Fifteen years of obstruction.
Fifteen years of rising prices.

Lori Brooke has spent fifteen years as a radical activist fighting against new homes in San Francisco. She has opposed housing of all kinds and has made opposition to home building a centerpiece of her campaign for District 2 Supervisor. She has called Mayor Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan an “unprecedented giveaway to developers”, said that making it easier to build homes would be “game over for local democracy”, and organized wealthy neighbors to block new homes for working families.

Brooke’s opposition to housing is not limited to one project or one policy. She has fought against every major housing initiative to come through San Francisco and Sacramento in recent years.

The Family Zoning Plan. When Mayor Lurie and the Board of Supervisors advanced a plan to allow small apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods, Brooke helped organize the opposition. She called it an “unprecedented giveaway to developers” and circulated scare tactics about what the zoning changes would allow. The Board approved the plan anyway.

SB 79. When state legislators introduced SB 79, a bill to streamline housing approvals, Brooke rallied against it, joining homeowner groups across the state to try to kill the legislation.

CEQA Reform. Brooke has defended the California Environmental Quality Act as a tool for neighborhood groups to block development they dislike. She told the SF Examiner that “without CEQA, the city becomes a developer’s playground.” Housing advocates and environmental groups have long argued the opposite — that CEQA is routinely abused to delay or kill projects that would reduce sprawl and carbon emissions.

SB 423. When the state legislature passed SB 423, which streamlines approvals for housing projects in cities that fail to meet their housing goals, Brooke called it “game over for local democracy.” The law was a direct response to cities like San Francisco refusing to build enough housing to meet state-mandated targets.

The State Housing Mandate. San Francisco is required by the state to plan for roughly 82,000 new homes by 2031. Brooke has argued the target should be recalculated because, in her words, “the immediacy of the housing crisis has waned.” Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco remains above $3,000 per month.

The Edward II Inn. In 2010, a nonprofit proposed converting the Edward II Inn on Lombard Street into transitional housing for youth aging out of foster care. The site is near Brooke’s home. Brooke and other neighbors opposed the project. The housing was for 18-to-24-year-olds who had aged out of the foster system and had nowhere else to go. The opposition delayed the project for years.

The pattern is consistent. Brooke opposes new housing at the city level, the state level, and on her own block. She fights zoning reform, environmental review reform, and state housing mandates. She opposed transitional housing for foster youth near her home. And she does all of this while holding a $5.8 million real estate portfolio and having personally profited from converting rental housing into condos.

The people who are locked out of San Francisco’s housing market — the teachers, nurses, restaurant workers, and young families who cannot afford to live here — do not have the luxury of owning three homes across two states. Brooke does. And she is using her political influence to make sure the housing supply stays exactly where it is: scarce, expensive, and tilted in favor of people who already own.

Brooke purchased her San Francisco home at 2628 Greenwich Street in 1995, in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of District 2. In 2012, she bought a second home in Scottsdale, Arizona. And in 2023, she purchased a lakefront property in Tahoe City for $2.5 million.

Brooke claims a homeowner’s property tax exemption on her San Francisco home, which requires the property to be her primary residence. She also filed a quit claim deed in 2024 reclassifying her Scottsdale property as a primary residence, which the Maricopa County Assessor now reflects. Arizona law requires that a primary residence exemption be claimed on only one property. How she can live primarily in both cities at the same time is a question the tax records do not answer.

When Brooke purchased 2628 Greenwich Street in 1995, the grant deed shows the building was a two-unit property. For nearly a decade, it functioned as a rental building — one of tens of thousands of small multi-unit properties that make up San Francisco’s housing stock.

In 2004, Brooke converted the building into condominiums. The SF Planning records and a declaration filed with the county recorder confirm the conversion. Condo conversions permanently remove rental units from the city’s housing supply. Once converted, a unit can be sold individually rather than rented, and it is no longer subject to San Francisco’s rent control protections. The city has restricted condo conversions in recent years precisely because they shrink the rental housing stock that tenants depend on.

Brooke now campaigns against new housing development. But when she had the opportunity to preserve existing rental housing in her own building, she chose to convert it into condos instead.

In December 2024, Brooke’s two daughters purchased the property at 2627 Greenwich Street for $1,755,000. That address is the building directly behind Brooke’s own home at 2628 Greenwich.

The purchase was financed largely by Brooke herself. A deed of trust filed with the San Francisco County Recorder shows that Brooke loaned each daughter $680,601 — a total of $1,361,202 — to fund the acquisition. The family now controls both sides of the same block face.

There is nothing illegal about parents helping their children buy property. But this transaction provides context for Brooke’s housing politics. When she campaigns against new development in her neighborhood, she is not just speaking as a concerned resident. She is speaking as someone whose family has a direct financial stake in what gets built — or does not get built — on her block.