After a late-night session on June 26, the Budget & Appropriations Committee of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors is moving forward with a set of proposed resolutions regarding the budget. This includes one key provision proposed by Mayor Daniel Lurie to reallocate tax revenue raised from 2018’s Local Measure C, a.k.a. “Our City Our Home” or just Prop C. Besides likely being illegal – per the city attorney – this move would remove funding for a popular and successful housing program addressing homelessness in San Francisco.

In 2018, hundreds of activists came together with over a hundred endorsers in a political upsurge to fight for a durable solution to homelessness in San Francisco. DSA San Francisco formed a key part of this coalition, with DSA members occupying positions at every level of the campaign, from signature-gathering to running the field operation. We saw something revolutionary in Prop C: the ability to address homelessness at its root by funding permanent supportive housing.

Prop C implemented a gross receipts tax on large businesses, with the revenue going into a special city fund. It also specified that this fund be used for four things, in proportion: at least half for permanent housing, at least a quarter for mental health services, up to 15% on homelessness prevention, and only up to 10% for temporary shelter. This isn’t an afterthought: Prop C was built around the Housing First approach, which argues that homelessness and the constellation of issues that often surround it — drug use, mental health crises, and poverty — are best resolved by providing housing, not by temporary half-measures.

Prop C has faced challenges before. In 2018, before its passage, it received unprecedented pushback from the mayor at the time, London Breed, in an astounding statement where she highlighted the “lack of accountability” in her own administration and claimed that housing people without homes would worsen homelessness by “funding services for residents from other counties”. (San Francisco’s Point-in-Time count has continued to show that around 60–70% of the homeless population was most recently housed in San Francisco, before and after Prop C’s passage). She also raised the possibility of it being blocked by business interests: “if it passes, Proposition C will likely immediately become part of an ongoing lawsuit to invalidate it and similar signature-driven tax measures passed earlier this year.”

San Francisco’s voters approved Prop C with a 61% majority, but former Mayor Breed’s prediction came true and an anti-tax organization sued the city, claiming that special-purpose taxes require a ⅔ supermajority. This blocked Prop C spending until mid-2020 when the California Court of Appeals reaffirmed voters’ power to set taxes on businesses with citizen-initiated ballot measures.

When it has been allowed to work, Prop C and Housing First have been successful. The city’s 2024 report shows that it has provided more than 5,000 units – a number larger than the current remaining unsheltered homeless population in San Francisco – and that this housing works: “In the Permanent Housing service area, 96% of households retained their housing or exited to other stable housing options”. The contrast with other approaches is stark, and the city’s approach to temporary shelter has been, at best, chaotic: during the pandemic, San Francisco made it difficult for people to self-refer into shelter. On the other hand, Prop C made it possible for many of the residents of the city’s Shelter-in-Place Hotel program to exit to permanent housing. 

This is the funding that Mayor Lurie plans to re-allocate to temporary shelter or other programs. As socialists we believe in provisioning the economy based on the needs of the people, not on the whims of startup capitalists or technocratic heirs-turned-mayors, and it’s clear that the urgent need of San Francisco’s homeless population is housing. The people of San Francisco agree. We call on the Board of Supervisors and the mayor to keep this funding permanent supportive housing and to protect Prop C and reject this antidemocratic provision.

Regardless of what happens at the Board today, it’s clear that real solutions can only come from organizing together. This decision is a step back for the city’s democratic processes, but together we can claim this power and demand real durable solutions for the city’s problems. Join DSA to fight for a world that places the interests of the many over the interests of the few!