A campaign button from Aaron Peskin’s first run for supervisor, in 2000, invited voters to “Annoy Willie. Vote Peskin.” Peskin succeeded on both counts, inspiring “Da Mayor” Willie Brown to call him “a pain in the ass” and worse. In four terms in office spread over 24 years, Peskin has been a potent thorn in the side of not only Brown but his mayoral successors and their powerfully wealthy allies.
When Peskin won and joined the board in 2000, he was part of a progressive resurgence amid the return of district elections, which enabled candidates without massive corporate backing to run viable district campaigns rather than prohibitively exorbitant citywide races. Peskin’s colleagues on the board then included Chris Daly, Tom Ammiano, Matt Gonzalez, Jake McGoldrick, Sophie Maxwell, and Mark Leno.
During Peskin’s near quarter-century tenure, he served as board president three times, gaining a reputation as a hard-nosed dealmaker and coalition builder. In his recent mayoral bid—which, full disclosure, I volunteered for extensively—Peskin campaigned to be “A Mayor Who Knows How,” and a “neighborhood mayor” based on his record as a skilled policy wonk and defender of neighborhoods against corporate chains and Big Real Estate.
Peskin’s legislative record is prolific: he sponsored 3,363 pieces of legislation, and cast 34,557 votes on the board. His first resolution, introduced on January 2, 2001, opposed construction of a fourth Caldecott Tunnel bore and urged the BART Board of Directors to “develop a better strategy for improving reverse-commute transit service.” His last piece of legislation: an ordinance expanding rent control in San Francisco, “to the extent authorized by a future modification or repeal of the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act”—which was temporarily rendered moot when Prop. 33 was defeated this November.
On the day of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration, we spoke with Peskin at his Great Basin Land and Water headquarters in North Beach, an old-school bastion filled with wood and paper, the walls adorned with framed honorifics such as a collection of campaign buttons through the years, a letter from the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, city proclamations, and wood-mounted gavels commemorating his board presidencies.
48HILLS Thank you so much for joining us. Since you were at [Mayor Lurie’s] inauguration, what do you take from that?
AARON PESKIN I have never been much about speeches. I mean, I’ve seen a few poignant speeches from a few mayors, but the ‘we all gotta work together’ speech is good, you know. … It’s consistent with the message of his campaign. There wasn’t anything surprising, I mean he said a hundred times, ‘I want to have full police staffing,’ which quite frankly everybody in the race said, I said that we had 300 fully funded vacant positions in the department that we want to fill. In the same breath, I said we had vacant nursing positions that we wanted to fill.
He [Lurie] acknowledged the fact that he is facing a budget deficit. And very clearly stated that there would be no cuts, not to police and fire, that’s not what he said, he chose his words very carefully. He said [no cuts] to sworn personnel. He’s making a very clear statement that to the extent that the deficit is so bad that people are going to be laid off, they’re not going to lay off fire and police.
He said all the way through the campaign that he was going to declare a fentanyl state of emergency. I mean, quite frankly, London Breed declared, in essence, a fentanyl state of emergency. And we ratified that. And quite frankly, it was showing some results when 11 months later due to political pressure and negative press, she reversed course. So, there was actually a coming together over the “linkage center.”
48HILLS What do you think is a really important thing the city needs that Lurie’s not talking about?
AARON PESKIN I mean, he’s talking about all the right things, look, a mayor’s a lot of things, but the number one thing that a mayor is, is the chief executive officer of an organization that’s supposed to deliver all sorts of things to all sorts of people from water coming out of your tap, to dookie going down your toilet, to airplanes landing at the airport, electricity coming to least certain buildings and certain streetlights, to buses running on time, to an array of social services, public health services. The way we in this country measure mayors is by how well a city is functioning… Now, how he goes about doing that and who gets upset about that and how his governing style is, which he’s claiming to be a very collaborative governing style? We’ll see.
You don’t have to be a friggin’ doctorate in political science to know that he [Lurie] comes from a very elite segment of society. You don’t have to have a PhD in English literature to read his inaugural program as to who the major donors to this were. You don’t have to be some kind of Svengali to see the symbolism of the people who were in the transition team.
