While other supervisorial races have featured multiple forums and debates, District 5, incorporating the Haight, Western Addition, and Tenderloin, is getting started late. Voters got a first hearing of the candidates at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California on Tuesday.
District 5 encompasses some of San Francisco’s most left-leaning neighborhoods, which have also figured prominently in the city’s political history, such as the Haight Ashbury, Western Addition, and, as of the latest redistricting two years ago, the Tenderloin. The incumbent, Supervisor Dean Preston, a card-carrying Democratic Socialist, is regarded as the furthest left-leaning — and most controversial — member of the Board of Supervisors.
Not a week goes by in the city’s legislative calendar, let alone election season, when Preston isn’t visibly at odds with the mayor’s office or other authorities on issues such as the project timeline, funding of affordable housing projects in his district, or the use of police to deal with nagging public safety issues.
Preston’s challengers, all of whom were present at Tuesday’s forum, included nonprofit director and Democratic Central Committee member Bilal Mahmood; 2022 school board recall organizer Autumn Loojien; draftsman Allen Jones; and marketing executive Scott Jacobs.
The 2022 redistricting process attracted significant controversy over progressive activists’ accusations that districts were being gerrymandered to the right. Ironically, that same process may well have strengthened the institutional left’s hold on District 5 and ensured Preston’s reelection.
That said, one player working to influence multiple supervisorial races we spoke to on background told The Voice that internal polls have Preston and Mahmood running neck and neck. District 5 has become the most expensive supervisorial contest, with significant funds thrown around in hopes of defenestrating Preston.
Answering wonky questions is hard
League of Women Voters vice president Danielle Deibler opened proceedings with a primer on ranked-choice voting and noted that attendees had submitted 75 questions for the candidates, which had to be sifted through for the forum.
“We did our absolute best to cover the top topics, and to squeeze in as many questions as we possibly could, and squeeze in as many compound questions as we possibly could,” Deibler told the candidates, “so I feel for you guys.”
In the end, moderator Maxine Anderson asked candidates about 11 questions, some of which addressed issues from a baked-in ideological perspective, or from within the confines of specific programs (“How do you intend to balance the goals of our Climate Action Plan to restore natural lands of all types, conserve biodiversity and expand urban forestry and greening as we try to add roughly 82,000 housing units by 2031”) rather than from the kitchen table.
District 5 encompasses some of San Francisco’s most left-leaning neighborhoods, such as the Haight Ashbury, Western Addition, and the Tenderloin.
One question was about the city’s African-American reparations plan, a draft of which was accepted by the Board of Supervisors in March 2023. The plan included proposals that captured national attention, such as paying a lump sum of $5 million to each Black resident deemed eligible based on being impacted by historical discrimination.
Insiders generally acknowledged at the time that the lump sum proposal was more of a point of negotiations than a serious idea, but it still captured most of the press’s attention versus other more concrete proposals in the plan, such as home down payment or business startup assistance.
Jones, who is the only Black candidate, opposed the plan.
“I believe that the only reparations Black people need is the reparations of respect,” he told attendees. This is not realistic. When people talk about the $5 million figure, do the math. Who’s going to be able to afford to put this together?”
Other candidates voiced support for reparations conceptually but elided any appraisal of the draft plan, instead pivoting to specific inequality-related issues in the district.
“Black people in this district have been promised again and again, administration after administration, that there will be reparations, that they will get affordable housing, that they will have jobs, and they have not seen that result, and that’s because we haven’t had people who are in office actually to fight for those issues,” Mahmood said. “We have a lot of excess budget in San Francisco City Hall … we’re not spending due to the understaffing crisis. That can be reallocated to people who have been displaced [in the] Fillmore and Japantown.”
“I think that what is happening right now with the Fillmore Safeway and the disgraceful history of redevelopment in District 5 is one of the darkest periods of San Francisco history,” Jacobs told attendees. “We need to do everything we can to right that very dark period of our history. That looks like promoting paths to business ownership for local community members. That looks like promoting paths to homeownership. That looks like creating the engines of economic and upward mobility for communities that City Hall has neglected for decades.”
“We need to stop breaking promises,” Loojien said. “I would love to see Black-owned grocery stores come back to the Fillmore as part of replacing the Safeway that’s there now,” relating how she helped connect a local activist whose family used to own grocery stores with the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development “to help her make that dream happen. I would like to see more of that.”
