Goings-on in SF — October 2022
Happy October, Brionies!
We’re a little over three weeks away from the big show: San Francisco’s fourth(!) election of 2022. In the previous edition of this newsletter, we promised you a deep dive into the city’s homelessness point-in-time survey, but with so many important races on the ballot in November both that and our usual preview of upcoming Board of Supervisors meetings will have to wait a month.
You’ve probably received your (very) lengthy ballot already and, like many San Franciscans, are feeling overwhelmed trying to navigate all the different races and the alphabet soup of propositions. Fret not – we’ve got you covered: check out the Briones Society’s November 2022 Voter Guide.
We strongly encourage you to visit our endorsed candidates’ websites and make a donation or sign up to volunteer. Candidates in bold with asterisks next to their names are in particularly competitive races where your donations can play a pivotal role.
A once-in-a-generation opportunity
It’s been a good year for moderates in San Francisco, starting with the Board of Education recall in February, a successful redistricting effort in April, and of course the recall of Chesa Boudin in June. We even managed to keep David Campos out of the Assembly – though we had to hold our noses and send Matt Haney there, instead (hey, it’s a game of inches). For the first time in nearly two decades, the tide is clearly turning: San Francisco Moves a Step to the Center.
But we can’t squander this momentum. The Board of Supervisors is currently made up of two members who are center-left (Catherine Stefani and Matt Dorsey), three members who swing between the center-left and the far-left (Myrna Melgar, Rafael Mandelman, and Ahsha Safai), five members who’ve fallen off the leftmost edge of political map (Gordon Mar, Hillary Ronen, Connie Chan, Dean Preston, and Shamann Walton), and one member whose sole purpose seems to be regulating every conceivable sphere of human activity, including where you can eat lunch (Aaron Peskin).
A win by Joel Engardio over Gordon Mar will meaningfully alter this lopsided dynamic, creating the potential for moderate victories at the BoS over the next two years if the center-left and swing-left factions can find common ground on certain issues. That will set the city up for success in 2024, when Ronen and Peskin are termed out, and Chan and Preston will both face uphill battles for reelection due to redistricting (Chan’s District 1 added moderate precincts in Sea Cliff, Lake Street, and Presidio Terrace; Preston’s District 5 lost progressive strongholds in Ashbury Heights and the Inner Sunset, while absorbing the political albatross that is the Tenderloin).
Just imagine the progress we can make after 2024 with a moderate mayor, District Attorney, Board of Education, and Board of Supervisors. It’s been a long time coming, but we’re optimistic about San Francisco’s trajectory. Maybe we can even get some sensible conservatives elected!
It all starts here, though – and we all need to do more than just vote: Make sure you donate, volunteer, and spread the word to all your friends! Share this newsletter with them!
Need more motivation? Just remember, elections have consequences. This November will determine whether you get more of this and this and this and this, or instead get this and this and this and this.
Riding the gravy train
As usual, there’s no shortage of news about San Francisco pols behaving badly. And, as usual, it’s not the major media outlets breaking these stories, but independent reporter Susan Dyer Reynolds.
Former DA Chesa Boudin accepted $250,000 gift from USF School of Law Racial Justice Clinic
Supervisor Dean Preston sold Mendocino nature preserve to founder of firm with city contracts
Boy, it sure would be great if someone proposed a solution to address all this rampant corruption.
Mo Money Mo Problems
Run a Twitter keyword search for “bullish” and “San Francisco,” and you might be surprised by the results. Maybe it’s the afterglow of Dreamforce, but a lot of people seem to be noticing the same thing: restaurants and bars are livelier, hacker houses are filling up again, VCs meetups are back – even FiDi is less of a ghost town these days. There are actual, honest-to-god, human people walking around on the Streets of San Francisco!
Of course, getting a head start on the renaissance also means that, despite the best laid plans of the city’s NIMBYs, our perennial infrastructure problems are not going to be resolved by a municipal death spiral of depopulation and economic collapse.
So, where are we going to house everyone?
That used to be a mere political question. Now it’s become a legal one. And with gloomy new data about downtown’s prospects for recovery, the answer increasingly being put forth involves converting offices into condos. At first glance, this appears to be a win-win. San Francisco needs to build 82,000 housing units by 2030. Tech companies, many of whom went all-in on remote work, need to offload millions of square feet of real estate. How cool would it be, after all, to live in this building?
Unfortunately, it turns out that commercial-to-residential conversions are easier said than done. Engineering and architectural obstacles abound; according to one study, only 30% of office buildings “make for suitable candidates for conversion.” Nevertheless, the idea seems to have legs, and a diverse array of serious players are advocating for a downtown with a healthier mix of offices, retail, and housing – from SPUR to former D3 supervisorial candidate Danny Sauter to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Either way, with the recent passage of Assembly Bill 2011, more housing is coming to San Francisco. Stay tuned.
Palate cleansers
Too many hardworking, decent, and intelligent citizens are fearful of getting involved in politics (or, better yet, actually running for office) because they think they don’t know enough about the issues. Trust us, you don’t have to clear a very high bar. What was it that John Adams said? “Public business must be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it, others will not.”
Enjoy Gordon Mar realizing, “I’ve made a huge mistake.”
Not San Francisco-specific, but here’s Jamie Dimon living his best life.
That’s it for this month, folks. See you at the polls!