Damian Writes About Stuff

Preamble to the Preamble

My good friend Sasha has asked to publish his 2024 San Francisco ballot initiative guide to this site, so that it may reach my audience of tens of people. Enjoy – damian

Preamble

I make friends at parties with a fun bit of trivia about California ballot initiatives; under current rules, you could probably get The Purge on the ballot with a little more than half a million signatures. Mercifully, none of this year’s ballot initiatives seek to turn life into a horror film (that question is in the Federal part of the ballot, under “President”), but there are a number of consequential policy items going directly to voters.

If you live in San Francisco, there will be ten state items, one Bay Area regional item, and fifteen city-specific items¹. I have a cheat sheet below, and then have sorted the initiatives into a few categories to add a bit of context.

All voter guides carry the politics of the people who wrote them. I’m going to largely avoid talking about who put each initiative on the ballot and who is lobbying for it. As I write this, California’s many political players are negotiating endorsements, but the text of what we’re voting on has already been set. That’s why this guide can come out early, as I’m just going to be talking about what the initiatives do and who benefits (or suffers) from them. I believe we can and should make the government work better for more people, and after reading about what’s on the ballot, hopefully you’ll see why my recommendations are what they are.

Oh, and I hope you’re excited there’s no dialysis question this year. Better things are possible.

Candidate endorsements can be found here

Justice

🟢 YES on Prop 3 👨🏻‍❤️‍👨🏿
🟢 YES on Prop 6 🦅
🟢 YES on Prop 32 👩‍🏭
🔴 NO on Prop 36 🛂
🟢 YES on Prop O 🏥

Hate voting on ballot initiatives each election? Don’t worry, this might be the last one!

Two ballot measures protect against potential federal intrusion on civil rights. Statewide measure Prop 3 eliminates California’s ban on same-sex marriage, replacing it with a new state constitutional right to marry the person of your choice. This is important because same-sex marriage and interracial marriage are both legal only because of Supreme Court decisions, which are at risk of being overturned [1, 2] without federal legislative action. Similarly, San Francisco has an initiative, Prop O, which will add various legal protections for people seeking an abortion within the city. You should vote yes on both.

Prop 6 amends the California state constitution to ban forced labor in prison – the last legal form of slavery in America [1, 2]. Slavery is bad. Vote yes to get it out of our state.

Prop 32 raises the state minimum wage slightly over the next two years to help offset recent inflation². The politics and economics of the minimum wage are complicated, but the actual scale of this change is modest. Improving wages for people at the bottom of the income distribution has been a positive trend the last few years and should continue. Vote yes.

Lastly, Prop 36 reinstitutes and adds several mandatory minimum prison sentences for petty theft and drug charges. Single acts of petty theft have not carried a prison sentence in California since 2014. This generated hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal justice savings, required by law to be spent on public schools. Police departments across the state wanted to make sure people didn’t see good results from giving them less money, and so have protested by often not doing their jobs [1, 2] and fanning fears about public safety (more on this later). There is little evidence this proposition will make anyone safer, but it will transfer 8 figures from elementary schoolers to prison guards. Vote no.

Housing [Bad]

🔴 NO on Prop 33 🙅
🟢 YES on Prop 34 🏚️

Prop 33 repeals the Costa-Hawkins Act, a 30-year old state law which regulates rent control in California. The act today prevents cities from enacting new rent control laws stricter than the state’s. All California apartments older than 15 years are currently subjected to a moderate, state-mandated rent control regime³.

Rent control policies vary – they can be written to do good things, like making it possible for people to stay in their homes when richer people move in next to them. They can also be written to do bad things, like prevent new housing from being built, a really important thing for bringing down the price of housing in California. Cities across the state, from conservative Huntington Beach to less conservative^{[citation needed]} San Francisco have already announced their intent to use rent control rules to limit housing construction⁴. Rent control is good; preventing its abuse by keeping it away from city politicians is also good. Vote no on Prop 33.

