Lurie shifts San Francisco housing and energy policies, Nolte retires
Lurie is speeding downtown housing conversions and keeping San Francisco all-electric, even as climate budgets tighten and Carl Nolte leaves the Chronicle.
Daniel Lurie is pushing San Francisco harder on housing while drawing a tighter line on city spending, a combination that could speed some projects downtown and leave climate programs with less support. For neighborhoods from downtown to the north and west sides, the practical question is no longer whether the city should build more housing and electrify more buildings, but which projects move faster and which face new uncertainty.
On housing, Lurie signed legislation on February 12, 2026 creating a special financing district to help convert vacant and underused downtown office and commercial buildings into housing. He followed that on February 25 with the BUILD Act, introduced with Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, to accelerate housing construction and support union jobs. Those moves build on Lurie’s 2025 Family Zoning push, which the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved and which is intended to loosen long-standing zoning rules enough to allow taller, denser housing in parts of the city and help San Francisco meet state housing obligations. The changes reach neighborhood-scale development across the city, not just Downtown San Francisco, and put more pressure on sites in places like the Sunset and the Mission where housing fights have long been local and intense.
The energy picture is more fixed. San Francisco adopted its all-electric new construction ordinance in November 2020, and any project that filed for initial permits on or after June 1, 2021 must be fully electric. In covered new construction, gas piping is not allowed for space heating, water heating, cooking, lighting or clothes drying. The city’s rules also apply to some major renovations, which means owners planning new buildings or substantial rehabs still have to design around electric systems rather than gas hookups.
What has changed under Lurie is the level of city support behind that transition. His proposed 2026-27 and 2027-28 budget totals $16.9 billion and closes a $642 million deficit by eliminating more than 400 vacant positions and cutting another nine jobs, after spring layoffs totaled 127 jobs. San Francisco Public Press reported that the proposal would significantly reduce support for the Environment Department and end general-fund dollars for the Climate Equity Hub, a program that helps low-income households with energy-efficiency and health-focused retrofits. Antonio Diaz of PODER said the city’s building electrification program helps tenants who cannot afford clean-energy upgrades, underscoring who could feel the squeeze first if those programs shrink.
Carl Nolte’s retirement adds a civic-news coda to the same moment. The fourth-generation San Franciscan joined the Chronicle in 1961, and in his final column on June 13, 2026, he said that weekend marked the 65th anniversary of his first day at the paper. The Chronicle’s archive dates to 1865, a reminder that Nolte’s run spanned a stretch of city history that now looks unusually long as San Francisco resets its housing and energy priorities.
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