San Francisco has changed a lot since former district 9 Supervisor Hillary Ronen started working in City Hall in 2009 as a legislative aide to her predecessor, David Campos. Barack Obama had just been elected president, and the most prominent issues in San Francisco were a looming fiscal crisis, the mortgage and housing bubble, mass evictions and displacement.
Now, as Ronen departs City Hall along with fellow progressives Aaron Peskin and Dean Preston, San Francisco is girding for battle with President Trump while facing a massive budget deficit and ongoing homelessness and street addiction crises.
In the Nov. 6 election that ushered Trump back into the White House, San Francisco elected Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie as its next “moderate” mayor, along with centrist supervisors in districts 3 and 5, which have long been firmly in the progressive camp. Funded by millions from corporate real estate and Big Tech interests, the right seems ascendant, at least in the electoral arena (progressives passed many ballot measures and defeated some from centrist circles). Ronen’s district retained its leftward compass, electing democratic socialist Jackie Fielder.
Looking beyond the labels and electoral trends of the moment, Ronen shared her insights on the city, the district, and the issues in a 48 Hills interview.
48HILLS How do you feel San Francisco’s politics have changed in your time in City Hall?
HILLARY RONEN I’m not sure the politics have changed so much, what I think has changed is just how visible poverty is in the city and how much it is impossible to ignore no matter what your class or income is. And because of that, these street issues, feelings of being unsafe, are much more dominant than they used to be when poverty was more hidden.
There are those in the city, the moderate forces who primarily believe that running a good and functional city involves keeping business interests at the forefront and making sure that people are making wild profits that then turn into sales taxes and all these different revenue sources that then come into the city. There are other of us, and I include myself among them, who believe that the key to running a wonderful city is making sure that inequality is kept to a minimum, that excess profits are shared with the whole community, that everybody’s basic needs for food and shelter and a quality education are met. That’s two different ways of looking at the world and at the job. I think ultimately that has not changed.
48HILLS Within all that, do you feel that the balance of power has changed?
HILLARY RONEN There used to be a lot more people in the middle that tended more towards the progressive side in San Francisco. Maybe they weren’t working-class, maybe they didn’t have a job that required them to be thinking about how poor people are faring in San Francisco, but their heart and soul were like, we need fairness. We need to make sure that the least among us have what they need to succeed. With so much poverty being right outside people’s doors now, and the problem feeling so overwhelming, and the feeling of seeing that poverty making people feel unsafe, that middle sort of has shifted further to the right. Other than [Art] Agnos, we’ve always had a more moderate mayor. It’s a strong-mayor city, but the blaming of the situation on progressives, which is you know really laughable, because progressives have never had enough power. It’s the sort of market rate Reaganomics neoliberal system that has gotten us to this crisis. People are just so angry in general that everything feels so unwieldy and unsafe in the city that it’s been easy to blame on progressives.
48HILLS Why do we have so many issues like this in a city and a region with so much incredible wealth? Why hasn’t the city been able to do more about it?
HILLARY RONEN I think it’s a couple things. We’re in late-stage capitalism, where all of these forces, laws and tax systems and unlimited money in politics have gotten us to the point where there are so many obscenely rich people. And the poor are just every day poorer. And the middle class is shrinking if not close to non-existent. I mean that divide, that inequality is getting so wide, so stark, and that has been happening since the 1970s and 1980s.
The feds used to build public housing, and granted it was usually not maintained and substandard, and ghettoized, allowed to have crime fester, we all know the ills of the past around public housing, but instead of fixing all those ills, which are not that hard to fix, the feds just stopped [building public housing]. So there was no longer anyone building affordable housing at scale. So all we had was market rate housing, and for the most part market rate housing is built by investors and developers. They want to make a big profit, so they’re only going to build if they can make a bigger profit building housing than in some other investment. So that drives up the cost of housing and it’s a cyclical problem. You could work two full-time, minimum wage jobs in San Francisco and still not afford a single place to live. I mean, the system’s rigged, it’s not fair.
