by Lori Brooke and John Crabtree

Oct 04, 2025

https://crabtreej.substack.com/p/the-books-are-cooked

[publisher’s note — After 161 installments here on Though the Heavens Fall,” I am publishing herewith the first in a series of reports on San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Upzoning Plan authored primarily by someone other than me. Lori Brooke is President of Cow Hollow Association and a founder and leader of Neighborhoods United SF. I have written on this topic before and so has Lori. She is a well-respected expert on upzoning and development issues whereas I am learning as I go. Although we are sharing the byline on this report I will, again, give a vast majority of the credit for this writing to Lori, she knows more about this and she wrote more of the content to follow so, it is only fair to give her primary credit… John Crabtree]

The Books Are Cooked.

The Narrative is False.

There is no Consensus.

The Public is getting Played.

Housing affordability is a real and urgent challenge for many San Francisco residents. Instead of addressing the root causes of a lack of housing affordability San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, backed by lobbying group CA YIMBY and flush with real estate and tech cash, has promoted a false narrative — that deregulation, demolition, and luxury development will somehow deliver “housing for all.”

However, in reality, the last things that we need here in San Francisco are speculative real estate development, displacement of tenants and small businesses and an explosion of luxury towers. No, those we do not need.

Mayor Lurie’s Upzoning Plan and Senator Wiener’s mega-developer and speculator friendly legislative packages are not about affordability, equity, or good planning. They are both about power, profit, and propaganda. The proposed changes represent one of the largest transfers of wealth in our city’s history, from working families to the pockets of real estate mega-developers and speculators.

Today we are going to consider how we got to this place, this situation.

Numbers Do Not Lie — But Made-Up Numbers Do!

It began with a flashy headline: California needs 3.5 million new homes. That number did not come from a state agency, but from a report by mega-consulting firm McKinsey & Company. McKinsey is a private firm with no public oversight or accountability, nor does the firm concern itself with public input and critique of their analysis.

[co-author’s note — rather than make statements about the reputation and past work of McKinsey & Co. I am including below a synopsis of my research into McKinsey & Co. for your quick perusal. If anyone would like footnote references shared just post a comment asking for it or message me directly… John Crabtree]

McKinsey & Company has been involved in multiple major scandals in recent years across the globe, which have significantly tarnished its public image and resulted in high-profile lawsuits and settlements.

Opioid Crisis in the U.S.

• McKinsey played a major role in advising Purdue Pharma and other companies to “turbocharge” OxyContin sales, contributing to the opioid epidemic.
• The firm agreed in December 2024 to pay $650 million to settle federal civil and criminal investigations, and additional hundreds of millions from other lawsuits and state settlements.
• A former McKinsey partner admitted to obstruction of justice for destroying documents related to the firm’s opioid work.
• McKinsey is now barred from working on controlled substance projects as part of its settlement agreements.

Conflicts of Interest & Government Work

• Investigations revealed that McKinsey simultaneously worked for both pharmaceutical companies and U.S. government agencies like the FDA, raising significant conflict of interest concerns, especially regarding opioid regulation.
• The French “McKinsey-Gate” scandal highlighted McKinsey’s unchecked influence in French government contracting and alleged failures to declare conflicts of interest.

Other International Scandals

• In South Africa, McKinsey paid $122 million to settle allegations of involvement in a long-running bribery and corruption scheme involving government officials.
• The firm has been criticized for helping the Saudi Arabian government identify dissidents on Twitter, leading to persecution of those individuals.

We posit that McKinsey & Co. is not a credible source from which policy decisions in California, or anywhere for that matter, should be decided. We also challenge anyone to argue that point with us.

When researchers and watchdogs like the Embarcadero Institute exposed the flaws in McKinsey & Co. data and policy decisions influenced by it, the State of California quietly reduced the number to 2.5 million. There was no explanation, no accountability, and the crisis narrative remained intact.

Notably, Freddie Mac reports a nationwide housing shortfall of only 1.5 million units, which make the California numbers look all the more absurd. Did Freddie Mac somehow forget to include California in their analysis?

Or, perhaps, we are being intentionally misled.

Following the dark-of-night reduction by the state in the total number of new homes needed in California, the state RHNA (Regional Housing Needs Allocation) mandates began to land. The nine-county Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) divided up their 441,000 portion of the new housing unit burden through a process where every county had just one vote, regardless of population, existing housing capacity, or infrastructure. San Francisco got the bulk of it: a whopping 82,069 units, later ballooning to 94,300 with a 15% buffer added by the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD). Why the extra buffer? “Just in case,” was the only rationale offered and it was backed by no data whatsoever.

What should be relevant is that San Francisco already has nearly 70,000 units in the development pipeline, and current zoning allows for 141,000 more units, together far exceeding what is required. Yet HCD arbitrarily and without an objective justification will only recognize 58,000 units in the pipeline, claiming the remainder does not meet “certainty” thresholds, even if they have already been approved.

In addition, City Hall has also failed to convince HCD to recognize a reasonable percentage of the 400,000 units of capacity already created through 4- and 6-plex zoning passed in 2023. If even a small portion of those were credited, the city’s net mandate of 36,000 units would drop significantly, reducing the need for excessive, blanket upzoning such as Mayor Lurie’s Upzoning Plan.

Played for a fool.

San Francisco must find other sources for the balance of the 36,300 new housing units built or under construction by 2031 — 82,069 + 15% “just in case” increase = 94,300 mandate minus 58,000 units recognized as built or “under-construction”). These demands and mandates are absurd. No one, except maybe Senator Wiener, will defend them. San Francisco has been set up for failure — it is difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at any other conclusion after an in-depth review of this body of information, data and policy initiatives.

And there is the rub. RHNA mandates were established before the pandemic, using outdated assumptions that no longer reflect San Francisco’s population trends, economic condition or existing development, permitting and construction pipeline.

The California Department of Finance expects only modest growth of approximately 32,000 new San Francisco residents by 2050, far below the assumptions behind state RHNA targets. The Wiener/HCD/RHNA mandate is obsolete, artificially inflated and increasingly detached from reality.

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