As the first democratic socialist elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 40 years (since Harry Britt in 1980), former District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston became a lightning rod and top target for the city’s reactionary and conservative groups, whose well-financed campaigning narrowly defeated him this November.
Most famously, President-elect Trump’s buddy Elon Musk insisted Preston be tossed in jail for his politics, and vowed to spend $100,000 to help oust him, though it seems he never ponied up. Conservatives, Big Tech, and Big Real Estate plowed $300,000 into a “Dump Dean” campaign, with big donations from Garry Tan (he of the “die slow” posts threatening progressive supervisors) and other wealthy tech interests.
Before jumping into electoral politics, Preston spent more than 20 years as a tenants’ rights advocate and leader, founder, and director of the statewide group, Tenants Together. In our recent interview at Beanbag Café on Divisadero, Preston said he plans to stay active and vocal in city political issues, and shared thoughts on his legislative legacy and broader political dynamics in the city.
48HILLS You went to the mayoral inauguration, what are you thinking about the direction that city leadership is going in?
DEAN PRESTON Obviously, my preferred candidate for mayor was Aaron Peskin. I was hoping we’d have a more clear progressive at the helm. But I’m trying to keep an open mind on Lurie and give him a chance to define himself. It’s no secret that I was a fan of replacing our outgoing mayor. I’m glad to see some changes to City Hall.
There’s a lot of rhetoric in the context of a campaign and even inauguration, and then there’s actually governing, moving legislation through and putting ideas in practice. … What’s missing, in my observation, is the involvement and voices of marginalized communities in this city and of grassroots movements. What makes me cautiously optimistic is that so far, I think Lurie has tried to send the message of meeting with everyone, bringing everyone to the table. I hope that continues because I think when I look at a lot of the higher level early picks [for Lurie’s administration], I don’t see a lot of prominent labor organizers and tenants’ rights folks and criminal justice reform leaders and the many grassroots voices and leaders that I think need to be at the table. … My initial concern has just been, I see more business consultants and tech people and others than I do grassroots community leaders among his leadership teams.
48HILLS What do you feel the city needs right now in terms of policy direction, political direction?
DEAN PRESTON How much time you got? I think prioritizing and centering the needs of folks who are struggling the most in the city right now. That’s what the city needs, that’s been lacking under former Mayor Breed’s leadership. Whether it comes to policies around housing, around labor issues, around criminal justice reform, on pretty much any issue, whose needs are going to be centered and prioritized? In an era of nationally things shifting to the right, San Francisco needs the same thing that I think the nation needs, which is like an actual left, true opposition, true progressive movement.
I think we have the added challenge in San Francisco of the incredible money behind disinformation, and if we don’t find better ways to rebut that and to get out more progressive messages, this kind of disinformation dominates.
When I say disinformation, it’s not just the slash and burn of campaigns and the smears and all that. It’s actually disinformation about the policies that the city needs or has used. In some ways the city needs more evidence-based, actual proven solutions to things. And what often gets in the way of that is incredible disinformation campaigns about those very solutions.
We piloted a lot of those things during the first couple of years of the pandemic. And some of them were quite successful, but they obviously threatened big money interests. There’s been this revisionist history attempt to declare any kind of progressive solutions as failures in order to take a much more deregulation, reactionary, conservative approach. What we need from City Hall is for folks to be actually driven by compassion and facts and evidence and real solutions and not just kind of clickbait conservative press release type governance.
There’s a lot of things that I’ve seen in my time in City Hall that shouldn’t even be controversial and are just made to be controversial because they challenge more conservative interests in this city. You can go down the line. Drug policy and the closure of the overdose prevention site that we had [the Tenderloin Linkage Center] that was working to save lives. Our very successful effort to move thousands of people who are unhoused into hotels, to use vacant hotel rooms in that way. What affordable housing we were able to get through has been successfully housing low-income people. We should be scaling that up instead of just focusing on deregulating high-end housing.
48HILLS Why do you think the narrative [against progressives] took hold and had at least some success?
DEAN PRESTON I think it’s a national narrative beating up on San Francisco and beating up on progressive solutions, and then unfortunately having a mayor that echoed a lot of that locally, and so-called moderates and a bunch of billionaires in tech and real estate who echoed a lot of that. Folks who are very invested in declaring the failure of anything in San Francisco.
I’ve been at progressive organizing work and tenant rights work and housing justice work now for 25 years. If you were someone like myself, conservative business interests would attack you for being too pro-tenant, too pro-rent control, unfair to small landlords, and so forth. That was the discussion.