Preston touted his support for the reparations plan, including separate funding for an Office of Reparations, which became a political beef between Mayor London Breed and supervisors when she cut it from the budget last December. But then he also pivoted to other initiatives, such as his office’s work to help residents of the Midtown Park apartments fend off significant rent increases caused by bureaucratic mishandling of the project.
Back to bread and butter— and drugs
Turning to green transportation issues, Preston proclaimed himself “the transit nerd on the board” and supported Panhandle bike lanes, safer bus stops, and, notably, the controversial Proposition K that would permanently close the Great Highway to motor vehicles. “I am the only supervisor who is an everyday Muni rider,” he told the crowd. “I stopped fair hikes for years during the pandemic, got bus lines restored when service was suspended, and led the fight with transit agencies and advocates when the governor had a $2 billion transit funding cut to get those funds restored. So I will continue to fight for full funding for public transit in San Francisco.”
“My generation will bear the brunt of climate change, so this is something that hits close to home,” Jacobs told the audience. This means investing in infrastructure, including more electric car chargers and an electric charging network across San Francisco. It means investing in Muni. I am a supporter of Prop. L on the ballot this year,” referring to a planned new tax on rideshares and robotaxis to fund Muni.
Jones pointed out his rather fancy electric wheelchair, parked stage left for the audience to see. “This gets me everywhere,” he added. I spearheaded getting public electric wheelchair charging stations in San Francisco, and no one on the Board of Supervisors would pick me up on my offer. If we’re not going to start with public electric wheelchair charging stations, which are in other cities, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that we really care about how people get around.”
Loojien emphasized making Muni attractive to everyday commuters and offered up microcars as a possible complementary solution.
“When we’re looking at reducing the climate impact of transportation in our city, I think what it comes down to is making it easier for people to do what’s right and harder for people to do carbon-intensive things, ” she told attendees. We need to get Muni ridership up. Part of that is making sure that people feel safe on Muni and that it’s reliable and fast […] I’d also like to see a network of electric cars powered by small solar installations throughout the city that I think would be a game changer right now. Cheap electric cars coming out of China are about half the cost of regular cars; I’d love to take down those tariffs at the national level. Anything we can do to bring down the price of electric cars to make it easy and cheap.”
“For Muni, we have to ensure that we have safe and reliable transit access. District 5 has some of the highest transit traffic collision corridors. We have to install more automated speed cameras. We have 100 that have been installed across the city but some of the highest traffic collision corridors still don’t have them,” Mahmood said, promising to partner with the city’s Sacramento delegation to lobby for them.
Public Safety, and in particular the city’s drug crisis, which is partially centered on the Tenderloin, was probably the one issue on which challengers were more able to clearly differentiate themselves, particularly from the incumbent.
“It is a huge problem and we need to take a fundamentally different approach to addressing it. I believe that involves a fully funded San Francisco Police Department. We need to stand with the police, not call to defund them,” Scott Jacobs told the audience. “I believe that we need to also take the approach where if we need to compel people into treatment, we should do that. It is not compassionate to allow people to die, slow deaths on the sidewalks of San Francisco.”
Allen Jones offered a creative, if short-term, approach. He told attendees that he suggested to Police Chief Bill Scott that construction heaters be placed on busy drug corners to deter dealers. “I guarantee you, they will not want to stand in one place too long, and they will move on,” he added.
“I don’t know if you guys have walked through the Tenderloin lately, but I have and it breaks my heart,” Autumn Loojien said, recommending a variation on proposed drug market intervention plans. “We need to attack supply, demand, and revenue all at once — getting people off the streets, getting people into effective evidence-based treatment, enforcing the laws against public drug use, and going hard against shoplifting, which funds the open drug markets, which are killing our city.”
Mahmood also endorsed drug market intervention.
“It’s the only evidence-based plan that has actually worked in the United States. It’s eliminated opioid crises in North Carolina and Nashville, Tennessee. [It ]works in three steps, incapacitating the drug market by creating an interagency task force; fully funding a coordination center that exists today [in San Francisco], but it’s all operating on overtime; workforce development for people who come out of prison and patrol officers of which we have zero now to maintain community safety.”
Preston, on the other hand, began by saying, “I’m really tired of how the Tenderloin is used as a national punching bag.” He spoke in support of the city’s current overdose prevention plan, community ambassadors, more supportive housing, and reopening harm reduction-oriented safe consumption sites.
“We led the effort with the Department of Public Health to create the city’s only overdose prevention plan. When we follow that plan, overdoses go down. When we do stupid things like shutting down the only safe consumption sites in the city, overdoses surge.”
The forum is available to stream on YouTube for those who missed it.