to pass. We need every vote on this critical step to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by helping more people live closer to where they work. San Francisco’s Climate Action Plan sets a goal to build at least 5,000 new housing units per year, with not less than 30% affordable units. “[I]n order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the housing crisis. … ‘infill’ housing — that is, housing built in urban areas, near transit, jobs and services — can reduce greenhouse gas pollution more effectively than any other option.”

Proposition J will codify the permanent opening of JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park to alternative transportation. A car-free JFK creates a safe open space for recreation and encourages a transition away from fossil fuels.

Visits to the park are up 36% over the period before the pandemic, and 70% of people surveyed approve of a permanent JFK Promenade. San Francisco League of Conservation Voters was an active and vocal supporter of the Car-Free JFK Campaign that resulted in the permanent car-free status. Our support of a car-free JFK continues.

Proposition I would overturn the Golden Gate Park Access and Safety Program and reopen JFK Drive to motor vehicles. The initiative would overturn a consensus measure that created a permanent safe open space for people of all ages and abilities. Prior to the closure, 75% of trips on JFK were taken through, not to, the park. As a result, JFK Drive landed on the city’s Vision Zero High Injury Network among the 13% of city streets responsible for 75% of severe and fatal traffic collisions.

In his four-year term as Supervisor for District 8, Rafael Mandelman has demonstrated strong leadership on many environmental issues in San Francisco, such as building decarbonization, Vision Zero, public transportation, waste reduction, and urban trees and green spaces. We at San Francisco League of Conservation Voters are excited to endorse him for another term.

Proposition H would consolidate San Francisco’s elections by moving odd-year elections to even years, when voter participation is much higher. San Francisco League of Conservation Voters supports this initiative to increase voter engagement in electing local officials.

Proposition L will save and expand our transportation infrastructure and is critical for meeting our climate goals. By renewing the half-cent fraction of San Francisco's current sales tax, Prop L will raise $2.6 billion over the next 30 years for transportation projects across the City. Since it is a tax measure, it will require greater than 66% approval to pass, but it does not raise anyone's taxes since it just extends an existing tax.

The Board of Supervisors placed Proposition E on the ballot in response to Proposition D, after Prop D secured enough voter signatures to qualify for the ballot. Like Prop D, it would streamline permitting procedures for three categories of housing: 100% affordable housing, 100% educator housing, and mixed-income housing that includes more than the minimum amount of affordable housing required under current law.

San Francisco has the slowest process in the entire state for reviewing proposed new housing. From an environmental perspective, San Francisco is probably the best location in the state for new housing. Because of San Francisco’s sustainable forms of transportation (walking, biking, transit), mild climate, relatively green sources of electricity, strict green building standards, and low per-capita use of water, new housing built here has a lighter environmental footprint than new housing built almost anywhere else in the state. San Francisco’s decades-long failure to allow enough housing to be built is also a major factor in the City’s high cost of housing, its shameful lack of affordability, and the displacement of lower-income communities. As a result, people move farther away from their jobs, creating time-consuming and polluting long-distance commutes for those who can least afford it.

Two years ago, voters directed the City to create a new department focused on street cleaning by removing street sanitation responsibilities from the Department of Public Works (DPW). At the time, SFLCV agreed that street cleaning represents a high priority, though we did not believe that forming another costly department with overlapping administrative duties would address the problem. As the deadline looms to form this new department—the Sanitation and Streets Department—Supervisors Peskin, Ronen, and Preston have come to share SFLCV’s concern.

San Francisco League of Conservation Voters is dual endorsing Honey Mahogany and Supervisor Matt Dorsey. District 6 will have a strong environmental leader, regardless of who wins.

We asked both candidates about affordable housing, walkable and bikeable streets, public transit, green energy policies, water sustainability and conservation, zero waste, and their respective environmental vision for the City. Mahogany and Dorsey share similar outlooks on these environmental issues: they support public transportation, a car-free JFK and Great Highway, building decarbonization, and increased housing at all levels.

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board of Directors has gone through a transformation over the last several years, becoming more concerned with transit oriented development, sustainable transportation, and social justice. We at SFLCV applaud this shift.

Janice Li has been an integral part of this transition into a much more dynamic and forward thinking transportation organization, and we are happy to endorse her for reelection.

San Francisco League of Conservation Voters has been satisfied with the ongoing efforts of Supervisor Shamann Walton’s work on environmental issues in San Francisco during his four-year term as Supervisor for District 10. D10 is challenging and diverse in its environmental needs both to remedy historic travesties and manage the tremendous development along the southeast corridor from Pier 70 and Hunters Point Shipyard to Candlestick Point.