Prop 34 is designed to get the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, responsible for Prop 33, to stop spending money on political activities. The AHF brings in more than a billion dollars each year contracting with the federal government to provide healthcare for uninsured patients⁵, of which they spend tens of millions of dollars on ballot propositions every election cycle. Prop 34 is targeted to only affect the AHF, and does not interfere with their many legitimate medical activities – it simply compels them to spend their largesse on patient care, not play with California politics at the whims of their executives. Vote yes.

Housing [Good]

🟢 YES on RM4 🏘️
🟢 YES on Prop G ♿

Want to vote on something that actually helps house more people affordably? RM4 is a Bay Area-wide bond measure to fund the production and maintenance of subsidized housing, expected to create 70,000 to 90,000 affordable homes. It’s real money that will make a real difference in the housing crisis – vote yes.

Want to vote on something that actually helps house more people affordably? You don’t get to this time. RM4 was a Bay Area-wide bond measure to fund the production and maintenance of subsidized housing, expected to create 70,000 to 90,000 affordable homes. It’s real money that would make a real difference in the housing crisis – this is of course why a crack team of Jordan Peele villains Bay Area homeowners filed a lawsuit against the measure, which, along with some other legal maneuvering, led RM4’s authors to pull it off the ballot. It will probably be back on the ballot in 2026, along with several other important funding measures.

Prop G made it to the ballot, committing a modest amount of money to making rental homes available to extremely low-income and/or disabled San Franciscans. It’s unlikely to help people get into shelter, but should help vulnerable people stay in housing, which is also a good goal. Vote yes.

Government Finance [Good]

🟢 YES on Prop 2 🏫
🟢 YES on Prop 4 🌊
🟢 YES on Prop 5 🗳️
🟢 YES on Prop 35 🩺
🟢 YES on Prop A ✏️

Government finance in California is dominated by a 1978 ballot initiative known as Prop 13, which limited how governments can collect and spend money (example here). Because Prop 13 makes new taxes difficult to pass, a lot of government expenses – particularly one-time expenses on building and replacing infrastructure – are paid for with slightly-easier-to-pass bonds. There are two state bonds on the ballot and you should vote for both of them. Prop 2 funds replacing public school buildings older than 75 years and Prop 4 funds protecting infrastructure from climate change.

San Francisco has one additional local bond, Prop A, which also funds public schools and which deserves your support.

Prop 13 is a pretty bad deal for most Californians, as it hamstrings government services and makes renters subsidize homeowners. While major reform remains too politically scary for Sacramento to touch, a small but important reform made it to the ballot this year as Prop 5, which lowers the threshold for voters to approve bonds. Today 66.7% of voters must approve a bond measure for it to take effect, causing even very popular measures to fail to get funded. Prop 5 will lower that threshold to 55%, making it easier for more local governments to fund and fix public infrastructure. This is good and you should vote yes.

Finally, Prop 35 indefinitely extends some rules on state Medicaid spending in a way that is fiendishly complicated but will probably result in more Medicaid beneficiaries – low-income people, children, and disabled adults – having access to preventative healthcare. The measure proposes a better deal than we might get if left to the legislature, and so you should vote yes.

The rest of this guide is for San Francisco measures only. If you’re registered to vote somewhere else, I have no further advice for you, apart from “consider moving to San Francisco.“

Government Finance [SF, Bad]

🟢 YES on Prop B 🤑
🔴 NO on Prop J 🏈
🔴 NO on Prop M 🤡
🟢 YES on Prop N 🎓

San Francisco’s Prop B combines a number of niche projects in need of funding into a single clown-car of a bond measure. This single bond will fund repairs on aging hospitals, park upgrades, traffic signal and pedestrian improvements, homeless shelters, and a memorial to Harvey Milk. This is a bad way to fund the government, but you should vote yes anyway.

Prop J creates a new time-wasting obligation for the SF school district and gives the city government a new way to threaten them with funding cuts. This allows the mayor and city supervisors to look like they’re demanding accountability while actually just getting to bully the school board around. This is dumb, vote no.

