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In 2022, the Coalition on Homelessness sued the City of San Francisco, demanding that officials provide shelter to every unhoused person who arrived in the city before moving anyone from an encampment. The city ultimately settled, effectively handing a small advocacy organization veto power over a core municipal function. It was, as John Chachas later wrote, “neither the decision nor the wish of the vast majority” of San Franciscans.
His question was about accountability. A fringe group had made city policy. Where were the institutions whose job was to scrutinize that process?
Chachas is an unusual person to be asking it, but he has authority when it comes to media’s influence on public decision-making. He is a deal banker who has spent three decades advising on media transactions, the founder of Methuselah Advisors, and the owner of Gump’s, the 165-year-old luxury retailer on Post Street. His credentials are in capital markets, not journalism. But his career has given him a clear view of both sides of the problem: what a functioning local press does for a city, and what its absence allows.
Before the Newsroom Shrank
Local journalism’s accountability function is easy to describe in the abstract and easier to miss when it’s gone. City council meetings covered in detail. Budget decisions reported with context. Lawsuits against city government tracked over months. Regulatory capture examined, named, and brought before the public.
The San Francisco Chronicle at full strength performed this function. So did a constellation of neighborhood papers, beat reporters, and investigative units that understood the city’s specific bureaucratic terrain. What distinguished the coverage wasn’t volume. It was proximity, institutional memory, and the willingness of reporters who lived in the city to stay with stories until they produced accountability.
That press corps has shrunk. The Chronicle has gone through rounds of layoffs and buyouts over the past decade. Veteran reporters and mid-career journalists have left faster than institutional knowledge can be retained. The outlets that once provided redundancy like alternative weeklies, neighborhood papers, and specialized publications for hyper-local coverage have mostly closed. In their place, a handful of newer operations work hard with far fewer resources.
How the Economics Collapsed
Chachas has described what happened to the underlying economics with unusual directness for someone who spent his career on Wall Street.
“The use and taking of content produced by newspapers by the likes of Google and Facebook is criminal,” he has said. “The big and destructive power of Google and Facebook was left totally unchecked until the local media industry was essentially destroyed.”
The mechanism is specific. Google and Meta built advertising businesses on top of the audience relationships that local news organizations had spent decades developing. They kept the revenue. They paid nothing for the content that made their platforms worth advertising on. Local newsrooms, stripped of the advertising base that had sustained them, cut staff, consolidated, and in thousands of cases across the country simply closed. More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. More than half of American counties now have little to no local news coverage.
The irony in San Francisco is particularly sharp. The companies that destroyed local journalism’s economics are headquartered in the Bay Area. Google’s campus sits forty miles down the peninsula. Meta’s offices occupy a sprawling complex in Menlo Park. Their employees flooded into San Francisco during the 2010s, reshaping the city’s demographics and political culture. And the revenue they extracted from local newsrooms removed the accountability layer that would have scrutinized what followed.
What Fills the Vacuum
The Coalition on Homelessness lawsuit is one answer to what fills the space a weakened press leaves behind. Small, organized groups with strong ideological commitment and legal resources can shape policy when there is no sustained public scrutiny pressing back. City officials who might otherwise face questions about the terms of a settlement, the precedents it sets, or the costs it imposes on residents can navigate those decisions with less friction.
Chachas called this the “tyranny of the minority” in a 2023 piece for City Journal: “behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.” He was describing the specific conditions on San Francisco’s streets, the open drug sales, the encampments, the public harassment that had driven one of his own customers to tell him: “I love your store. I’ll buy something online. I don’t want to step foot in that city.”
But the mechanism he identified runs deeper than street conditions. Activist capture of city policy is most durable when there is no institution consistently documenting the gap between what officials promise and what they deliver. A strong local press doesn’t prevent bad policy. It makes bad policy more expensive to sustain by keeping the public informed and officials answerable.
A Retailer Becomes the Watchdog
What is notable about Chachas’s public writing on San Francisco is that he has done, in open letters and opinion pieces, something a stronger local press would have done for him: named the problem, documented its specific manifestations, proposed concrete remedies, and directed criticism at named officials.
He called out Mayor London Breed, the Board of Supervisors, and Governor Gavin Newsom by name. He proposed a 30% tax cut over three years for businesses returning workers to offices. He argued for stricter enforcement of existing laws against public drug use and shoplifting. He wrote in a venue, City Journal, that reaches a national conservative policy audience partly because the local outlets that might have published similar accountability journalism had neither the platform nor, in some cases, the editorial appetite for it.
A 165-year-old luxury retailer’s owner should not be among the louder voices demanding basic municipal accountability. The fact that he is says something about who else isn’t.
The Same Story, Everywhere
San Francisco is an extreme case, but the pattern Chachas describes is not unique to it. Across the country, the communities that have lost local news coverage fastest are also those where civic participation has declined most sharply and where local elections have become increasingly dominated by small, organized constituencies rather than broad public engagement.
Chachas has warned that undermining local media is one of the most underappreciated threats to democratic institutions. “Local newspapers were the guardians of behavior on a local level,” he has written. “They covered city council meetings, investigated corrupt officials, reported on school board decisions, and held power accountable in communities across America.”
The Coalition on Homelessness did not capture San Francisco’s homeless policy because it was persuasive to a broad public. It captured it because the institutional infrastructure for sustained public scrutiny had been weakened. The tech giants who gutted the newsrooms that might have provided that scrutiny are not filling the gap. They have no incentive to. Their platforms profit from outrage but not from accountability. Those are different businesses entirely.
Chachas has written about this from two directions simultaneously: as a media banker who understands what killed the economics, and as a business owner who stands on Post Street watching the consequences. The argument he makes is the same in both registers. You cannot have functioning democratic institutions, at the city level or any other, without someone doing the work of holding them accountable. When the press can’t or won’t do it, someone else has to. And whoever fills that vacuum determines what gets scrutinized and what doesn’t.
In San Francisco, a small advocacy group filled it first.