Introducing Governing San Francisco

Campaigns are marketing and sales. Governing is the product.

San Francisco City Hall Rotunda, photo credit Thomas Hawk

Over the next 60 days, I’ll be writing a series of memos here on what I see as the most significant shift of power in San Francisco in decades—the moderate coalition taking power in the Board of Supervisors and the first Mayor from outside of government since 1911. I want to explore the fundamental dysfunctions and challenges of governing San Francisco to help civic leaders around these campaigns be more informed and intentional in what we say and do. We can increase the odds of success for Danny Sauter, Bilal Mahmood, and Daniel Lurie’s first 100 days, or if we misunderstand the challenges ahead of them, we could accidentally make their challenging jobs more difficult. 

I aim to write a memo every few days for the next two months. Importantly, I am not the expert; I’ll source knowledge, inspiration, and insights chiefly from leaders in and around the San Francisco government with an eye toward what newcomers at the base of the learning curve would need to know. I want to hear your comments, feedback, critiques, and ideas.

Who am I?

My name is Zack Rosen. I am a 20-year citizen of San Francisco, and I have a bit of a career mullet: business in the front building Pantheon, and political party in the back—nights and weekends, I co-founded California YIMBY, Abundance Network, and KidSafeSF. Increasingly, civic leaders have been stepping up to help reform San Francisco government. In San Francisco, I’ve been helping Abundant San Francisco and on the JFK Promenade and Ocean Beach Park campaigns. My first job was working on the digital team for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

The recurring themes of these memos will be:

• The difference between marketing (winning campaigns) vs. product (governing that gets outcomes)

• The sheer complexity of governing San Francisco

• Questioning the norms, culture, and incentives that have been hobbling the effectiveness of San Francisco government

• Other things veterans of governing San Francisco think are most important in the days ahead

Mostly, this is not about giving advice, although there will be some of that; it’s really about building shared context and a lens to the work of governing that makes things clearer and simpler. I hope that by sharing the insights, we can help, in a small but meaningful way, the community of civic leaders who love our city and toil away for years to improve our civic institutions—enabling them to be a bit more effective.

Admittedly, publishing gate-kept knowledge publicly is a bit nerve-wracking, given how charged our politics are. I’m sharing these publicly rather than privately because I think there is value in more public knowledge about how systems of governance work or why they fail.

To reform government, actors inside and outside the system—advocates, press, donors—must have a shared understanding of our challenges. Today, they don’t. Building this shared understanding of our city’s fundamental challenges is a prerequisite for successfully solving them together. Our city’s challenges are substantial. 

Specifically, we’ve heard messaging around how the election of moderates in and of itself will “fix” the city. Elections are consequential, but we simply will fail to govern effectively without sustained alignment between electeds, government staff, and outside civic leaders, starting with this transition. With a new majority on the Board of Supervisors and a new Mayor, that work starts now.

It is also assumed that moderate control of the Board of Supervisors can be counted on in the subsequent election cycles. That is a faulty assumption, as the history of Board of Supervisors control shows a thermostatic regression to the mean; defending Joel Engardio in D4 and Rafael Mandelman’s D8 seat will be challenging in 2026.

This is a historic moment and opportunity for governing San Francisco. The next 60 days will help shape whether the mandate for change voters gave our leaders translates to tangible outcomes or if we fall back into our old habit of letting the 30% we disagree on as a city tank the other 70%.