Prop M shoots the city’s finances into a deeper hole by broadly cutting business taxes, with a special focus on the most deserving members of our community – business owners with up to $5 million in assets. Small businesses wield disproportionate power in city government, and they do not need further coddling. The city can become more business-friendly by providing better and more efficient services and housing more customers and employees, rather than sacrificing the city’s budget on the altar of slightly lower taxes. Vote no.

Prop N is incredible because of how little it does – it authorizes the city to negotiate with its employee unions to forgive their student loans, maybe. It’s a fig leaf to allow people in city government to claim they’re fighting for public employees without actually doing anything. 8/10 idea, 2/10 execution. Vote yes.

Government Finance [SF, Really Bad]

🔴 NO on Prop F 🚔
🔴 NO on Prop H 🚒
🟢 YES on Prop I 👩‍⚕️

One of the most important local issues on the ballot is pension reform for city employees⁶. The police department, having helped fearmonger about public safety in SF (see Prop 36 above), is now trying to turn public concern about crime into a massive new handout program for senior officers. Prop F would pay retirement-eligible cops $500,000 salaries to work a little longer at the end of their careers – a program that is unlikely to put more officers on the street but is likely to drive up the price of Hawaiian real estate. To help win support for their handout, the police union’s allies have put a measure on the ballot to benefit firefighters as well⁷. Their measure, Prop H, allows firefighters to retire earlier⁸. This is a pretty costly change, and the ballot box is the wrong place for this to be negotiated between firefighters and the city. My recommendation is to vote no on both F and H.

The police have also sought the support of local nurses and 911 operators, whose giveaway measure, Prop I, is far smaller and less costly. Their benefits are much less generous to start with than the fire and police departments’; I think it’s reasonable to vote yes.

Somehow Even Stupider SF Governance Things

🔴 NO on Prop C 🕵️
🔴 NO on Prop D 👑
🟢 YES on Prop E 📝

Prop C creates a new city office, the inspector general, to “root out corruption.” The powers and duties granted to this new office, however, make the inspector general a great tool for corruption, as they can harass the political opponents of whoever’s in the mayor’s office. The inspector general can subpoena or execute search warrants on just about anyone in the city on unfounded “citizen complaints.” This is a power that should not be granted to the mayor – vote no.

Many government functions in San Francisco are controlled by commissions, whose members are generally appointed by some combination of the mayor and the Board of Supervisors. Commissioners are hard to remove and thus can act independently, a fact which annoys people who want the commissioners to do their bidding.

Prop D seeks to change this, by requiring the city to eliminate half of the 130 existing commissions, almost certainly a good thing. However, it mostly eliminates commissions with independent decision-making authority, and the ones that still can make policy decisions will have a supermajority of their members appointed directly by the mayor and able to be fired at will. This gives the mayor enormous new powers, and again, given SF’s track record of corruption, that’s a recipe for bad governance. Vote no.

Prop E is a better take on the problem of commissions in SF, creating a new commission “study committee” to recommend specific commissions to consolidate, eliminate, or reform, leading to a ballot proposition (…) in 2026 to implement those changes. This has a chance to make the commission system more efficient without giving everything away to the mayor – vote yes.

Transportation

🟢 YES on Prop K 🛹
🟢 YES on Prop L 🚎

We end on a high note. Remember when I said better things are possible? 

Prop K seeks to build a new park by the Pacific Ocean, on a stretch of road already regularly closed to traffic by sand buildup. This turns rising sea levels from a costly nuisance into an accessible public attraction – just look at the renders. If freeway-happy Los Angeles can have a walkable, bikeable oceanfront park, so can we. Vote yes!

Prop L⁹ corrects for Uber and Lyft’s 2019 political shenanigans, where they locked in preferential taxes well below other major cities’ tax rates on rideshares. Prop L requires the increased revenue to be spent on MUNI operations, in the short term helping offset MUNI’s significant financial challenges and in the longer term facilitating service growth – lower fares, more routes, and more buses and trains on those routes.

