Mayor Lurie's Family Zoning Plan legalizes more homes for families in neighborhoods that have long blocked duplexes, triplexes, and small apartments. It passed the Board of Supervisors in a 7–4 vote, keeping San Francisco in control of its own planning process instead of ceding control of our neighborhoods to Sacramento.
We're calling out the four supervisors who voted no and tried to stall homes, affordability, and local control.
GrowSF sent the following letter on December 2, 2025 to the supervisors who voted against Mayor Lurie's Family Zoning Plan.
San Francisco City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102-4689
December 2, 2025
RE: Your vote against a more affordable San Francisco and in support of surrendering local control to Sacramento
Dear Supervisors Connie Chan, Chyanne Chen, Jackie Fielder, and Shamann Walton:
We write in response to your votes against the Mayor's Family Zoning Plan - a plan that, thankfully, passed despite your opposition. Each of you has long presented yourselves as advocates for working families, vulnerable residents, and long-time San Franciscans. Yet when faced with the most consequential housing affordability decision of your tenure, you chose to vote against those very communities.
San Francisco's affordability crisis has been decades in the making, driven in part by restrictive, exclusionary zoning that locked entire neighborhoods away from the kinds of homes working families can afford. The Family Zoning Plan is the most meaningful step in a generation toward changing that. It allows more homes within neighborhood-scale height limits, enables in-law units and small apartment buildings, and concentrates new density where it belongs: along transit and commercial corridors - all while keeping more than three-quarters of the affected areas at their existing height limits.
Despite your votes, San Franciscans will now benefit from a plan that protects our neighborhoods from a Sacramento takeover and enables more affordable homes to be built. With Family Zoning now passed, San Francisco retains control over its own planning and keeps its neighborhoods intact. Your votes indicated a troubling preference to surrender that control.
As you know, the mayor's plan made no changes to the rules requiring 1-1 replacement for rent controlled units. The underhanded effort to distort that reality is disturbing, and makes your vote to oppose a plan that actually strengthens protections for tenants and small businesses alike all the more ironic. Family zoning expands relocation support, grants, and incentives for small businesses affected by construction and ensures they can return and thrive in updated commercial spaces. By voting no, you attempted to deny these benefits to the very communities you claim to champion. Critically, you opposed a plan that the City Economist projected could generate substantial economic benefits, including hundreds of millions in added local economic activity, and create the conditions for downward pressure on housing costs over time by expanding the city's constrained housing supply.
All four of you made a choice that will be remembered. You voted to keep housing scarce, to maintain exclusionary practices, to risk a loss of local control, and to deny working families the chance to remain in the city you claim to serve. You stood against a policy that will shape San Francisco's livability, affordability, and diversity for decades, harming the vulnerable populations that you proclaim to fight for.
Fortunately, a majority of your colleagues chose progress over politics, and the plan passed despite your reckless opportunism and obstruction. San Franciscans deserve leaders who act in good faith and in the long-term interests of the city. We will remember who moved the city forward, and who tried to stand in the way in the name of power and electoral politics.
Sincerely,
Sachin Agarwal
Co-Founder GrowSF
Steven Bacio
Co-Founder GrowSF