This site is being built in public. The budget and Board of Supervisors explorers are live; more is on the way.

Civic data for San Francisco.

Sourced dashboards on how the city actually works — starting with the city budget and twelve years of Board of Supervisors votes. The housing pipeline is next. Built to be read, shared, and corrected.

● Live

The Budget

Where does the money actually go?

San Francisco's proposed budget is about $16.9 billion. Most of it runs itself — roughly 55% is enterprise operations that fund themselves. The other ~45% is the General Fund, the part City Hall actually fights over. A focused first release, sourced to the June 2026 city budget and verified to the printed totals. Revenue, the set-aside structure, and federal exposure are still to come.

Open the budget explainer →
● Live

BOS Explorer

Every vote, on the record.

Twelve years of San Francisco Board of Supervisors votes — 498 meetings and roughly 139,000 recorded votes, 2014 through June 2026 — searchable by supervisor, issue area, and how contested each vote was. Sourced to official meeting minutes (sf.gov) and Legistar. Data through June 2026.

Open the explorer →
○ Coming soon

Housing Pipeline

Are we building enough?

San Francisco's housing pipeline against its state targets: what's approved, what's built, what's stuck. In development.

In development

About this project

tldr;sf is being built in public. We publish each dashboard when its data is sourced and verified, not before — which is why some are live and others are still in development.

tldr;sf is a research project surfacing the structure of San Francisco's governance and budget. The aim is straightforward: dashboards that pass the "read it cold" test — anyone who lands on a page should learn something useful about how the city actually works, even if they came in skeptical.

Editorial discipline: Every quantitative claim is sourced. Hover the ⓘ badges to verify. We disclose source lean (left, moderate, right) where it matters. We distinguish what was proposed from what was signed from what was implemented. We try not to editorialize in the primary view; we leave conclusions to the reader.

Civic-ed lane: tldr;sf is sibling to D for D8, the campaign of Darshini Patel for District 8 Supervisor. The dashboards are non-partisan civic education; the campaign's interpretation of that data lives at votedarshini.com.

Open source: Code at github.com/rfycy7pt9y-gif/tldrsf. Issues, corrections, and contributions welcome.