San Francisco is having a civic nervous breakdown because the brother of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law is buying a minority stake in the Giants.

Not Donald Trump. Not Jared Kushner. Joshua Kushner. And not control of the team. A minority stake.

Apparently, that is enough to send parts of San Francisco’s activist and media culture into full panic mode.

One Giants employee posted a video from Oracle Park turning in their uniform and quitting because Kushner was buying into the team.

Social media lit up with complaints about “MAGA ownership” and Trump-world influence invading one of San Francisco’s most beloved civic institutions.

There is just one problem. Joshua Kushner is not exactly Steve Bannon in a Giants cap.

He has historically donated heavily to Democrats and has occupied a very different political lane than his brother Jared and the Trump orbit. But nuance never stood a chance here.

For some in San Francisco, the name “Kushner” was enough. That is the story.

The Giants are not some random expansion franchise nobody cares about. They are one of the oldest and most storied franchises in Major League Baseball history — with eight World Series titles and a lineage that includes Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, Buster Posey, Madison Bumgarner, and Bruce Bochy.

Oracle Park is one of the great settings in American sports. Giants-Dodgers is still one of baseball’s defining rivalries. Generations of Northern Californians are emotionally attached to this team.

Which is precisely why the reaction has been so revealing.

Nobody was arguing about payroll. Nobody was debating the farm system. Nobody was asking whether this helps the Giants close the gap with the Dodgers in the NL West.

The panic was political from the first pitch.

That tells you where we are now.

Sports ownership used to be judged mostly by whether owners were competent, stable, and willing to spend money to win. Now it is an ideological background check.

Who donated to whom? Who attended what fundraiser? Whose brother married whose daughter? Who might show up in the owner’s suite?This is what happens when politics becomes religion. Everything becomes a loyalty test. Even baseball.

The irony is almost too perfect.

San Francisco is not exactly at risk of becoming a MAGA beachhead because a Democratic donor with the wrong last name bought a small piece of the Giants. But symbolic politics runs the city now.

In Democrat circles in San Francisco, politics is not just something people believe. It is something they perform. It is identity. It is status. It is social sorting.

So even indirect association becomes contamination. Joshua Kushner does not have to be Trump. He does not even have to be conservative. He just has to be Kushner.

That is enough.

To be fair, Giants ownership was already politically sensitive. Current owner Charles Johnson has drawn years of criticism for conservative political donations.

So this latest development landed on dry grass.

Still, the reaction says more about San Francisco’s liberal elite than it does about the Giants. The city’s activist class cannot even let baseball remain baseball.

A minority owner becomes a political emergency. A family connection becomes a scandal. A business transaction becomes a moral crisis.

This is not normal.

Fans used to argue about batting orders and pitching rotations. Now they investigate ownership family trees.

And the Giants are not being bought by Donald Trump. They are not being turned into a Trump campaign surrogate. They are not replacing team mascot Lou Seal with a MAGA hat.

A minority stake is changing hands. That’s it.

Yet for the loudest voices in San Francisco, even that apparently requires public anguish.

If this is the reaction to the brother of Trump’s son-in-law buying a minority piece of the Giants, imagine what happens if Donald Trump ever throws out the first pitch at Oracle Park.

Jon Fleischman, a longtime strategist in California politics and a lifelong baseball fan, writes at SoDoesItMatter.com.

Shadows cast by tall and not-so-tall buildings alike have long been used to block housing in San Francisco, and Supervisor Bilal Mahmood wants it to end.

The District 5 legislator is announcing a law on Thursday that would eliminate the ability for people to say shadows cast by a building are an “environmental concern” that can be used to delay, and possibly block, new housing. 

“In San Francisco, we’ve literally paid the price of being too afraid of our own shadow,” Mahmood said, pointing to data showing that shadow-based concerns were used to delay or block 2,195 housing units in 11 projects since 2017.

Whenever a new housing project is proposed in the city, its developer must create an environmental impact report on a variety of factors, like toxic waste and seismic hazards. 

San Francisco requires that report to include a shadow analysis noting whether the new building will cast shade on any open space in the city. Mahmood’s legislation would get rid of that requirement; it is not in state guidelines, and most California cities do not consider shadows an environmental factor. 