We appreciate Supervisor Walton’s efforts to protect displaced residents, to build equitable housing developments, and to hold the Navy yard accountable to high standards of environmental clean up.

The District 4 Supervisors race will be close this year. Supervisor Mar has made a point of prioritizing environmental issues out in the Sunset, which is why he is our top candidate. Though he does not push to the front to try to grab headlines, he instead puts his head down to get the work done. This can be seen in his work on affordable housing, sponsoring a budget add-back to fund the Department of Environment, or even simply biking to work regularly. In the future, we look forward to how the Supervisor will champion programs to restore our urban canopy. This was one of the main areas in his questionnaire that spoke to the future of our city.

San Francisco League of Conservation Voters endorses Catherine Stefani for District 2 Supervisor. We base our endorsement on Supervisor Stefani’s commitment to, and demonstrated record of, ensuring both affordable and market-rate housing are built in D2. We look forward to working cooperatively with Supervisor Stefani during her second term to move City policy towards vital local environmental issues, including better public transit, both in D2 and citywide, and increased water conservation and reuse to protect the Tuolumne and the San Francisco Bay.

Prop M—dubbed the Empty Homes Tax—would tax residential buildings of three or more units if the building has vacant units for more than 182 days (6 months) per year. Under Prop M, starting in 2024, residential building owners would be taxed $2,500-$5,000 per vacancy; the specific tax amount depends on the size of each unit. The larger the vacant unit, the higher the tax. The tax increases with each year units are kept vacant. By 2026, for continuously vacant housing, building owners would pay $10,000-$20,000 per unit, the specific amount again depending on the size of the empty unit.

San Francisco League of Conservation Voters endorses a “Yes” vote on the Empty Homes Tax for three reasons.

Prop N would dissolve the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority and transfer responsibility for the underground parking garage to the SF Recreation and Parks Department. This is a good plan because the Concourse Authority has served its purpose. By dissolving the Concourse Authority, this change would allow the City and the neighboring museums to better serve Golden Gate Park visitors who need to drive, while alleviating demand for on-street parking that creates heavy car traffic in the park.

The Department of Building Inspection, charged with enforcing building, electrical, plumbing, disability access and housing codes for San Francisco’s more than 200,000 commercial and residential buildings, has been engulfed in an ongoing corruption scandal which has led to arrests, resignations across city government, and multiple federal indictments (so far). Needless to say, public trust in this department and its oversight commission, the Building Inspection Commission (BIC), is low.

To rebuild trust in this key agency, Supervisor Melgar based the reforms outlined in Prop B on her 10 years of experience on the BIC. Fundamentally, Prop B brings the DBI and BIC into alignment with the rules that all other departments and commissions follow, remedying these agencies’ long, unwarranted history of being run differently than other departments and commissions in San Francisco.

As part of a suite of good governance reforms on the ballot in June 2022, Prop E solidifies San Francisco’s commitment to prohibiting pay to play politics.

To understand why Prop E is good for San Francisco, it is first necessary to understand an unfamiliar term — “behested payments” — and refresh recollections about very recent history.

Behested payments are donations made to a government agency or charity at the request of a public official for a legislative, governmental, or charitable purpose. For example, if a Supervisor asks a real estate developer to make a donation to a local nonprofit, that is a behested payment. The payment was made at the “behest” of the public official. So, what’s the big deal? Donating to nonprofits is a good thing.

These payments become problematic when the party making the payment at the request of the public official also has an interest in a decision over which the public official has authority, i.e., they are an “interested party.” Consider a Supervisor who asks a real estate developer to donate to a nonprofit while the developer’s permit is pending before the Board of Supervisors. While not rising to the level of a bribe, the payment does raise questions of impropriety. The very type of impropriety with which the City is all too familiar.

Prop C implements sensible reforms to the recall process in San Francisco.

The power of voters to recall an elected official is vital to democracy. When enough San Francisco residents agree that a representative acts in a way that conflicts with the duties of the office and contrary to the public good, we should be able to mount a grassroots effort to remove them from office.

However, as we have seen in last year’s statewide effort to recall Governor Newsom and in the current effort to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, recall elections are being misused by deep-pocketed outside interests when they are unhappy with election results.

And, currently when a San Francisco officeholder is removed by recall, it is the Mayor who chooses their replacement – giving the Mayor’s office outsized influence over who holds positions of power in the city.

Prop C addresses these issues in several ways. First, it narrows the window of when recall elections can happen. Currently, anyone in office for 6 months can be subject to a recall. Prop C extends that to one year, meaning officeholders serve for 12 months before they can be recalled.