Fire safety may be important, but irate condo owners from Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, the Marina, and Pacific Heights stormed an SF City Hall committee hearing Monday to demand a delay on a new sprinkler mandate for their units.

One way to get San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s attention is to be a person who has money. That’s what a group of condominium owners on Nob Hill, Telegraph Hill, the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Russian Hill learned in late 2025 when confronted with a new mandate that high-rise condominiums built in 1975 or earlier should have sprinklers for fire protection. The condo owners squawked because they claimed this would cost up to $300,000 per unit, and Lurie dutifully obliged by introducing legislation to delay the sprinkle mandate by five years.

Well, that Lurie legislation came up Monday before the SF Board of Supervisors Land Use and Transportation Committee. And that committee voted unanimously to kick the can on the sprinkler requirement five years down the road from 2027 until 2032, as more than 100 homeowners lined up to complain that the fire safety rules would burden them with financial hardship.

There is also the argument that the onerous sprinkler requirement — which is for all buildings over 11 stories that don't have at least two egress stairwells deemed fire-safe for up to two hours — is having a depressing effect on real estate values for units in the 126 buildings that are impacted, as it looms over the properties' futures. And cost estimates to install the sprinklers may be off because of the hazardous materials — like asbestos — that will be unleashed once you start cutting into walls in these historic highrises.

“With a stroke of gavel you have taken money out of these people’s pockets,” San Francisco realtor Dona Crowder comlined during public comment. “Their values have gone down and they could be underwater. This is today. We can’t sell the units or the buildings today without a very significant effect on the value. That is a fact.”

The delay approved Monday is not a final decision. The matter still needs to go before the full SF Board of Supervisors.

The new sprinkler rule was a part of the routine updating of the city’s fire code that happens every three years. And opponents say that the measure was passed without studying the feasibility of its implementation, or the individual financial burden it would create for nearly 10,000 homeowners.

But delay measure's co-sponsor, Supervisor Danny Sauter, got his condo constituency the relief they wanted, even if they are still pushing for the entire code change to be repealed.  

“One thing I heard loud and clear is that what we are doing today, the changes to the fire code are not enough, that delay is not enough,” Sauter said before the vote. “This is going to continue to cause a lot of anxiety.”

The proposed sprinkler rule would apply to around 9,800 units in mostly pre-1975 buildings. The delay legislation not only puts off implementation for five years, but also appoints a committee to study its feasibility. And a blue-ribbon committee is often a great way for City Hall to make sure that nothing ever gets done about something, which may be exactly what the condo owners are hoping for.

Related: SF Residential and Commercial Fires Troublingly on the Rise, Fire Department Says [SFist]

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