Two candidates have filed to run against incumbent Supervisor Dean Preston to lead District 5. The district saw big changes during the 2022 redistricting, and now spans from the east end of Golden Gate Park through Haight-Ashbury, Japantown and the Western Addition, the Lower Haight and Hayes Valley, and most of the Tenderloin.
We have invited the three District 5 hopefuls to participate in our series, “Meet the candidates.” We will ask each candidate to answer one question per week, leading up to the election, with answers capped at 100 words. All the responses will ultimately be compiled onto a single page, where readers can peruse the potential supervisors’ stances on upwards of 40 topics before it’s time to vote in November.
Allen Jones
Restoring world-class city status to San Francisco.
As a longtime (1960) resident of San Francisco, I have witnessed the city lose a lot of its status as a “world-class city.” I believe there are three types of San Franciscans: Those who have class (help others). Those who have no class (threatening elected officials, thieves, vandals, selling drugs, etc.) And those who need to go back to class (the Board of Supervisors).
I intend to open the eyes of San Francisco by reminding us what a world-class city is and is not.
Bilal Mahmood
Housing.
I have been a renter for nearly 10 years in San Francisco and proudly live in the Tenderloin. Workers, nurses, teachers cannot live here unless we build not just affordable and market-rate, but also middle-income housing. We are the slowest city to approve new buildings in the entire state. It’s not progressive, it’s embarrassing. We must tackle the bureaucracy holding us back — 87 permits, $500K in fees, 1000 days of meetings — and I will advocate for initiatives from parallel permitting to technological investments to the reduction of discretionary permits to cut the time to build housing in half.
Dean Preston
My first priority has been, and will remain, getting results for everyday San Franciscans, not billionaires.
I have voted for 29,815 new homes, with 86% affordable. Raised over $400 million for affordable housing. Pioneered the use of empty hotels for homeless people. Raised taxes on large corporations to provide vital services. Banned evictions during the pandemic. Established the right to a free attorney for anyone facing eviction. Championed overdose prevention sites. Brought community ambassadors to District 5 neighborhoods. Protected small businesses from back rent and eviction and assisted those victimized by crime. More results like these will be my priority.
Candidates are ordered alphabetically. Answers may be lightly edited for formatting, spelling, and grammar. If you have questions for the candidates, please let us know at eleni@missionlocal.com.
Read the rest of the series here. Illustrations for the series by Neil Ballard.
You can register to vote via the sf.gov website.
Please ask Bilal Mahmood if he will condemn toxic psycho (and donor to Mahmood’s campaign) Garry Tan’s recent calls for “slow death” to 7 of our democratically elected supervisors. Will Mahmood return Garry Tan’s $5000 campaign donation? What would Mahmood do if someone called for his death or threatened to harm his loved ones and family members? Is that acceptable behavior in the public and on social media? It could have a chilling effect on people deciding to run for elected office. There’s no room for hateful dangerous calls for violence to elected public servants or their families. San Franciscans expect better.
It’s readily apparent nothing is going to come of the “die slow” tweet. It’s wishful thinking that it can be leveraged in the way some hoped.
Dean Preston is a Mensch. I support him wholeheartedly. He’s been maligned by the right people if you know what I mean.
In my opinion Dean Preston has the cleverest answer.
I would be inclined to believe him if he had hung some flowers from the yellow “gibbets” at the ugly parklet on Turk Street between Jones and Leavenworth.
Here it is “same as it ever was” on Google Maps, save in this instance graffiti-free!
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7828911,-122.4134945,3a,75y,137.48h,100.56t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sJfc1H-m7p7EyFJcZOt7lNw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=en&entry=ttu
I believe our ugly and insulting “Sparc” should be removed or turned into something that could really compete in style and beauty with parklets in tonier neighborhoods.
Safe Passage Park (Spark) was the result of a year-long community effort to create COVID emergency outdoor space for the 3,500 kids who live in the Tenderloin. The space was intentionally left relatively open and resembles a playground because it was meant to be a (small) open space for those children. It never lived up to the expectations that it would become the front yard for families living at 201 Turk Street (tlcbd.org/spark). Yet I still believe small playgrounds in very close proximity to family housing are important: it’s easier to take young children out to play if it’s a two-minute walk instead of an hour roundtrip on the bus (which not incidentally was no longer in service immediately after the emergency declaration).
Spark’s “grand opening” was on July 17, 2021 – a full sixteen months after the declaration of a public health emergency. It was excruciating for me to have multiple emails and phone calls ignored by then-Supervisor Haney’s office, to be told by multiple city agencies (SFFD, DPW and SFTMA most frequently) that every single suggestion the community proposed was impossible, and to have weekly Zoom meetings with literally dozens of city officials (from DEM, SFFD, DPW, SFMTA, Rec and Park, the Mayor’s Office, DPH, Human Rights Commission, DCYF and others) during which they offered or refused to push back against a never-ending stream of excuses that “justified” the 100% failure of the city that knows how to deliver for those kids.
A year before SPark opened, the former Director of Our Families Our Children Council, referred to our list of proposals as “low-hanging fruit” that the city could implement to demonstrate its commitment to children in time for the upcoming public announcement of the Memorandum of Understanding with UNICEF the city had just signed pledging to make San Francisco a child-friendly city. A grand total of zero of these low-hanging fruit were “harvested.”
Quickly and without apparent hesitation, the city created a multi-agency program and began granting restaurants access to parking spaces (and the Polk Street bike lane) for outdoor dining. The city shut down vehicle access to multiple blocks around Union Square to protect luxury capitalism from the looters who took advantage of the political work of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in May 2020. But none of that could happen in the Tenderloin.
The Tenderloin children who were for all intents and purposes trapped inside didn’t matter enough to city bureaucrats for them to think creatively and quickly to do what was obviously a good idea elsewhere in San Francisco. Even food – a clear necessity – wasn’t important enough: it took six months before the SF-Marin Food Bank was allowed to open a pantry in the TL. The initial proposal for the 300 block of Ellis was too complicated so nothing could be done, but that’s exactly where the weekly pantry opened once the bureaucrats stopped being jerks.
So, yeah, SPark isn’t what you think it should be, and maybe is should be “upgraded” to look like something that would be palatable to the Union Street or Noe Valley crowd. Supervisor Preston certainly believes they Tenderloin deserves and is good enough to have nice things, unlike for example Kanishka Cheng, CEO of the AstroTurf “think tank” TogetherSF.
Interesting group of candidates. An accurate picture of the voters. A trickle down advocate. An accomplished politician. We shall see how easy it is to buy voters in SF these days.