San Francisco can’t be expected to build all the affordable housing for the region’s poor. And then, we have people constantly coming, because we’re considered a more compassionate city, which is something to be very proud of. But we have a big budget, and we have to balance the budget every single year, and the feds can deficit spend like crazy. Just like they do on all the wars and all the tax breaks and all. We can’t print money so we’ll never be able to make it up. I think we’ve done probably the best job most cities in this country have done in building, tens of thousands of units of affordable housing. You’ve had housing first policy for a long time. And we’ve permanently housed tens of thousands of people that were experiencing homelessness, so it’s not like we can’t do anything, but we cannot keep up with the demand. It’s gotten too unequal, the cost of living too high, the earnings too low and the system too skewed, to support the rich at the expense of the poor.
And so it’s been extremely frustrating to see these problems at the local level, I don’t think they’re fixable without a real difference coming from the feds which we’re not going to see in the next four years. With this whole DOGE [President-elect Trump’s project to slash government], we’re going to see a cut to federal spending on the needs of people. And what does [SF Supervisor] Matt Dorsey want to do? He wants to harass the hell out of people so they leave. If you can make people’s lives hellish enough, they’ll leave, right? That is not a humane strategy.
48HILLS This makes me want to ask you about the narrative coming from the other side, because there’s been a lot of talk about all these people moving to the city because they say San Francisco’s compassionate. And then of course, Mayor Breed said “compassion is killing us.”
HILLARY RONEN I ask myself this question all the time as well, and I have a lot of complicated thoughts about it. I’ll start out by saying there’s some truth to it, right? If you are known as a city that’s much more compassionate and that offers really great social services, then I’m sure it’s going to be somewhat of a draw to people that are in dire straits. I don’t like gaslighting people and pretending that’s not true at all. I also think it’s somewhat over-exaggerated, there are so many reasons why people go to certain places. Usually, it has to do more with knowing somebody there or a community or a job. If you look at the interviews and statistics, the amount of San Franciscans who have been evicted and had no place to go is much higher than the people who have come in.
I really wanted to work on a regional housing plan because people are coming back and forth from all over the Bay Area, more than coming in from you know the other side of the country. My biggest recent disappointment in politics, Trump being number one, but number two was that we couldn’t get [regional housing bond measure] on the ballot. We had been working for a decade to get a regional housing bond on the ballot that would have created $20 billion dollars of revenue for affordable housing, which would have been transformational in the region…A public bank would have started to create over time a permanent source of affordable housing that wasn’t tax-based. It was really a genuine alternative solution to having a regular revenue source of which we have none… We need a permanent source of revenue for affordable housing and we don’t have one and it’s a major problem.
48HILLS Do you see a viable future for a public bank here?
HILLARY RONEN Absolutely, and it’s one of the reasons that I’m excited about [new District 9 Supervisor] Jackie [Fielder]’s leadership, because we need someone who really understands what’s needed to get this going. It’s a real strategy that would provide new revenue for infrastructure in the city that we need desperately. We have an annual budget of $14 billion dollars. A lot of that money is just sitting there. We should be earning interest and investing that money in ways that create more money for the city to do more of the work that we need to do. Instead it’s private banks that get to profit from that capital… It would be massively life-changing for the city.
48HILLS What are your hopes for the city? What would you like to see the board and the mayor doing the next four years?
HILLARY RONEN I’m already seeing one of those things, which I’m really excited about. I went to the Mission cleanup the other day with Mayor Lurie and several board members. Lurie’s attitude is just really refreshing. He’s very nice and that sort of warm nice demeanor, he is so kind to everyone and looks them in the eye. I just haven’t seen that kind of attitude in the mayor in a very long time.
48HILLS Why does that matter?
HILLARY RONEN People want to work with you and people feel cared about and seen by you and don’t want to be in this constant battle with you. I really think, you know, since the Willie Brown days, since the Aaron Peskin [elected in year] 2000 days, we’ve never gotten away from this like, the board and the mayor battle each other. It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s not written in like stone of how you run the city. I’ve been at the board under three mayors, and I think Lurie could break through that. I think if the board and the mayor’s office really, really did their best to work together, I think the city would function better.
There are just some nuts and bolts things that are really broken about the city and have been for a while. Hiring is one of those things. If I were the mayor I would really be focusing on the nuts and bolts and you’ve got to hire faster. We have a byzantine civil service process, that has all the right intentions, but ends up actually harming those intentions.
My biggest criticism of London [Breed], I ended up working pretty well with her towards the end and have developed a really nice relationship with her. But my biggest criticism of her was not sticking with a vision, even when it was hard or even when it wasn’t getting those sexy press releases and, you know, headlines in the press. These are the hardest problems of our time. You cannot fix them overnight and you cannot fix them if you’re constantly switching strategies, which I feel like her administration did all the time … that’s been really frustrating, not only for me, but for so many people working in city departments over the past six-eight years of just the constant switching of strategy.
I became a big fan of like stripping away process where it’s become a hindrance and isn’t really serving its purpose. I was one of the biggest proponents of getting rid of this section in the charter that allowed us to like, ban a bazillion states from doing business with [the city]. It was for like any time a supervisor wanted to make a point, you know, whether it was LGBT rights, whether it was racism, whether it was abortion, we would do this ban… It changed nothing and it wasn’t like a strategic nationwide movement, it was just one supervisor wanting to get the headline… It made all the things we would purchase 10 times more expensive, it would take 10 times as long, that’s the stuff that becomes, you know, symbolic, and isn’t really accomplishing anything. In my view, get rid of all of it. I think a lot of the stuff was well-meaning when it started and just wore out its purpose or wasn’t working as intended. …
I do think you should have like living wages paid, for example, which is more expensive, but it also makes sure that the workforce in your city has enough money not to be homeless, and to afford living and having health care and all those things. So I do think there are good versions of using public money to increase the well-being of your citizens. And then I think there are somewhere we just don’t have that luxury anymore of using it for so many purposes.
48HILLS How have your progressive politics, or your idea of what’s progressive, changed in your time?
HILLARY RONEN Something that really, really frustrates me is “progressive” groups on the left who, if they don’t hear the buzzwords, then you’re not “progressive.” I don’t like to use progressive talk because it turns people off sometimes, and doesn’t accomplish uniting and bringing more people into the fold… I try to use language that brings in more people, not alienate people and you know, they hear the word and then they just stop listening. I often use more moderate language and find that because there’s all these intersections of agreement, and emphasize those areas of agreement.
But if you look at everything I’ve actually done as supervisor, like look at my entire freaking record, it has been pretty damn progressive. Not democratic socialist, because I agree with those ultimate principles, but I get so beaten up by those people. To the point where they came to my house and protested me when I was on the budget committee because I didn’t cut the police budget enough, even though I was suggesting cutting it more than anybody else. Things like this that are just like, God, you guys just love to hear yourselves talk and to feel pure and be purist. What about outcomes? I’d rather be considered a moderate and be in my daily work moving wealth from the rich to the poor. And if you look at my record, I was always moving wealth from the rich to the poor.
Every day of my life, from the time I became a working professional, until the day I die, I will be working towards making sure that there’s more equality, economic justice, and fairness in this country, and I do that by working towards material change in wealth and power from the rich and the powerful to the poor, and to people who have no voice or power in society, that has never changed for one second and it will never change. It’s my life’s work. It’s who I am. It’s who my family is. It’s who my husband is. This is my religion. My religion is justice. I love people so much, and I cannot stand seeing people suffer. I cannot stand people living in poverty. I cannot stand people don’t have the basics to live with dignity. I’ll never stop working to change it.
48HILLS There’s a larger perception that this is not a progressive day [for San Francisco]. We’ve been losing a lot. What do movements need to do to recapture?
HILLARY RONEN I think so much is about messaging… I really think we [progressives] can be a movement that turns people off because we, you know, consider ourselves holier than thou, the only ones that are pure and righteous. And that makes people feel bad about themselves. And so why would they want to be around those people or a part of that movement? We really have to be more accepting and also just think about how we explain things and talk about things. …
There’s always stuff that you can agree with everyone, who doesn’t want safe, vibrant, healthy clean communities? Everyone wants that. So let’s start there. And then the difference is how you get there, right? The more that we can articulate our vision for getting there, in a way that doesn’t exclude people or turn them off or use language that alienates people, the better we’ll be. There is a difference of opinion on how to get there, and it is big. Yeah, I do believe we are losing that. I cannot get over this one, where [Supervisor Matt Dorsey] now says, ‘I want to arrest 100 people a day that are using drugs on the street. But no, I’m not restarting the drug war.’ What was the drug war if it wasn’t arresting people for using drugs, right? And doing so in a racist manner, that made us the number one incarcerator of all of of the entire world, where the majority of people in jail are people of color… There are very big differences, massive differences in how we think that we’ll get those clean healthy vibrant neighborhoods, right?
48HILLS How do you see public safety from a left progressive view?
HILLARY RONEN For me police should not be doing the fundamental work of making sure that people’s basic needs are met and, and poverty work. I think so much of police’s time is spent on addressing poverty. And that should not be their job. We should have mental health professionals, we should have social workers. We should have other government agencies and employees addressing people’s poverty… So I created things to try to divert this, like the crisis response team, to divert the work of dealing with people with drug addiction and mental health, to [the Department of Public Health] and to the fire department, especially emergency services workers. … When I said ‘defund the police,’ I think that’s the worst term ever… what I meant is take some of the police money in their budget and give it to DPH and fire to do that life-saving work. I did not mean get rid of the police force altogether. That’s just not realistic.
48HILLS How do you balance these immediate needs with addressing root causes?
HILLARY RONEN To me, that was the hardest part of the job. I was constantly trying to get that balancing act correct. When I started the job, I was younger, I was really idealistic. And I really only worked on root causes… I have now realized you can’t ask people to deal with what’s happening today in the streets, if it’s unacceptable like the whole fencing operation in the Mission, which was so awful. You can’t ask them to just wait until we fix poverty, and homelessness, and mental illness, and drug addiction, and gun control until we make this better. You cannot do that to people. It’s not real, it’s not correct. I was constantly trying to strike that right balance of not only dealing with the immediate symptoms of problems in a real meaningful way, but simultaneously doing something structurally, to try to ease the pressure of what was driving that problem.
When I started my job eight years ago, it was right after the Super Bowl party had come to the Embarcadero and all the people that were homeless and living there were pushed into the Mission. When I started, we had about 300 people living in tents between Valencia, Potrero, Cesar Chavez and Division. It was so densely encamped in the Mission and I had to fix those symptoms right away before I could get to the root cause of the homelessness. I did that by opening up a navigation center. I had to fight all the neighbors. We got the navigation center open, we moved people into the navigation center, and here’s where, you know, sometimes I push back against the more lefty people…I felt like because it was a really great navigation center and it was being run really well, that you weren’t going to get kicked out of it, you could come and go, bring your pets, your partner, belongings, all the things. And we said at that time, you have an unlimited spot until we find you housing.
But if you choose not to take that spot, unless there was like a mental illness… you can no longer sleep [on the sidewalks] in the Mission, and the Coalition [on Homelessness] pushed back on that. And I was like, sorry, I can’t fix this problem, if we were like giving you a really humane quality alternative and you’re like, no, I’d rather live on the street, that’s not okay. So we got down to 30 tents and it was enormously successful. And then once I did that, I really started working on reforming our mental health and drug addiction system because that’s so much of the root of homelessness. That’s when I started creating Mental Health SF, which really radically improved [the] behavioral health system in San Francisco.
Another example is the fencing nightmare that I’ve been dealing with. What many people don’t realize is that because of the fencing, we’ve had several homicides. DPW [public works] workers were assaulted and were begging their union to reassign them because they were scared to do their work. Small businesses were shutting down because they no longer could get foot traffic because no one wanted to come to the Mission, and legitimate vendors that have been there for years were being extorted by this gang of fencers. We needed to do the moratorium. But then we have this issue that most of the fencers are there because they don’t have a sustainable job, either because of immigration issues or because of education or language, so they can’t just get an alternative job. How are they going to pay their rent and put food on the table if we don’t have an alternative space for them?
