San Francisco officials want to snuff out smoking on bar patios and parklets, and the city's battered hospitality industry is fighting back with a petition, a warning about closures, and a blunt question: Why now?
Supervisor Myrna Melgar and Dr. John Maa of the San Francisco Marin Medical Society have crafted a proposed ordinance that would extend the city's existing smoke-free rules, already in place at restaurants, to bars and taverns with outdoor seating. The measure is scheduled to go before a committee on May 18. If it clears that hurdle, the full Board of Supervisors would vote in June, The US Sun reported.
Should the board approve the ban, it could take effect in less than a year, potentially as early as the start of next year.
Proponents frame the ordinance as a straightforward public-health measure. Under California state and local laws, food establishments are already required to maintain smoke-free environments both indoors and outdoors. The proposal would simply treat bars and taverns the same way restaurants are treated.
Dr. Maa, a surgeon, said the goal is to shield workers and patrons from secondhand smoke:
"This is to protect the patrons of these establishments and also importantly, the employees and anyone who might be exposed to secondhand smoke."
Melgar offered a more dismissive take on the opposition. "I don't think tobacco smoke is essential to building community," she said.
That line landed poorly with bar owners who have spent the last five years watching San Francisco's hospitality sector shrink. More than a dozen bars have signed a Change.org petition opposing the ordinance, and the petition had gathered roughly 1,500 signatures at last count. Among the businesses that signed on are The Stud, Horsies Market & Saloon, and Mothership Bar, fourteen establishments in all.
The petition's language is pointed. It warns that eliminating the outdoor-smoking exception "will force some establishments to close entirely, or to lose a critical portion of their customer base at a time when the San Francisco hospitality industry has not yet recovered from the compounding crises of the pandemic, downtown vacancy, retail flight, and public safety concerns."
That last phrase, "public safety concerns", is doing a lot of work. San Francisco's well-documented struggles with open drug use and street disorder have already driven customers and businesses out of the city. Bar owners are asking why City Hall would choose this moment to impose another restriction on the establishments still hanging on.
The petition puts a hard number on the damage: "The city's restaurant and bar sector lost hundreds of businesses in the past five years. This is not the moment to pile on additional restrictions."
Lynne Angel, co-owner of El Rio, a bar that has operated since 1978, said outdoor space has been the difference between survival and closure since the pandemic.
"Having an outside space saved us. This proposed legislation feels like yet another hurdle for small businesses in the city."
Neil Holbrook, co-owner of O'Reilly's Pub, made a similar point. "One of the reasons we have a parklet is so people can come out and have a cigarette with their beer," he told the New York Post.
Ben Bleiman, founder of the SF Bar Owner Alliance, raised a practical objection that the ban's supporters have not answered. He predicted that if patios go smoke-free, bar customers will simply step onto the sidewalk to light up, creating more of a nuisance for neighbors and pedestrians, not less. The ordinance, in other words, would not eliminate outdoor smoking. It would relocate it to places where the city has even less control.
San Francisco's progressive leadership has a pattern of imposing rules that sound tidy on paper but produce messy results on the street. Even former Mayor Willie Brown has publicly criticized the city's progressive governance for contributing to San Francisco's decline, a critique that keeps finding new evidence.
Set aside for a moment whether outdoor smoking bans are good policy in the abstract. The question San Francisco residents and business owners deserve an answer to is one of priorities.
This is a city that has struggled to manage open-air drug markets, sidewalk encampments, and retail theft. Hundreds of restaurants and bars have closed in five years. The downtown vacancy crisis remains severe. And the Board of Supervisors' answer is to crack down on a customer having a cigarette with a beer on a patio.
The enforcement mechanism for the proposed ban has not been spelled out publicly. The exact text of the ordinance has not been released. No one has explained how a city that already struggles to enforce existing public-nuisance laws would police smoking on bar patios, or what penalties would apply.
Those are not minor details. They are the difference between a real policy and a gesture. And gestures are something San Francisco's government has never been short on.
The Board of Supervisors has faced its own instability in recent months, raising questions about whether the body has the bandwidth, or the political will, to manage the consequences of a measure that bar owners say could accelerate closures.
The committee hearing on May 18 will be the first real test. If the proposal advances, the full board would take it up in June. Supporters believe they have the votes. Opponents believe they have the math, the math of lost businesses, lost jobs, and lost tax revenue in a city that cannot afford to lose more of any of them.
San Francisco is not the only major city grappling with how aggressively local government should regulate personal behavior in public and semi-public spaces. New York City is wrestling with its own governance and budget crises, and cities across the country face the same tension between progressive regulatory ambition and economic reality.
But few cities illustrate the disconnect as vividly as San Francisco. The supervisors want to ban cigarettes on patios while the city still cannot keep needles off its sidewalks. That is not a public-health strategy. It is a statement of priorities, and the priorities are telling.
When a city spends more energy policing a legal product on a bar patio than it does policing the illegal activity on the block outside, the problem is not secondhand smoke. The problem is the people running the city.