But they were actually critiquing policies that folks like me were advocating for. High taxes on the wealthy, things like that. I get that they didn’t like it, but at least there was a policy debate. Is that stuff good or bad? That seems very quaint now.
It was a losing formula for the more conservative interests, billionaires and others, to fight about, is rent control good or bad? Union organizing, good or bad? They’ve realized that they can’t win on the merits, and what they can do is the same thing that Republicans do nationally, make stuff up, just lie.
One of the issues I’ve often talked about while in office and that I’ve been really troubled by for two years: The mayor, senior leaders in City Hall, and supervisors would talk about that 60 percent of homeless people won’t accept housing. That was their narrative, because that’s how they justify sweeps, is to say, people don’t want the housing.
We commissioned a study through the Budget and Legislative [Analyst], it showed that it depends entirely on what you offer people. You offer people dignified private or semi-private rooms, they take them 90 percent of the time. If someone’s unhoused and you offer people a one-night stay without their pet, without their possessions in a congregate shelter that they don’t perceive as being safe, they turn it down.
But that’s an example where there’s a narrative they just keep pounding, 60 percent of people who are unhoused won’t accept housing, and the mayor’s office includes that in every press release, and their billionaire-funded news outlets like The Standard repeat it and The Chronicle repeats it over and over again so that most people in the city think people who are unhoused won’t take the housing, and therefore the solution isn’t housing. When we look at what’s needed and how you move forward, part of it is overcoming and rebutting that very strategic misinformation that is put out there to lead to policy solutions that don’t work. It’s huge.
48HILLS What do you think is motivating all that, other than getting you and some other people out of office? What do you think was the larger agenda?
DEAN PRESTON I think most of it boils down to just greed and racism, a toxic mix of classism and racism, with some folks more intentionally and with other folks maybe less intentionally. But at the end of the day, you have major monied interests that will do whatever they can to protect their profits, to not be taxed to fund solutions. And not all these solutions are cheap.
I wrote a piece in Truthout that talked about this. We went to the ballot with a huge tax with Prop I in the middle of a pandemic. Everyone told me at the time, voters won’t pass a tax in the middle of a health crisis. Voters passed it. All these things that were being federally funded, solutions on funding hotel rooms for homeless people, funding pop-up medical facilities so people can get their COVID testing and shot regardless of their insurance, massive rent relief programs, the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country.
Those things were all happening starting in 2020. A lot of them were federally funded for the first couple of years. So, I think these billionaires were smart enough to understand that if those kinds of solutions are working and people are willing to pass taxes on billionaires and the federal money is about to go away, they’re going to get taxed to pay for this stuff.
I’m not friends with these billionaires. I know people who [are]. And what they’ve all reported to me is that the original sin, the thing that they hold against me more than anything else and has motivated their massive giving against me, has been Prop I. Doubling the tax in San Francisco whenever one of these real estate tycoons or conservative billionaires sells an office building, sells a mega mansion in Pacific Heights, brings in, the low end around $100 million a year. The high end is about $180, $190 million a year.
And we didn’t ask their permission. We didn’t negotiate the number down with them, we just did it. They outspent us over five to one, and we won. So, they’re very motivated by the bigger money interests. Billionaires, big corporate interests. They want to deregulate, to not pay as many taxes and to maximize profits.
Real estate speculators have been doing it for years. Gentrifying neighborhoods, making a killing especially in lower income neighborhoods, and replacing the residents there with higher income folks. I think where the racism and classism come in is just the push to never have to see or experience seeing poverty. They want San Francisco to be more of a playground for the rich.
I just don’t know how else you can look at these policies being rolled out, like Matt Dorsey’s latest, [arresting] 100 people a day who are using drugs. That’s just mass arrest of disproportionately Black and brown people. It’s not all the white people who are doing drugs in their condos, right? It’s all the people who have been evicted and are on the streets. … You’ve got this huge push under the guise of public safety which is about mass arrests and mass incarceration.
Anywhere else this would be called conservative. Here somehow it gets labeled moderate. The folks who have a D next to their name think they’re different.
48HILLS How do you push back on that?
DEAN PRESTON It’s just all spin. Crime was down last year. And if you’re running a Mark Farrell type campaign or you’re Together SF or Will Oberndorf, Neighbors for a Better SF, and you want to make people feel like there’s escalating crime and they need to be afraid and that’s why they need more reactionary solutions, they just spin it and say it over and over again.
