The billionaire-funded campaign against Sup. Dean Preston just gets weirder.
At one point, Elon Musk—who doesn’t even live in San Francisco, much less in District 5, and who has moved his company X out of town, said Preston should be put in jail for proposing limits on security guards pulling guns. Then Musk said he would give $100,000 to a campaign to defeat Preston (he hasn’t, so far).
But Garry Tan, who said that Preston and some other supes should “die slowly” has given $50,000 to an independent PAC run by GrowSF that is attacking Preston and supporting his rival, Bilal Mahmood.
(Let’s of big tech money in that PAC, including from Chris Larsen and several Y Combinator partners, not all of whom live in SF.)
Preston has led campaigns to raise money for affordable housing by taxing high-end real-estate transactions and the biggest businesses in the city. Perhaps that infuriates the billionaires, although Y Combinator is not one of the biggest businesses in town, and as far as I can tell, hardly any of the big donors live in D5.
So now this:
GrowSF has bought a billboard next to an old car wash at 400 Divisadero. It argues that “this car wash should be affordable homes” and that “Bilal Mahmood will fix it.”
That’s especially bizarre, since Preston has spent much of the past four years trying to get affordable housing built on the site—and Mayor London Breed, who supports Mahmood, has blocked it.
Yes: This site could have been affordable housing. Preston got the money in the budget, and the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation was under contract to buy the site and build more than 100 units of affordable housing. But Breed refused to allocate the approved, budgeted money, so the deal fell through.
In June, a private developer, 4Terra, bought the site, and has approval to build an eight-story, 203-unit building with 23 affordable units. “It’s a done deal,” Jen Snyder, who is helping run Preston’s campaign, told me. “There’s nothing Bilal can do to ‘fix it.'”
The site should have been affordable housing. It could have been. Instead, it will be luxury housing with a few affordable units.
The billboard is, in other words, completely inaccurate.
From a Preston press release:
Dean Preston championed an unprecedented affordable housing package that included a commitment to acquire 400 Divis for 100% affordable housing,” said Hillary Ronen, the 2022 Budget Committee Chair who led negotiations between Preston and the Mayor to land the massive affordable housing package. “Everyone at that negotiating table—including the Mayor’s office—knew and committed that 400 Divis would be acquired for affordable housing. It was a key part of the deal Preston fought for, and it’s deeply disappointing the mayor reneged on the commitment. The idea that Dean Preston is blocking affordable housing there is Trumpian level disinformation.
I reached out to GrowSF, but have not heard back.
There is no law that says campaign billboards, or any other campaign messaging, has to be accurate. That’s up to the news media—and I am waiting to see the Chron and the SF Standard call this one out.
Meanwhile, the Preston campaign has a virtual billboard response:
