SF Advances a Public Bank for the Loans Private Lenders Won’t Make

On Monday, San Francisco’s Rules Committee voted 3-0 to advance a charter amendment by District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen that would write the framework for a municipal public bank into the city’s governing document, sending it toward the November ballot. The structure cleared its first hurdle cleanly. What the vote did not settle is who is behind the measure — and how the city would ever pay for the bank itself.

Supervisor Jackie Fielder has held nearly every role in the long campaign to create a San Francisco public bank. She co-founded the SF Public Bank Coalition in 2017. Her coalition commissioned the October poll now widely cited as evidence of public support. And in February she introduced the tax measure that would fund the institution. Advocate, source of the polling, and author of the funding are, in this case, the same elected official — a concentration of roles that invites conflict-of-interest scrutiny as the measure heads toward the ballot.

The scale of the ask is its own problem. Fielder’s measure would raise an estimated $40 to $50 million a year — though that projection comes from Fielder herself, not an independent analysis. The city’s working group estimated the bank would need $400 million to capitalize, eight to ten times the tax’s annual yield. And the tax would take effect only if two-thirds of voters approve it, in a year when San Franciscans already face a parcel tax and a regional sales tax for Muni, and the city is closing a roughly $640 million deficit, down from an $877 million projection earlier in the year.

The amendment does not itself fund the bank; it only enshrines the structure. The companion funding measure still needs three more Board co-sponsors even to reach the ballot. And the timing is awkward: Mayor Daniel Lurie’s budget this year leans on cutting about 550 City Hall positions, most of them already vacant. The bank, meanwhile, is built to lend where private banks won’t — which means if those loans go bad, the city’s general fund, not a private shareholder, absorbs the loss.

The structure is moving. The capital isn’t.

What Passed Committee

Chen’s amendment would create a Municipal Financial Corporation run by an independent board of qualified bankers — appointed by an oversight committee drawn from the treasurer, controller, city attorney, mayor, and Board of Supervisors.

The bank could lend only inside San Francisco. It couldn’t touch fossil fuels, private prisons, weapons, tobacco, or documented labor violations.

“San Franciscans need and deserve bold solutions to address our most pressing challenges,” Chen said when she introduced it last month. “We must use every tool we can to keep San Francisco affordable and to advance solutions that lead towards a just economic recovery for all.”

Fielder’s Role

The amendment doesn’t stand alone. Its companion has a backstory.

Supervisor Jackie Fielder co-founded the SF Public Bank Coalition in 2017, years before she won office. The coalition lobbied for the bank for nearly a decade. In October 2025, it commissioned a poll — run by the firm Underpin — showing 67 percent of likely voters back the idea. But it was paid for by the campaign, not an independent pollster.

Fielder now represents District 9. She’s been on medical leave, and she returns to City Hall just as the institution she spent years building clears its first real hurdle.

In February 2026, she introduced the measure that would actually pay for it. It raises the gross receipts tax on financial middlemen — credit card companies, mortgage brokers, consumer lenders — from a 1.5-to-3.36 percent range up to 1.69-to-3.85. Her office projects $40 to $50 million a year, earmarked for a “Public Bank Fund” through 2035, accumulating until the corporation can start lending around 2029. After 2035, the earmark expires but the tax does not — the revenue simply flows into the general fund. So voters are being asked to approve a permanent tax sold on a specific promise the tax stops keeping in nine years. And even then, it’s a long, slow walk to $400 million — one that only begins if two-thirds of voters say yes.

The Gap Between Structure and Bank

What cleared committee is a framework. A framework is not a bank.

Start with the amendment: as a charter amendment, it needs six votes on the full Board — a majority of eleven — to reach the ballot. Five supervisors have co-sponsored it so far, so it needs just one more yes vote before the July deadline.

Then the thresholds diverge. The structure needs a simple majority. The money needs two-thirds. Pass the first and fail the second — entirely plausible — and San Francisco owns a legally chartered bank with nothing in the vault.

Clear both, and the regulatory gauntlet begins: FDIC insurance, a state license under AB 857 (2019), OCC chartering. None of it is guaranteed.

And the number at the center of all of it hasn’t moved. The SF Reinvestment Working Group pegged it in 2022: $400 million to capitalize. Fielder’s tax is the on-ramp, but the legislation names no up-front source for the full sum.

What Proponents Are Saying

Proponents say the charter amendment is simply step one. No legal structure, no bank — and to last, the structure has to live in the charter.

Nine years of organizing are behind it. The Board unanimously endorsed the feasibility plan in 2023. Backers point to the Bank of North Dakota, profitable for more than a century and the source of hundreds of millions returned to the state. The pitch: public banks work when they’re built right, and San Francisco has the size, the financial chops, and the housing crisis to make the case.

“We are in this moment of crisis,” said Fernando Martí, former co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations and now a USF housing-politics lecturer, “with the federal and state government having not been able to backfill and actually cut back some low-income housing. Affordable housing is dependent on the public’s investment.”

What They’re Not Saying

The Bank of North Dakota is mostly a “bankers’ bank” — it lends to other banks, not to people. SF wants to lend straight to residents, small businesses, and housing developers. There’s no modern American precedent for that.

Then there’s who pays for it. The tax lands on private financial intermediaries — credit card companies, mortgage brokers, consumer lenders — to bankroll a public lender that wouldn’t owe the tax itself. Critics see a conflict in funding a government-run lender with a levy aimed squarely at private ones. The Chamber of Commerce’s David Harrison, its public policy director, put it bluntly: “The city is managing serious fiscal pressures and considering several record-setting new taxes. We think it is worth asking whether now is the right moment to create a new regulatory institution while even further taxing our largest employers to fund it.”

The timing is also far from ideal. Lurie’s budget closes a $640 million gap by cutting roughly 550 positions — mostly vacant — and trimming nonprofit grants, cuts that advocates warn could cost more than 1,000 community-org jobs, a figure the mayor’s office disputes. Voters are also being asked for a parcel tax and a regional sales tax for Muni.

There’s also the matter of what the bank is for. By design, it would lend where private capital won’t — affordable housing, small businesses, green infrastructure — at below-market rates, financing what Fielder calls projects “Wall Street can’t extract much profit from.” That’s the point of a public bank, and supporters insist mission lending and solvency can coexist; the Bank of North Dakota has stayed in the black for a century doing a version of it. But lending into the gaps the market avoids, at concessionary rates, under political pressure, is also how loan losses accumulate — and SF’s direct-lending model has no contemporary precedent to show it can be done without them.

And if the bank stumbles, the bill lands on the general fund — the same fund already buckling.

The amendment now heads to the full Board. The clock is short: the July deadline is weeks out, and one more supervisor has to vote yes.

Approve both the structure and the tax, and the city stands up the Municipal Financial Corporation — able to lend, but not to take deposits. Deposits mean FDIC insurance and a state license: a separate, multi-year climb.

And then it just needs $400 million.