There is something deeply telling about the choice to call it a “blueprint.” A blueprint is a map drawn up in private, a set of instructions for others to follow. It doesn’t act, it orchestrates.

That’s the clearest sign yet that Blueprint for a Better San Francisco is not a fresh start, but the evolution of something much older, more cynical, and far better funded than it lets on. TogetherSF failed precisely because it showed its face. Blueprint, by contrast, begins where TogetherSF collapsed: Hidden behind a friendly font and an unusually well-connected podcast mic, just distant enough from the billionaire class that birthed it to feign neutrality.

Behind Blueprint sits Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, the 800-pound gorilla of conservative San Francisco.g. Neighbors holds the purse strings now — quietly funding Blueprint’s $2 million annual budget, propping up ConnectedSF’s city-wide organizing operation, and attempting to dictate the future of San Francisco politics from behind a curtain of civic neutrality. That curtain exists for one reason: Visibility has become a liability. William Oberndorf, Neighbors’ founder, was until recently a Republican mega-donor with a long résumé of conservative causes. Jay Cheng, its president, is embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal and was recently fined $54,000 for campaign finance violations. This is not a rebrand. It’s a reputational laundering job — and Blueprint is the front.

TogetherSF was a failure not because it lacked resources, but because it lacked subtlety and ultimately was selling something San Franciscans didn’t want to buy. The group tried to strong-arm San Francisco’s political future through sheer volume — spending big, speaking louder, and dragging Michael Moritz’s money with it into every race it touched. But the November 2024 elections brought that empire down hard. After months of emails, ballot measures, and glossy promotional events, voters overwhelmingly rejected TogetherSF’s candidates. Its brand had become radioactive, its leadership sloppy. Kanishka Cheng, its president, was implicated in backchannel coordination with consultants and strategists, and its founder Moritz quietly stepped away from the wreckage. 

What’s left now is Blueprint — sleek, professionalized, and crucially detached from the characters that gave TogetherSF its political liabilities. The website is clean, the budget modest (for now), and its new director, Scotty Jacobs, is being trotted out as the face of a fresh civic awakening.

But this is a political sleight of hand. The money is still Oberndorf’s. The network still maps to Neighbors’ strategy of control without exposure. And the internal documents from TogetherSF show that many of Blueprint’s so-called “new ideas” — from mayoral reform to charter amendments — are just recycled from its predecessor’s playbook. This isn’t a pivot. It’s a continuation — albeit a well-disguised one.

Even more revealing is the fracture Blueprint now has to navigate within the “Astroturf Network.” Groups like GrowSF and the Abundance Network have aligned themselves squarely with the YIMBY movement — backing District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio, opposing road closures, and pushing for upzoning across the Sunset. Neighbors, by contrast, has sided with the recall effort against Engardio, using ConnectedSF as a district ground game to target the very kind of density politics their counterparts support. The ideological split is stark — and unresolved. But what unites every branch of this funding ecosystem, Blueprint included, is a shared commitment to ramped-up policing and the slow dismantling of progressive electoral infrastructure.

It’s easy to look at this emerging realignment and see only another chapter in San Francisco’s never-ending nonprofit-political chess game. But that would be a mistake. What Blueprint represents is not only continuity — it’s consolidation. Neighbors has learned from the public failures of its earlier proxies. It’s learned to step back. It’s learned to silence Moritz and sideline Kanishka. It’s learned to distribute its influence horizontally through partner groups like ConnectedSF while keeping the public-facing apparatus mild and professional. This is a smarter, colder machine. And like any machine built in private, it wasn’t designed to be understood — only followed.

Blueprint is what remains when a monied political effort takes a political hit. No more founders on flyers, no more scandals in the sunlight — just capital in motion, wearing a civic smile. Far from simple reinvention. It’s a disappearing act. And the longer we pretend not to see it, the more permanent the structure becomes.