Realizing small business funding opportunities

Increased & streamlined access to city resources, grants, and programs to help nascent & legacy small businesses thrive. Investment in all San Franciscans, including access to capital & opportunities to start new businesses.

We support legislation and city programs that foster the small business community. We seek to inform small business owners & workers of funding opportunities that even the playing field with the huge corporations with tax breaks.

We support a public banking option to fund the small businesses that are excluded from corporate financial institutions. We seek to create resources to protect our city’s small businesses from crisis and shutting down.

Commercial rent controls

Protection from eviction and predatory landlords and more equitable storefront & office leasing through commercial rent controls.

We seek to educate and provide resources for legal assistance on lease and rent negotiations to protect small businesses from eviction.

We support standardizing commercial lease terms to make commercial leasing more manageable by the business community.

We support legislation and funding that makes commercial renting and owning more accessible for small businesses.

Fair taxation on businesses

Progressive taxation that relieves the disproportionate burden on small business owners by ensuring San Francisco’s wealthiest corporations are paying their fair share.

We support fair fees and taxes relative to the business’s ability to pay— recognizing that businesses starting out need fee waivers and established businesses can handle reasonable charges that increase as the business profits increase.

We support programs that improve the economic health of the community through taxation, and think the businesses benefitting the most from the current conditions should be the ones investing the most to make our city a better place to live— leaving behind a legacy that allows others to economically prosper as well.

Affordable housing

Prioritizing increasing affordable housing to allow small business owners & workers to live in San Francisco.

We acknowledge that the cost-of-living crisis impacts small business owners and workers the most, driving away humble establishments and displacing their workers.

We support affordable housing development that allows workers and owners to live in the same city as their small business— we reject that more unbridled profiteering development will achieve more affordability.

We support initiatives that realize financing for affordable housing and initiatives that combat housing being treated only as speculative stock market shares.

Right to unionize and workplace protections

Right to unionize and workplace protections for workers in San Francisco.

We respect worker’s rights to organize and engage with one another to seek better working conditions under the protection of the National Labor Relations Board.

We acknowledge that a more equitable workplace environment creates healthier outcomes for owners, workers, and the city.

We support bargaining in good faith about wages, hours, vacation time, insurance, safety practices and other mandatory subjects.

Community safety that works

Promotion of alternative forms of community safety that shifts the burden from incarceration and policing to proven community-driven strategies.

We endorse community safety measures to prevent business theft and disturbance and we endorse enabling restoration after theft and other business disturbances.

We acknowledge that property crime and theft are symptoms of larger structural issues and reject reactionary use of police, which has not prevented property crime and whose budget steals from services that actually keep the community healthy and crime-free.

We support a non-carceral response that restores the business and protects the dignity of workers, youths, and those surviving poverty and addiction. We support the use of community ambassadors, mental health teams, and safe consumption sites for maintaining healthy public conditions.

We reject the use of sweeps — sweeps are extremely violent, robbing people suffering from poverty of the little possessions they have and, crucially, don't get to the root of the problem. Police sweeps simply move folks to another block, pushing the problem in front of more and more of our small businesses.