I am proud to have finished a year on the San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, 2025–26. Most of you, quite rightly, have no idea what that is. I’ll get to that, but first, why and how I ended up there.
I think those of us who came up in the ‘90s feel the escape velocity of the world differently, more sharply than the generations behind us, who were born and shaped into the acceleration, and more uneasily than our parents, who settled before the world picked up speed.
Today, I can find the casualty count out of Gaza, or the state of the war in Ukraine, faster than I can find a parking spot in North Beach, which, truth be told, has eluded me for fifteen years. And for all that information, I have not in years felt that my grasp of what is happening has improved, nor, more to the point, gained any real power to change what happens out there.
That feeling, of knowing without understanding and being unable to contribute, has long drawn my attention back toward my own local communities, in particular San Francisco, a place I owe a great deal.
The last few years were not kind to San Francisco. Remote work made leaving easy, and its ease made it popular. A string of poorly elected leaders, from the supervisors (Peskin) to the mayor (Breed) to the DA (Boudin), failed not only the mythos of the city but the people who lived in it and depended on it. And a particularly charmed cohort who could have stayed instead decamped for Miami while it was fashionable to pronounce SF dead, then slunk back, brazenly, once Miami didn’t work.
I do not respect that, nor the character it reveals, and it is a ledger they will never get back into the black regardless of their business success (see Kendrick v. Drake).
And yet the city persevered, with residents holding the failures to account at the ballot box, through recall, and simply by staying. I wanted my own version of that, something beyond voting and volunteer poll inspection, and more useful than the rant this musing began life as a couple of years back.
Two things stopped me from writing that diatribe. The first was a kind of hypocrisy, since in an earlier essay, CA > Everyone, I had argued that we do more good tending our own house than raging at Washington, that we persuade “more effectively than any lecture or social-media rant.” Having put that in writing, I could either live by it or admit I had been posturing. The second was my own ignorance, since I did not really understand how city government actually worked, and was curious about its innards. The trouble is that from the outside you cannot truly know. I had done the easier things, donating to campaigns, reading Mission Local and the SF Standard, following the handful of reporters and stubborn citizens who do the real digging, and none of it had felt like enough.
What I found instead was strange and old, and it let me both learn how the city worked and try to help. The San Francisco Civil Grand Jury is a body of nineteen ordinary residents, selected and sworn in for a year by the county Superior Court. They are handed real investigative authority, subpoena power when they need it, and a mandate to examine any corner of city and county government and find where it might be made to work better.
The practice is older than the country, running back through the colonial juries that refused to indict the Crown’s critics, all the way to twelve “good and lawful men” summoned in 1166 to tell a king what he did not want to hear. California wrote grand juries into its first constitution in 1849 and, by 1880, aimed them squarely at its own local governments. To this day, only California and Nevada require every county to seat one every single year. Being on the other side of it now, I see the wisdom in something we have half-forgotten, that a vote every few years is the minimum expectation of citizenship, and that a free people needs standing ways to look inside its own government, not merely to choose (one now hopes) its managers.
Being on the jury takes a certain curiosity and a certain naivety. The time and effort it asks for are impossible to gauge when you swear in, and the work is more uneven and demanding than it appears. I suppose that is why we give money, when we give at all, since money is convertible, and here in San Francisco people can earn an absurd amount of it in little time. Time and energy do not convert like that, since you cannot earn them back.
I have written, in On Time, that “our society treats our greatest asset, time, with great contempt,” and I cared enough to build a company, Laurel, around winning some of that time back. And time is exactly what this jury asked of me, so alongside eighteen strangers I spent a year trying to do something useful for a million people, most of whom would never know it happened (perhaps the reason for this writing).
The nineteen of us were, functionally, a year-long group project, with all the unevenness and norming that implies. The scale of what a city does is conveniently invisible from the sidewalk and staggering up close. The machinery is enormous, and you watch competent (and incompetent) civil servants get hammered down by systems, budgets, and byzantine rules. Much of my earlier, misplaced contempt for local government eased with context, and I came out with both more sympathy and more ambition, because once you glimpse how good it could be, the gap between that and what exists is hard to unsee.
We published five reports over the year, each a look into a corner of the city hiding in plain sight.
After the Palisades fire in early 2025, we went looking for San Francisco’s own version of that danger and found it standing in our parks. A century ago the city planted eucalyptus groves and has barely tended them since, turning places like Glen Canyon into a low but genuine hazard, one cheaper to clear now than to fight later. (ABC7)
Inside our county jails, three crises have stacked on top of one another. People arrive sicker than ever, caught between fentanyl and untreated mental illness, and the buildings that hold them are quietly coming apart after years of skipped maintenance, with far too few staff to hold any of it together. The system makes do for now, and the report is about what happens when it no longer can. (Mission Local)
For decades, every Tuesday at noon, San Francisco tested its outdoor warning sirens, the long mechanical wail most of us stopped hearing as anything at all. They have been silent since 2019, and no one has quite decided whether to bring them back. This is the story of that non-decision, and of an emergency system left waiting for an answer.
When the ground shakes or the smoke rolls in, the city is supposed to reach you through AlertSF. We read alerts it sent over eighteen months and found that not one of them told you everything you would need to act, where to go, how long you had, what was even happening.
San Francisco spends close to half a billion dollars a year trying to house and help the people on its streets, most of it through nonprofit contracts. We looked at how that money is watched and found a city sitting on data it barely analyzes, and an oversight commission that has yet to audit the very department it was created to check. It is an enormous sum with remarkably little watching over it. (SF Public Press)
I am not sure these reports will change much. By law and design, we can only examine how the County operates, not its politics, so the people with the power to act on our findings may see little to gain by acting. But I have come to believe we do not need, and should not wait for, a handful of political saviors.
A city cannot simply be a place that generates capital for people to spend.
Local government is one of the few places left where an ordinary person can still move things. The distance between a resident and a real decision is short, both literally and figuratively, and the ways to contribute are more numerous than most of us realize, the Civil Grand Jury being only one of them. It is not that any of us do too little, not at the pace life now runs, but that these chances sit far closer than the headlines that overwhelm me. It is life, if you like, by a thousand small acts.
Not all of it has been as formal as a jury. A hospitality group I am part of ran a hole-in-the-wall coffee window in North Beach, and for a stretch its entire seating area was a handful of chairs we set out on the sidewalk each morning, a parklet in spirit if not in permit. The parklet proper is a San Francisco invention, a single parking space handed back to people instead of cars, now copied by cities on nearly every continent. Ours was only folding chairs and a coconut cold brew, but it was the same idea in miniature.
The same holds at scales far larger than a coffee window. Consider the minimum wage. Washington has left the federal floor at seven and a quarter dollars an hour since 2009, worth a third less now than it was then. San Francisco, meanwhile, has raised its own almost every year for two decades, to a minimum now above nineteen dollars an hour. The raise came up from city halls, not down from Washington, and the rest of the country has been slowly following ever since.
Whatever eventually goes national tends to begin somewhere small and local, which means the overwhelming scale of the world is, improbably, answered one city block at a time.
So I won’t tell you to join a civil grand jury. It is a strange, uneven, unglamorous way to give up a year, one that found me about as much as I found it, and hardly the only place a person can be of use. But the feeling I began with, of knowing so much and being able to change so little, turned out to have an answer. It took me a year I did not think I could spare and gave back more than I expected, which is the whole of what I know and the only reason I have bothered to write it down.