You have a very low homicide rate in San Francisco. You wouldn’t have known that six months or a year ago because nobody would say that. If it stays low, now the next politician, whether it’s a mayor or a supervisor or whatever, can celebrate how the rates have dropped just because it was a false impression that they had gone up last year. And what you hear all the time, and it was in Lurie’s inaugural speech, and you hear all the time, it’s not the stats that matter, it’s how people feel about it—without acknowledging that how people feel about it is in part how the media and social media generates and gins up the fear.
48HILLS What do you see as a progressive vision for public safety?
DEAN PRESTON One of the interesting things about the last five years has been we’ve seen the progressive vision and what works, and we’ve seen reactionary stuff that doesn’t work. This city’s been doing both. I’ve always been a huge fan of community ambassador models. I think there’s tons of work that has fallen to police departments for years that police don’t need to be doing. In fact, they’re the wrong people to be doing it.
Often community ambassadors are far better at de-escalating situations, providing assistance to people on things that really aren’t law enforcement issues, offering help and care and resources. … It’s one thing to say the police budget’s too high, or we shouldn’t be sending police to certain kinds of calls, but I think you have to have actual proposals and solutions of how you’re gonna keep communities safe. We did that with ambassadors, and it’s absolutely worked.
I brought community ambassadors to every neighborhood in District 5. … Up in the Haight-Ashbury, it is not only safer, but the interactions between homeless youth on the streets with the Police Department used to be a huge conflict all the time. We would get complaints every day when I took office about allegations of excessive force against youth on the streets. We haven’t gotten those in years. Why? Because we have community ambassadors out there and because the city invested in all of these street teams.
I think the city’s made a lot of strides. We had the budget legislative analyst report looking at the street teams, and the [police] department’s own data; 80 percent of calls that used to go to police, mostly people who were unhoused or having behavioral health issues on the street, those are not police dispatched now. When we talk about a progressive vision of public safety, that’s all part of it.
The problem is that while we’ve been doing some good things like that, mostly pushed by progressives, sometimes in partnership with the administration, the city’s been doing these reactionary things to get headlines and appear tough. They don’t really solve anything. Like the mass arrests of drug users. That’s just literally done nothing to improve the life of people in the Tenderloin, doesn’t make the streets cleaner or safer even. It temporarily moves people around. But go walk a block that’s got community ambassadors walking up and down the block in the Tenderloin versus a block in the Tenderloin that doesn’t have community ambassadors, and you’ll see a massive difference. Walk down a block where there’s been a sweep or drug arrests, it might be empty today, [they might] come back in a day. You can’t arrest your way out of addiction. It’s never worked.
48HILLS Let’s talk about homelessness and the conditions of the streets. There’s a lot of polarization between sweeps and the camp that says let them stay in their tents on the sidewalk.
DEAN PRESTON I don’t hear anyone really saying let folks stay in their tents on the sidewalks. I think there is a school of thought that regardless of what we have to offer people, that we should do sweeps and criminalize and use law enforcement to address someone living in a tent on the street. That’s one camp. And there’s another camp that says, why don’t you actually have places for people to go to? The question is, what happens in the meantime? If you don’t create places for people to go to, what are your options? I don’t think there’s anyone who has a vision of addressing homelessness whose vision is people on the street.
Homeless advocates did Prop. C, they want to invest in permanent supportive housing and other places for people to go to. The homeless advocates have done more to make that a reality in San Francisco than anyone else. I think it’s really dishonest when those same advocates are framed as, they just want people living on the streets. …
Now they’re constantly attacking harm reduction and attacking people who advocate for harm reduction and treatment that they just want people left to suffer and die in the streets, which is so offensive and outrageous. People who dedicate their lives to helping people and just because they don’t want to start locking them up for their addiction then you are just okay with them suffering and dying, it’s so fundamentally dishonest.
The debate is very dishonest, driven by political PACs and a bunch of conservatives who basically just want to do mass arrests on the streets. They want to terrorize people on the streets whether they’re there because of drug addiction or homelessness, they want to do mass arrests or have people out of sight or have people so terrorized that they feel like they have to leave the city.
48HILLS Can the city fix this situation?
DEAN PRESTON I think the city could substantially improve on these challenges, on housing people who are unhoused, getting folks who are addicted into safer environments and eventually into treatment. But in terms of fully solving a lot of these issues, it’s really hard to see being able to scale up without greater assistance from the feds and from the state.
There’s been such a disinvestment over the years, where cities have to solve these issues themselves. I do think there’s some folks who kind of concluded that we can’t do anything locally and everything has to be solved with federal and state interventions. You know, we have a $16 billion budget. We’re a can-do place when we want to get things done. I think we could make pretty big strides.
I’ve been one of the leading voices talking about vacancies. We have about 8,000 unhoused people and we have 40, 50 thousand vacant units. So, the idea that we can’t solve this, I don’t buy it.
But I do think that if you don’t solve some of bigger structural issues and some of the decades of disinvestment in affordable housing from the federal government, if you don’t have a different approach from the federal and state government, you can take steps forward here but you’re also going to have a continued number of people who are falling into homelessness and end up addicted. You can make significant progress locally, but some of these things also need to be tackled nationally.
48HILLS I often wonder, with a $16 billion budget, plus phenomenal wealth in the city and in the region, has anybody put out a plan that says, here’s what we could do in a year or two, at least for the people who are here now? What’s your vision?
DEAN PRESTON I often hear this critique that there’s no progressive plan for these things. And I kind of push back on that because I do think we have been putting forward some pretty big visions and plans. I think the problem is that when it comes to implementing this, everything’s a fight. Prop I is great example. We did Prop I, Prop K. We had a consensus of the voters, let’s use a huge transfer tax, raise hundreds of millions of dollars to start a social housing program in San Francisco. And then the mayor is just like, no, I’m not gonna spend it on that. I’m not gonna put it in my budget for that.
So, you have a political fight that consumes everyone’s time and energy instead of saying, okay, here’s a plan. How do we scale that up and do more?
Same thing with the shelter in place hotel program. It was such a huge political fight. Supervisors passed legislation. Huge battle for years, instead of everyone coming together and saying, let’s move folks who are unhoused into hotels and let’s figure out how we can sustain that kind of program going into the future and have that bigger plan.
Experts within the departments are afraid to think really big. They’re afraid to think really transformative. And they’ll bring you these plans that they think can maybe survive the political fighting that exists. When I took office, when the redistricting happened and the Tenderloin was moved into our district, we asked for the Department of Health’s overdose prevention plan. They didn’t have one. So, we worked with DPH to call for a hearing, worked with them, created the city’s first overdose prevention plan.
When they released that plan, it only had a 15 percent reduction projected in the first couple of years of overdose fatalities. And I remember feeling, this isn’t bold enough as a plan. Why aren’t we thinking bigger?
But as I look back on it, they weren’t wrong. Because realistically, what happened was, the mayor wouldn’t implement parts of the plan, [there were] fights over the wellness hubs, closure of the Tenderloin [Linkage Center]. I think that gets factored into this plan.
48HILLS Why is that sort of culture of stasis there, low expectations from city leaders about issues that they say are urgent crises?
DEAN PRESTON I think a lot of people are frustrated when they see the political battles happening and things not changing in a dramatic way. They don’t necessarily look at who’s getting in the way and who’s fighting for change. That’s when people are very susceptible to kind of quick fix magic wand type solutions.
Rather than actually addressing the housing crisis in San Francisco and affordability, someone’s like, we just need to upzone everything. As if that’s like a magic wand and you just say the word upzoning and 10,000 units of housing appear. It just doesn’t work that way.
But instead of examining what are the issues, why aren’t we building more affordable housing and how do we change that and who’s fighting for it and who’s fighting against it, instead it’s just this feeling of well we all agree we need more affordable housing in San Francisco and it ain’t happening and therefore we just need this shiny object over here to solve it all.
48HILLS Do you think maybe it’s more like people have different visions for the city, what the goal of the city is?
DEAN PRESTON I think there are very different goals. When you look at the political players, the money in politics, the billionaires, the PACs, the political power players, the elected officials, I don’t think everyone does want the same thing. I think big real estate, big tech, conservative billionaires want this to be a deregulated, unlimited profit center, heavily policed, without any visible traces of poverty and from their perspective, the whiter the better.
I’m not saying everyone’s sitting there saying that. But that’s what the policies are. I don’t know Will Obendorf personally, but the guy is a big funder of Mitch McConnell and other right-wing Republicans and is one of the biggest funders in San Francisco. He doesn’t want the same things as you, me, or anyone else sitting in this cafe. Most people want guaranteed healthcare, a secure place to live, a living wage, and all these things that these conservative billionaires fight against.
Everything those folks do sends a strong message that, like I said, they want a deregulated, under-taxed business and billionaire class that has a heavy police and surveillance presence across the city and where people are not allowed to exist in public if they are foreign or unhoused, and if they are addicted and unhoused that they are arrested for that…They’ve become far bolder in their attempt to transform the city into that kind of like rich person’s paradise as opposed to a city for all. And it’s very concerning given the amounts of money that they commit to that project.
48HILLS Looking forward, coming out of your time in office and all your years organizing before that, how do you feel progressives can build a more effective movement to push back on this?
DEAN PRESTON I think it’s a combination of two main things. One is re-establishing spaces where people can do more traditional organizing. We do a good job in election cycles of knocking doors and talking to voters, but I think that the gathering people offline for events, for rallies, is something we need to rekindle… No matter how much you get done as a movement, right now we’re in a situation where it will get spun so that folks who aren’t out there with you organizing are not gonna know of those successes and what you’re doing.
There is a huge dominance, particularly of digital media, but just of messaging that is coming from conservative interests. It’s a national problem and it’s also very much a local problem….
Yes there are some [local] independent media outlets, but the reality is if you look at what narratives get out, how information gets out in San Francisco, the progressive movements in San Francisco have got to figure out how to more effectively get their message out in the face of very strategic and well-funded information. … The conservatives have gotten more sophisticated about it and have created a real echo chamber problem, and I feel like the progressive media and progressive groups who are engaged in incredibly righteous and important struggles and are often winning them, the messages from those fights are not amplified in a strategic way.
If we as a progressive movement do not have a better infrastructure for getting narratives out, getting data out, and organizing in the face of this kind of disinformation, that even when you win the substantive battles, you can lose the bigger fight.
It’s something I’ve seen unfolding over the years, but I’ve seen it even more being in office, seeing the things that work and how those get torn down in a media culture that’s not about actually solving problems, it’s more about punching left than solving problems. … I think that conservative interests have the obvious advantage of money but have done far more to create infrastructure for spreading their message. So, I don’t at all think that the left should be engaging in any kind of disinformation campaign, but I do think that the left should be engaging in strategic communication.
48HILLS Looking ahead at the next two to four years in San Francisco, what would you most like to see done locally, either at City Hall or through initiatives? What do you think the city needs most?
DEAN PRESTON Massive scaling up of social housing. It’s become so completely unaffordable for anyone to live here that is not already in a long-term rent-controlled place or has owned for 20-30 years. It’s just becoming less and less friendly to working class people.
What I would like to see is an actual commitment to large-scale social housing in San Francisco. And then the question obviously is how do you fund that? And I think probably one of the most important pieces is the public bank. I would put a public bank very high on that list of bigger things that can really change how [the city] operates and who it operates for. I think a public bank, a hugely scaled up social housing program, stronger rent control, we need to have state law changed to repeal or reform Costa-Hawkins so that you could immediately impose vacancy control.
I think we have a complete crisis of affordability and the most obvious and direct and simple way to address it is to just regulate the out-of-control rent people can charge, landlords can charge, but because of Costa-Hawkins we can’t.
And then the final one in terms of big picture transforming things is how we’re going to deal with public transportation in San Francisco. There’s such a mindset of preventing cuts or, you know, mitigating the damage instead of really envisioning a bigger, bolder public transit system. I’ve been an advocate for free transit, for like really going all in on transit….
Public transit has been a big part of my work in office, and we saved a bunch of lines that MTA was going to eliminate. There was this whole attempt to downsize Muni during the pandemic that we fought. We fought fare increases, I kept the fairs from increasing throughout my five-year term, now they’re going up.
It’s not just about, can we get a little more money to run this line here, it’s about an approach to public transit. It’s a great thing when people ride transit. Half our emissions are private vehicles in the Bay Area. It should be made to be an amazing experience to ride transit. They shouldn’t have to wait a long time. They should be able to go at midnight and get a bus after their shift is over. I totally believe in free transit or at least having a plan to get there instead of increasing [fares and fines]. You park and you don’t feed a meter, you get a much lower ticket than if you ride the bus and don’t pay. When people ride public transit, whether it’s out of necessity or out of choice, they’re doing good for the city.
In 2021, using extra federal relief money that was sitting in our reserves, we passed a three-month free Muni pilot for San Francisco, fully funded. $13 million fully funded to try it out for three months, get some data. And the mayor was 100 percent opposed to it. MTA was opposed to it. They wouldn’t even work with us, we said, okay, maybe you could do it on certain lines or certain times. Like, let’s just pilot what having a fair free system or part of a system, what that looks like. And the mayor vetoed it. We had seven votes, and the mayor vetoed it….
It really saddens me to look at other cities like Boston, Kansas City, others have launched like free bus ride pilots, it’s a growing movement and we had an opportunity to pilot it for free [paid for by the federal government] and it was vetoed, because people didn’t want to move in that direction.
There is sometimes a resistance to just thinking of a big positive government thing. Instead of just Uber and Lyft shuttling people around, or Waymo or whatever, you can really make your buses free, inviting, running frequently, and, you know, there are real barriers financially to doing that now, but there’s also a resistance to scaling up a government good.
And there’s obviously private interests always pushing for their piece of any pie, certainly transportation. I would say, looking at some of the bigger things to your question, launch a public bank, scale up a huge social housing program, and massively increase our public transportation, like really double down on public transportation and try to find a path to discounted and eventually free fares.
48HILLS What do you want to work on most?
DEAN PRESTON A little more time with my family. I think I will have a little more time to lean into some of these issues around the state of more progressive media in San Francisco and really looking at different models that have been successfully used nationally but that seem to be lacking locally in really holding this sort of billionaire takeover attempt accountable and exposing it for what it is. Strengthening a real infrastructure for getting progressive voices and stories out.
We can have all the wins we want but if we’re gonna just have a media [where] that will be mischaracterized, we’re in trouble. I’m definitely committed to doing some work to improve the local media landscape around progressive issues and continuing to be a voice from outside City Hall, holding the line on some of these issues that I’ve seen in the city from my time in City Hall.
48HILLS Is there anything I didn’t ask that feels important that you want to leave people with?
DEAN PRESTON I would definitely encourage you and any readers of this to look at the retrospective we just put out. We put together about a 50-page document that really goes through a lot of our vision and work and what we did over the last five years. I was the first democratic socialist elected in 40 years [since supervisor Harry Britt, appointed in 1979 and first elected in 1980]. I took a lot of grief from billionaire class in San Francisco, from the corporate media of San Francisco and even on things where we made I think a positive and transformative difference, it was often extremely difficult to get any coverage of any of that.
I think we effectively ground the eviction machine of San Francisco to a near complete halt for almost three years. I’ve been doing tenants’ rights work for decades. I never even thought that in my lifetime I would be able to be part of effectively taking evictions completely off the table for years. Mostly during the pandemic. Now it’s tragic that it takes a pandemic to do that….
Looking at all the things together, take the Right to Counsel program, we created the biggest rent relief program locally in US history. Over 12 pieces of legislation to ban evictions. … Through our work, through ballot measures, budget advocacy, and legislation, [during] a global pandemic, a health crisis, we prevented the health crisis from becoming an eviction crisis.
Without those interventions, tens of thousands of people [would] have lost their homes because people were losing their jobs, losing their hours. They can’t pay their rent. There were no provisions in the law saying, if you lost your job, if the bar you were working at closed, so now you have no money coming in, you don’t have to pay your rent. Like there was no law like that. There’s a whole section of our retrospective that just goes through the different things we did that collectively stopped, it’s already been documented, 20,000 people from losing their homes.
Eviction should be a last resort. Eviction should be only when someone’s threatened to burn down the place or there’s like a real problem. I think everyone understands there’s going to be some rare circumstances where it doesn’t make sense for someone to live there.
But when it’s things like a dispute about rent, there’s a million ways to solve that other than kicking someone out and having them on the street. Through our advocacy, looking at that eviction machinery that I’ve been fighting for over 20 years, here the courts allowed us to be a little more aggressive and then my colleagues voted for it with me. And we showed that you can do that. And if you have a reimbursement program that goes along with it, the landlord ends up still getting their money. They just don’t get to evict people while that dispute’s pending. They get paid differently. So that offers a glimpse of how we could do something differently.
Our office, despite being undermined and opposed at every step by Mayor Breed, [who] was not happy that we won the election and just made it her mission to try to undermine us on everything, despite that, we were able to get some big things done. Over 100 pieces of legislation, five major ballot measures. Stopped tens of thousands of evictions. One of the strongest affordable housing records on the board. Brought back all the bus lines from being cut. Huge food security wins, human rights issues, like championing that Gaza ceasefire resolution. We were a very busy office.
I think there is an unfair portrayal of progressives, of leftists, of socialists as if we’re not focused on getting things done. And I certainly think that progressives like Aaron Peskin and others show that huge legislative record of accomplishments. But I think also that we as democratic socialists in office, unapologetic leftists, working with a lot of people who weren’t, from the mayor to the board of supervisors, we were still able to pass a ton of really important legislation.
