SF Supervisor Wong Launches 'Dumb Laws' Contest in 2026

San Francisco has no shortage of rules. Some protect public safety, some preserve neighborhood character, and some, apparently, exist to ensure you don’t carry a baguette down the street without proper concealment.

District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong wants to find all of them.

Wong launched a “Dumb Laws” contest Wednesday, inviting residents and small businesses citywide to submit examples of regulations, permit requirements, fees, street signs, or administrative processes they consider outdated, overly complicated, or simply pointless. The winning entries get showcased on Wong’s social media, and the underlying rules could be reviewed, simplified, or repealed.

“I want to work on just things that don’t make sense and are making the lives of everyday people harder,” Wong said at a media event announcing the contest.

The contest page frames it as a starting point for modernizing San Francisco’s municipal code. “Over time, every city accumulates regulations that may have been created with good intentions,” Wong said in a statement. “But as the city evolves, some of those rules become outdated, overly complicated or simply unnecessary.”

A few examples already in circulation illustrate the absurdist end of the spectrum. San Francisco apparently prohibits carrying bread or pastries in an exposed container. There’s also a rule barring people from picking weeds or removing soil, flowers, or grass from city parks without permission from the Recreation and Park Department. Both rules likely made sense at some point to someone. Neither appears to be doing meaningful work in 2026.

But the more consequential examples involve small businesses grinding through bureaucratic processes that turn minor problems into expensive ordeals.

Cyn Wang, who runs Wang Insurance in the Outer Sunset, described what happened after vandals shattered her office windows in 2023. She expected a straightforward repair. Instead, city planning rules governing storefront design required her to hire an architect and meet transparency standards before she could get a permit to replace the glass. The process took more than a month and cost roughly $30,000.

“What we thought would be a simple fix, which is to replace the glass and then get the gate in front to protect the glass, turned into a bureaucratic nightmare,” Wang said at the roundtable Wednesday.

Her story captures the real cost of regulatory accumulation. No single rule destroyed her business, but the combination of requirements, timelines, and professional fees turned a vandalism recovery into a financial burden that many small business owners simply cannot absorb. Multiply that experience across thousands of permit applications citywide and the aggregate drag on the local economy becomes substantial.

Wong, a freshman supervisor representing the Richmond-adjacent western neighborhoods, is framing this as a practical exercise rather than an ideological one. The goal isn’t to gut regulation wholesale but to surface specific examples where the rules no longer match the reality of running a business or living in the city. “Sometimes, the people interacting with these rules every day are the first to recognize when something no longer makes sense,” he said.

That framing matters. San Francisco has watched plenty of deregulation conversations get hijacked by broader political agendas. A targeted, community-sourced review of genuinely obsolete rules is a different animal from a broad push to weaken zoning or environmental protections.

The contest runs through March 30, with winning entries announced in April. What happens after that is less defined. The contest page says highlighted laws could be reviewed, simplified, clarified, reconsidered, or repealed, but that covers a wide range of outcomes. Repealing a city ordinance requires Board of Supervisors action, and even minor code cleanup can get complicated depending on who has an interest in keeping the status quo.

Wong is clear-eyed about the longer-term ambition. “By highlighting these examples, we hope to start a broader conversation about how we can modernize city policies, reduce unnecessary barriers and make government work better for the people it serves,” he said.

San Francisco has been trying to reform its permitting processes for years with mixed results. Whether a social media contest translates into actual code changes will depend on follow-through after April. But surfacing the specific, named examples is a reasonable first step. You can’t fix what you haven’t found.