That’s where we started dealing with that root issue of like creating places for them to be, and then negotiating working with the vendors, slowly bringing them back on the streets with really strict rules. And it’s still not perfect. I wanted to solve it for Jackie [Fielder] and I couldn’t. We tried to pass a law in Sacramento that ultimately failed. The root cause of the problem is that, if you’re undocumented, you don’t have the legal ability to work in San Francisco. These people are trying to survive and yet we can no longer have fencing on the street, because it was so dangerous, we had to eliminate all the fencing.
48HILLS What are a couple major policies that progressives could try to accomplish in the next few years that would most significantly help San Francisco?
HILLARY RONEN I’m trying to be realistic in this time, which is going to be a really rough four years… Safe consumption sites, I think they’re really important. Addiction is an awful illness to have, it’s hard to battle and it often takes a long time to get there. You have people at all stages of their addiction and their recovery. And with fentanyl and the drugs on the street, it’s just so dangerous and people are dying at such fast rates that you don’t have the luxury that you had in the past, which I think is a myth nonetheless, of hitting rock bottom, that old adage, because they might be dead by the time they hit rock bottom.
I think safe consumption sites are the right solution to this problem. I went to New York to visit the state consumption sites there and was just incredibly impressed by the work. It solves two problems at the same time. Number one, it keeps drug users alive long enough to hopefully build healthy relationships with the staff of these centers, to feel loved enough, and if there’s hope enough to go into recovery and get clean and that happens all the time. Most or equally importantly, it gets the drug use off the streets. I do not want there to be open-air drug use in San Francisco and do not want kids walking by open air drug use. I don’t want to walk by open air drug use. It’s scary, it makes you feel unhealthy and unsafe.
I think that the only way to crack down on that in a way that’s going to work is to get people inside and in safety and around people that can help them get to the place where recovery can be possible. … People are addicted generally for a reason, and it’s either the homelessness caused the addiction, or the addiction caused the homelessness, but if you’re homeless it feels almost impossible to get clean. Because your life is hell on a daily basis living on the streets and trying to survive.
You want to start figuring out, is there any way to escape homelessness? So if I do get clean I can stay clean. And then also just having the self-esteem and the hope and the self-love and the respect and love of someone outside of yourself that many people don’t have on the streets. They can get that through the relationships they build with staff and with one another at these [safe consumption] sites. I continue to believe that would be a huge improvement to this crisis we’re facing. I think the public bank would be huge for the affordable housing funding needs that we have as a city. I do believe that we need to build more temporary shelter spaces, tiny homes, spaces for people to be off the streets before we can get them permanent housing, because we’re just never going to build enough.
48HILLS What gives you hope? Where do you see reason for hope for San Francisco?
HILLARY RONEN I love this city so much that I just see hope in the city. I don’t know how to explain it. What other city has the natural beauty that we have? I mean, the city is drop-dead gorgeous. Drive over that Bay Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge and you look in either direction and it just you know, takes your breath away. … Even though we’re more moderate [after recent elections], we still have that that essence of who we used to be and I don’t think you can totally rid San Francisco of our, you know, accepting Roots. Our LGBTQ identity has a lot to do with that. If you’re not accepted in your hometown, come here, we will love you up and we will have a million spaces where you can be exactly who you want to be, and we love it. …
We have Trump in office, that is extremely scary, we have these tech oligarchs that are operating with power, money, and impunity in ways that are unnerving. It is a moderate moment in San Francisco, in terms of politics. And despite all that, you can’t change what this city is even if you tried, because it’s just so inbred and in every corner of this place…I can’t imagine a more amazing place to live.
48HILLS Is there anything else you want to add that feels important?
HILLARY RONEN I do want to say this because, you know, everyone knows that I’ve been burnt out, that I’m excited to make this switch [out of elected office]. I worry that I’ve emphasized that too much and that I haven’t emphasized enough how much I have loved this job and how much I feel like the luckiest person in the world to have had this opportunity over the past 15 years, you know, six years as legislative aide and eight years as supervisor. There was not a day that went by that I did not learn a tremendous amount. I mean, if you’re lucky enough to have a job where you learn every single day… being able to meet and work with so many people in the city and be inspired by them and to feel that, you know, residents trusted you to make these really hard decisions, like all of that, I wouldn’t give that up for anything in the world… I have loved this experience and it’s changed me permanently for better, and I appreciate that.