The environmental impact report is intended to help politicians make an informed decision about whether to approve or deny a development proposal. But any resident can file an appeal if they think environmental impacts were not fully considered, which can delay, block, or alter projects. 

Shadows ultimately led to a delay for the infamous 469 Stevenson St. project from 2021, a 495 unit building on the site of a Nordstrom parking lot in SoMa.

Some SoMa residents were concerned that the project, which contained about 100 affordable housing units, would gentrify the area. 

But gentrification alone is not a legal reason for supervisors to block a project. So residents filed an appeal alleging the project’s environmental impacts were improperly evaluated. The Board of Supervisors ended up siding with them in an 8-3 vote, citing shadows cast on nearby Mint Plaza in their decision. 

The developer was forced back to the drawing board and had to redo his environmental report, delaying the project by several years. 

Even when projects are 100 percent affordable, shadows cast uncertainty: Residents near 16th and Mission’s “La Maravilla” housing project, a 380-unit project next door to Marshall Elementary that broke ground last month, raised concerns that the development would darken the school’s playground. That forced the nonprofit developers to hold meetings and negotiate with residents about the issue.

Mahmood said even if appeals are ultimately rejected, the length and cost of the appeals process makes it difficult to produce housing projects and leads developers to avoid building in San Francisco. 

“The housing problems we’re facing are death by a thousand cuts,” said Witt Turner of the Housing Action Coalition, a proponent of the bill. “We need to start sewing them up one by one.”

San Francisco is required by the state to plan for 36,000 more housing units by 2030, and the city’s best guess is that even under the most favorable scenarios developers will build less than half of that, and in four times as much time.

Mahmood, a YIMBY, has made streamlining housing a focus of his 15 months in office. His new legislation eliminates certain intermediate appeals and hearings and shortens appeal timelines, mostly from 30 days to 15 days. 

The bill will be evaluated by the planning commission and the Board of Supervisors in early summer. 

The bill is no silver bullet, however. Environmental appeals often cite more than just shadows when seeking to change projects. In the case of the Nordstrom parking lot building, for example, a failure to properly consider the seismic impact of a building was also a component of the decision. 

YIMBYs have long pursued reform to CEQA, a California law outlining the environmental appeals process.

“We shouldn’t let outdated laws get in the way of building housing, which is actually important to making progress on our climate goals,” Mahmood said.

SAN FRANCISCO – The 76-year-old man arrested for a March 27 crash in San Francisco’s Chinatown that left a man dead has been charged with vehicular manslaughter.

Zhuo Ming Lu on Tuesday pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, and denied the allegations against him, according to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.

In addition to the charge of vehicular manslaughter, Lu is charged with driving a vehicle in the commission of unlawful acts and driving at unsafe speed without gross negligence.

The crash

The backstory:

Authorities said Lu was attempting to park near Grant Avenue and Jackson Street when his vehicle jumped the sidewalk and crashed into the landmark New Lung Ting Cafe, also known as the Pork Chop House. The vehicle struck two pedestrians: Cutberto Zamora-Martinez, 49, of San Joaquin County and a second person who has not been identified.

“The victims were transported by paramedics to a local hospital. Despite the lifesaving efforts of first responders and medical staff, one of the victims was declared deceased at the hospital,” a release from the district attorney’s office states. “Another adult victim was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.”

One fatality

Dig deeper:

Zamora-Martinez had been working in the area, according to a GoFundMe page. A San Francisco Police Department source close to the investigation told KTVU the victims were carpet installers arriving for work.

The fundraising page described Zamora-Martinez as a husband and father who was the sole provider for his family and “a humble man who wanted the best for his family.”

Police said Lu remained at the scene of the crash and cooperated with investigators. 

Court date

What’s next:

Lu was arrested in April, and was later released on his own recognizance. He was ordered not to drive, and to surrender his driver’s license and passport. The court also ordered the Department of Motor Vehicles to suspend Lu’s license.

He is scheduled to appear for a pre-trial hearing on Sept. 30.