by Randy Shaw on December 1, 2025 (Beyond Chron.org)
1993 flyer. What tenants faced prior to the BIC
Five city officials with no connection to tenant groups is trying to eliminate San Francisco’s most vital tenant protection body: the Building Inspection Commission (BIC). Minutes from a recent meeting of the Streamlining Committee reflect the group’s profound ignorance regarding the BIC’s powers and mission. The Streamlining Committee (hereafter “the Committee) does not understand what the BIC does nor, more importantly, what it is supposed to do.
The Committee was created by Prop E in the November 2024 election. Prop E was the reform alternative to Prop D, which sought to eliminate dozens of commissions and strengthen mayoral power. Voters rejected Prop D, favoring Prop E’s plan for a committee to carefully assess what reforms to the commission system were necessary.
Unfortunately, the Prop E committee has ignored input from groups affected by potential changes. As a result, the Board of Supervisors must reject the group’s plan to place a measure on the November ballot eliminating or weakening the BIC.
Tenants Deserve Habitable Dwellings
If Committee members ever read the ballot handbook on the initiative (Prop G) that created the BIC they would know that improving living conditions for tenants drove the measure’s passage. Voters got what they were promised. Prior to the BIC, the downtown-run and politically unaccountable Bureau of Building Inspection (BBI) made housing code enforcement its lowest priority. The BBI failed tenants, landlords, and builders alike.
After the BIC was seated, stronger and far more effective code enforcement procedures were installed in record time. San Francisco went from having one the nation’s worst code enforcement systems to a national model (New York City, Oakland, and Los Angeles consulted me on how to adopt code enforcement procedures based on the San Francisco model).
Under the BIC’s leadership, DBI has never deviated from these successful code enforcement policies to this day. DBI continues targeting bad landlords rather than good ones, which was not the case at the prior BBI.
The BIC has given San Francisco tenants the greatest protection of their living conditions than renters in any other major city in the United States. This is the success this committee wants to dismantle.
Misunderstanding the BIC’s Role
Why do these people think the BIC has failed?
According to former Director Ed Harrington, the BIC “lends itself to graft and corruption.” The retired controller claims the commission “neither adds value to the City nor provides adequate oversight of the Department of Building Inspection.”
Harrington supports eliminating the BIC, “stating it neither adds value to the City nor provides adequate oversight of the Department of Building Inspection. However, he acknowledged uncertainty about where its current functions should be reassigned.”
Why doesn’t Harrington know where BIC’s functions can be reassigned? Because he proposed its elimination without taking the time to learn what the BIC does.
Ed Harrington was the city Controller when Prop G, which I wrote to create the Department of Building Inspection and the BIC, was on the November 1994 ballot. He never asked me about what the BIC does and should do. He was a great Controller but knows nothing about the history of city code enforcement and the BIC’s role in improving it. To this day Harrington has never taken the time to talk to tenant supporters of BIC.
As a controller, Harrington made sure to perform due diligence before reaching conclusions. He has not done so here.
Graft and Corruption?
The Building Inspection Commission was designed to set housing and building policies and to approve department budgets. Its purpose was never focused on eliminating “graft and corruption” because as a commission its members do not have supervisory authority over front line staff.
Ed Harrington knows enough about how San Francisco operates to know that Commissioners are not to blame for a Building Inspector on the take. Or a permit expediter falsifying information. Commissioners do not directly supervise line employees; I believe a city charter provision bars them from doing so.
In thirty years of operation covering tens of thousands of inspections and permits, DBI has seen a handful of corruption cases. It’s also seen a huge number of cases where commission policies have resulted in tenants getting heat, hot water, and other vital services they did not get before the BIC.
Prior to the BIC the city had no Spanish-speaking housing inspectors! Nearly all housing code lawsuits filed by the city attorney were to close illegal in-law apartments!
Absent a commission, slumlords were almost never prosecuted. Why? Because the downtown interests that controlled the then-BBI did not want the agency to pay the city attorney’s office to sue slumlords.
That’s the world without a BIC that Ed Harrington and his colleagues want San Francisco to revive.
It will take all those who care about tenants and social justice to stop them.
The BIC Can Do Better
I disagree with Harrington’s claim that the BIC does not provide adequate oversight of the DBI. But I agree the BIC should be more engaged with DBI leadership. DBI is such a large agency that commissioners must be especially dedicated to their role. It’s why talk of combining the BIC with the Planning Commission makes no sense. A single commission does not have the bandwith to set policies and monitor two large and complex departments with many very different functions.
If Planning and Building Inspection were combined under one commission, the big developer and downtown interests would go back to calling all the shots. Housing code enforcement would once again become the lowest priority, as those benefiting from that action rarely make campaign donations.
The minutes report that Vice Chair Bruss felt that the qualification requirements made appointments of quality DBI commissioners difficult. But these requirements were recently amended by Supervisor Melgar. Melgar’s reforms also shifted power over appointing the DBI Director from the BIC to the mayor.
Bruss at least knows enough to conclude that “BIC is responsible for administering mandatory state building code and regulations, which makes its role distinct.” Committee member Sophie Hayward also expressed support for BIC’s elimination but “remained hesitant without a clear understanding of where its functions would go.”
Critics of the sweeping Prop D in November 2024 felt that it had been drafted without input from the broader public. Voters overwhelmingly agreed.
The Streamlining Committee is now making the same mistake.
Randy Shaw
<I>Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron and the Director of San Francisco’s Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which publishes Beyond Chron. Shaw’s new book is the revised and updated, The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco. His prior books include Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in the New Urban America. The Activist’s Handbook: Winning Social Change in the 21st Century, and Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century. </I>
