Doug Chan
March 30, 2026

Reprinted from Facebook with permission of the author. Some of the content has been formatted for readability. The text is the same.

For working-class Chinese Americans on San Francisco's westside, Proposition A does not represent a meaningful advance in public safety—it is a regressive financial burden built on a decade and a half of broken promises.

While Mayor Daniel Lurie frames the measure as a vital, citywide upgrade to our emergency firefighting water system, beneath this appeal to civic resilience lies a deeply misaligned policy. Asking voters to authorize a fourth General Obligation (GO) bond for a pipeline that has never arrived is a bridge too far.

Proposition A imposes new ad valorem taxes on working-class homeowners while diverting fiscal capacity away from pressing neighborhood needs, proving once again that in San Francisco, resource allocation is inseparable from questions of equity and honesty.

The Empty Promise of “Every Corner”

Lurie’s ballot argument explicitly invokes the westside, claiming Prop. A will extend high-pressure water lines to “every neighborhood in every corner of San Francisco.” A basic fact-check of the city's own infrastructure history reveals this statement to be fundamentally “false,” as outlined by local critic John Crabtree.

San Francisco voters have approved Earthquake Safety & Emergency Response (ESER) bonds in 2010, 2014, and as late as 2020. Yet, the reality of the last sixteen years is stark. As Crabtree points out, there have been “three bonds passed; $1.44 billion borrowed (and spent); ZERO high-pressure, emergency firefighting water hydrants installed; and ZERO miles of emergency firefighting water pipe laid in San Francisco's unprotected neighborhoods.”

Under California municipal finance law, a bond measure is a binding contract. A city can only legally spend bond proceeds on the specific "Project List" approved by voters. If $1.44 billion in past ESER funds failed to deliver westside infrastructure, it is because those communities were never legally prioritized in the binding text of past measures.

Now, City Hall is asking for another $535 million. Yet the fiscal math does not align with the Mayor's promises. Prop. A allocates only $130 million to emergency firefighting water supply infrastructure.

“At a cost of $42 million per mile, as estimated by SFPUC,” Crabtree notes, “the city will be fortunate to lay pipe from Lake Merced to any point significantly beyond — north of — Sloat Boulevard.” It certainly “won’t get their mostly unplanned, likely unworkable ‘Westside Potable EFWS Project’. . . even across The Sunset, let alone across Golden Gate Park and into The Richmond.”

Furthermore, while life-saving water infrastructure remains unfunded for the westside, voters are being asked to authorize debt where “$200 million (38%) of which will go to a SFMTA Muni Bus Facility.” Combining disparate projects like water infrastructure and transit depots into a single measure is a common legal strategy to pass unpopular items, but it dilutes the funds available for true emergency safety.

When pressed on the Mayor's claim that this bond will protect “every corner” of the city, officials from the SFPUC and the Fire Department tellingly distanced themselves, stating, “PUC did not say this and the Fire Department did not say this.”

The inclusion of the westside in the ballot argument is not a structurally prioritized allocation; it is, in Crabtree's words, a “prevarication,” because “it is fundamentally anti-democratic to intentionally use the [Voter Information Pamphlet] to deceive voters.”

The Political Framing: Universal Benefit vs. Unequal Burden

Lurie’s argument rests on a universalist premise: that seismic safety investments benefit all San Franciscans equally. But this rhetorical move obscures a fundamental legal and policy question—who actually pays the debt service?

General Obligation bonds such as Proposition A are financed through ad valorem property taxes—taxes based on the assessed value of real estate. On the westside—particularly in neighborhoods such as the Sunset and Richmond—Chinese American families disproportionately occupy the category of “asset-rich but income-constrained” homeowners. Many are first-generation immigrants or elderly households whose primary wealth is tied up in their homes rather than in liquid income.

Furthermore, this burden is not isolated to homeowners. Under San Francisco Rent Board regulations, landlords are legally permitted to pass through 50% of the property tax increases resulting from GO bonds directly to their renters.

Therefore, even modest increases in bonded debt represent a real, cumulative financial pressure on working-class residents, layered on top of rising insurance costs and utility rates. Thus, while Proposition A is framed as a universal good, its financing mechanism is regressive.

Infrastructure Without Affordability: A Mismatch of Priorities

The deeper issue is not simply cost—it is prioritization. Mayor Lurie’s broader policy agenda, including the BUILD Act, reflects a consistent emphasis on stimulating development through tax incentives, seeking to reduce transfer taxes on large real estate transactions to attract corporate investment.

When viewed alongside Proposition A, a pattern emerges: the city socializes infrastructure costs through publicly backed debt paid by working-class residents, while privatizing the benefits of development through tax relief for large-scale developers.

For working-class Chinese Americans on the westside, this is a severe misalignment of priorities. Their most pressing concerns are housing affordability for younger generations, small business stability, and protection against displacement pressures. Proposition A operates adjacent to—rather than within—the lived economic realities of these communities.

The Illusion of “Free” Safety

A central feature of Lurie’s ballot argument is the implicit framing of Proposition A as an absolute necessity, discouraging scrutiny by positioning opposition as anti-safety.

But municipal public finance is always about trade-offs and debt capacity. Every dollar allocated to long-term bonded debt is a dollar that cannot be used for immediate service provision, targeted subsidies, or neighborhood-level interventions.

For linguistically isolated households and aging immigrant populations on the westside, the marginal value of community-serving investments is significantly higher than authorizing debt for a bond that legally fails to guarantee its core promises to their neighborhoods.

Proposition A might not be wholly without merit—municipal infrastructure inevitably requires capital investment. But its purported public benefits remain deeply dubious. As Crabtree summarizes the frustration of District 4 voters: “when will people start trusting City Hall again? . . . when City Hall stops lying to us.”

[John's columns about this subject may be viewed at his substack here: Though The Heavens Fall]