Full Disclosure: I (Sasha) gathered signatures to help put Prop L on the ballot, and I’m still working on the campaign¹⁰. This guide represents my views, not the campaigns’.

However, I have two words that do represent the Prop L campaign’s view: VOTE YES!

Damian also says to vote yes on L

Outro

Thanks for reading, bonus material is provided via footnotes if you are bored. Thanks to Sasha for putting in the time to research and summarize all the ballot measures.

1. It was going to be six, until the Board of Supervisors added nine new measures on their deadline to do so. Why? As one reporter put it, “the same reason your dog licks its own genitals – because it can.”
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2.  Nerdy technical point here: the CA minimum wage has been rising by $1 per year since 2017, and was scheduled to start rising with inflation this year (likely gaining less than $1). Because of inflation in 2021 and 2022, today’s minimum wage is not as large (in terms of buying power) as was expected in 2017. This measure seeks to continue raising the minimum wage faster than inflation through 2026 to make up some of that difference.
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3.  The Costa Hawkins Act locked in the rent controls active when it was passed. In San Francisco, that means local rent controls apply to buildings built before 1979. Prop 33 proponents thus claim that the 30% of San Francisco’s renters who live in homes built after 1979 don’t have rent control. This is false; they don’t have San Francisco’s rent control, they have the state’s. The current state rent control rules are less protective than SF’s and are scheduled to expire in 2030, but the state legislature can modify and/or extend those rules at will.
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4. Virtually all increases in housing production in California in the last few years are due to state laws that compel cities to zone for more housing and bring down the costs of construction. While the state legislature has passed new laws, the biggest change has been the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) stepping up enforcement, taking a pretty holistic view of the requirement that cities “affirmatively further fair housing.” The text of Prop 33 is really short, but it’s very clearly written to give cities a strong hand to sue the state if HCD (correctly) construes punitive rent control rules as not affirmatively favoring fair housing.
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5. The full story is crazy; AHF makes almost all of its money – almost $2 billion in revenue in 2022 – by arbitraging the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ 340B program. The AHF provides prescription drugs to uninsured patients, and thus is eligible to buy drugs from manufacturers at special deeply discounted rates. However, it also provides drugs to privately insured patients, and is reimbursed by insurance companies at the non-discounted rates on those drugs, pocketing the difference. This brought in a profit of over $400 million in 2022, according to the AHF’s 501(c)3 non-profit tax filings. This profit is spent providing other medical care to their patients, leasing dubious-quality “housing” to low-income and/or AIDS-affected tenants, and, in election years, large-scale lobbying on California ballot initiatives. Since 2017, the AHF has spent almost $70 million on housing-related ballot measures, under the pretext that, since becoming a landlord for low-income tenants that same year, they have a vested interest in housing policy. The first housing measure they sponsored, Los Angeles’ 2017 Measure S, would have effectively stopped housing construction in LA county, and there’s credible reporting they did this specifically so that AHF’s president could stop an apartment building he didn’t like going up near his office. They’ve continued that quest through three more ballot measures, including this year’s Prop 33. ↩︎
6. This sentence is a good example of the failures of the ballot proposition system. ↩︎
7. Fire departments, like police departments, have structural issues and have contributed to the problems of modern American cities. ↩︎
8. If you’ve seen signs around the city talking about how firefighters suffer cancer at elevated rates, they are, amongst other things, doing early campaigning for this measure. ↩︎
9. In a fun little twist, Prop L was also an SF public transportation measure in 2022, where it won with more than 70% of the vote. Let’s do that again! ↩︎
10. Go get involved with a campaign! I’ve met a range of people with diverse opinions, many of which differ from the recommendations I’ve laid out here. You should follow my recommendations, of course, but folks on the campaign have been great to meet and have run a great campaign for Prop L. To paraphrase Prop L’s principal author (and transit artist) Chris Arvin, “getting out with a friend and talking to voters […] feels way better than reading doomsday articles.” [1]
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