Let’s put the Nov. 5 local election in some historical context, since many of the themes that underlie the major campaigns have roots in community struggles that defined San Francisco politics in the post-War era.
In the 1980s, we called the struggle “downtown vs. the neighborhoods,” which was a synecdoche: Downtown represented the business interests that wanted to make as much money as possible by development in San Francisco, and the neighborhoods were the forces that were fighting back.
The larger issue: In the years after the end of World War Two, a small handful of people, mostly men, had carefully developed a plan for San Francisco: It would become a city with a dense highrise downtown core filled with workers in the finance, insurance, and real estate industry (along with some giant other corporations like Chevron, Bechtel, and McKesson), with the workers living in the East Bay suburbs, brought into the core on a new system called BART, or in the neighborhoods where they could take Muni downtown.
The South of Market, where some 10,000 people live in SRO hotel rooms, would become a hotel and convention center district. Freeways would cut through the city, including one that would rise above Golden Gate Park.
Much of that was implemented, through redevelopment and the creation of a massive highrise office district. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, people from communities around the city started asking: Who made these plans, and why were none of us consulted?
That was the beginning of the movement that brought us Mayor George Moscone and the first district elections of supervisors (which brought us, among others, Harvey Milk.)
It also brought a political philosophy to local politics that went like this: When you make decisions that impact existing residents and communities, they need a voice. And when the city changes, as it would and will, we should sometimes take a deep breath and slow down a little—and consider the impacts those changes will have on the people who live here.
District elections gives neighborhoods a voice at City Hall. The system of commissions and oversight agencies give communities a chance to understand what changes are on the way, and to give input.
Yes: This slows things down. It slows development. It slows rapid change. It protects existing vulnerable communities from displacement. That’s the whole point.
The tech industry doesn’t like moving slowly and carefully. Big Tech wants to “move fast and break things.” When you disrupt an industry, there are impacts on the people who work in it, but that’s capitalism. When you disrupt the Latinx community in the Mission by forcing people out, that’s something else entirely.
The reason it takes so long to get housing approved in San Francisco is not because of modern Nimbys. It’s because in the 1970s, the neighborhoods were facing the prospect of the downtown highrise district expanding across town. The first community to fight back was Chinatown, which won rules banning large buildings and much commercial office space.
Repeatedly, local activists tried to put a limit on how much new office space could be built in the city, and to demand that the developers (who were making millions) paid for the impacts on Muni, and water and sewer, and the Fire Department—and the need for affordable housing—that their projects were creating.
In response, and to undermine some of those efforts, in 1978 planners and a majority pro-business Board of Supes downzoned the neighborhoods. The rules the neighborhoods won included notices of new projects, a chance to get a hearing at the Planning Commission, and if necessary, an appeal to the board.
But it wasn’t about housing, which the progressives were actually demanding; it was about blocking new highrise offices.
More than that, it was a message: Don’t move fast and break our communities without giving us a chance to be heard.
In some cases, those rules have been abused by people who don’t want affordable housing. Democracy is imperfect. There are, absolutely, people in single-family housing on the west side of town who don’t want any more density. We also know the alternative, because we saw in the redevelopment era.
But let’s remember history. During the office boom of the 1980s, the left in San Francisco demanded more housing; we won an office affordable housing production program that required office developers to (partially) fund new housing for their workers and people who were displaced.
The entire reason that the Delancey Street center on the waterfront exists and provides housing, treatment, and job training for people with severe substance use issues is that attorney Sue Hestor and Planning Commissioner Sue Bierman demanded that a highrise office developer fund it as part of the approval plan.
Then under Mayor Willie Brown and later Mayor Ed Lee, tech came to town in a big way—and wanted to move fast and break things. The response, particularly from Lee, was: Full throttle, go.
Airbnb “disrupted” the hotel business, and also caused thousands of evictions and local tenants saw their apartments turned into transient rentals. It was illegal; Lee told the city staff to look the other way. Uber and Lyft “disrupted” the cab industry, and left hundreds of taxi drivers with massive debts for city permits that they can never pay; it was illegal, and Lee told city staff to look the other way.
In the process, thousands of San Franciscans were forced out of town, evicted, displaced by higher-paid tech workers.
The tech boom happened so fast that there was no way developers could ever have built enough housing for the workers in time to prevent displacement, whatever the zoning rules were. They hadn’t built housing in advance because profits were higher in office developments.
Maybe if the city had gone a little more slowly in attracting tech companies, had protected existing blue-collar industries South of Market from displacement by tech offices—and yes, had given up some of those companies (and the problems they created) to other cities, the existing residents of San Francisco would have been better off.
Maybe the next generation of San Franciscans, both the kids who grew up here and people who wanted to move to a city that’s safe for immigrants, LGBTQ people, artists, outcasts who want to start a better life and who don’t have a lot of money, might have been able to have homes and build communities here.
Maybe regulation and slower growth is a better option than what, say, Michael Moritz wants.
Because what Moritz and his allies want is the same type of planning, the same type of centralized control, that San Francisco had when a small group of men met in Ben Swig’s penthouse at the Fairmont Hotel and decided how to develop the Bay Area after the war and City Hall just went along. That’s what Prop. D is about.
There is always a tension in cities between the needs of capital, which is about extracting wealth, and the needs of community, which is about putting energy into building better lives for people. The way a city balances that tension determines its political, economic, and demographic future.
That’s what the Nov. 5 election is about.
Candidates backed by Big Tech billionaires are about moving fast and breaking things, including existing communities. Candidates who define themselves as progressives are, generally, about protecting existing vulnerable residents, about making a safe place for non-wealthy people who come here seeking sanctuary. About moving more intentionally and with everyone’s interest in mind, not just the rich.
If that means we “lose” some of the race for more innovation, more tech jobs, more disruption, maybe it’s worth the price.
Maybe we should have a slogan that says “disrupt neoliberal capitalism.”
Something to think about when you go to the polls.