But I mean, there have been some mayors that were cut from that cloth historically in San Francisco, who at least are looked back on as great people’s mayors, Adolf Sutro, “Sunny Jim” Rolph, who were men of means but actually believed that government was there to take care of the populace in all sorts of ways. … Do I have one eye open about whether he’s gonna get too cozy with the tech billionaires or not? Of course I do.
The process of going through an election as a candidate is pretty interesting. And Daniel Lurie’s no dummy. A bunch of these billionaires shit on him hard because they were so megalomaniacally focused on their absolutely insane dream of installing Mark Farrell, that they convinced themselves, on the one hand, they kind of said anybody but Aaron Peskin—you know, if you like London [Breed] more than whatever, vote for her first, you know, vote these three people in any order—but in reality, they were slamming the shit out of Lurie because they saw that he was spending more money than everybody and he got the longest running head start.
And they attacked him mercilessly, in ways that, he made it very clear after his election that he wanted nothing to do with that criminal [Neighbors for a Better SF head] Jay Cheng and Bill Oberndorf’s organization. So, I mean, all the billionaires ain’t on the same page. It’s kind of fun to watch the MAGA guys fighting with the Musk guys.
48HILLS What’s your takeaway from the election? What do feel like voters said in this latest round of San Francisco politics?
AARON PESKIN I hope I’m not being Pollyanna, but I actually think that it was something of a narrative course correction. The voters of this city and other cities, but this city in particular, have been traumatized by a number of things. And I think this election proves that they have not lost their way.
That set of compounding traumas was, maybe in no particular order: living through the fucking Trump years in bluest of blue San Francisco and resisting and feeling attacked and being attacked directly as a city by the president of the United States, who upheld San Francisco as you know, Sodom and Gomorrah and lovers of immigrants’ rights and drug addiction. And then that was compounded with, albeit at a far distance, the trauma of [the January 6, 2020] insurrection, and then profoundly compounded by COVID. And then the trauma of the recovery from COVID where San Francisco lagged behind, both as a matter of perception and as a matter of reality. Granted, San Francisco, because of the endless tech boom years, had further to fall because that bubble was so artificially inflated.
And then there was the very intentional trauma that was inflicted by a handful of right-wing billionaires and their astroturf lackeys that manifested in recalls and a mayor who played into that for her short-term political purposes and ran around and actually validated what Trump and the right had been saying about San Francisco. So all of a sudden, when the mayor said, “the bullshit’s got to stop,” shit’s out of control, it’s, you know, blame this person, blame that person. It’s not me, it’s the DA.
She got a new DA [Brooke Jenkins]. She couldn’t blame the DA. It’s not me, it’s the board of supervisors. Easiest, cheapest game to play in town because, you know, everybody loves their congressperson, but they hate the United States Congress. It’s easy to run against the body. ‘Compassion is killing us,’ all that stuff. So, weirdly enough, London aided and abetted getting that genie out of the bottle. And then she couldn’t put it back in the bottle. And then it came to bite her hard. Because at a certain point, she ran out of people to blame. And everybody was like, wait a minute—it’s you.
And then there’s this national narrative about San Francisco’s moving to the right, and meanwhile you got Michael Moritz who has Together SF with a paid staff of over 20 fucking people, and Bill Oberndorf, sending mail, putting up wheat-paste posters all over town, and this election showed that while they didn’t pick the progressive candidate, who got in the race last and raised the least amount of money, got a hair short of 90,000 votes at about 25 bucks a vote as compared to Lurie who got 102,000 first place votes, three and a half points higher than Peskin, at the average price of $160 a vote, with London at a point and a half above Peskin, pushing $100 [per vote], and [Mark] Farrell crashing and burning, and all of that astroturf infrastructure that went against every progressive thing on the ballot, and the voters rejected every single fucking one of them.
And to add insult to injury, [voters] repudiated the narrative about crime being out of control, didn’t give the cops their retirement package, right?
Bottom line is I think it actually showed that San Francisco voters, while they definitely in essence recalled London Breed, rejected the far-right candidate, rejected the progressive candidate, but took the kind of, and this was very intentional on Team Lurie’s part, the liberal candidate. So I say we’re okay.
48HILLS What did you feel were the best indicators that people didn’t buy into the reactionary narrative, that they rejected it?
AARON PESKIN So, I ran a campaign for mayor at the same time that I was very intentionally campaigning heavily in District One for Connie Chan and heavily in District 11, and the fact that progressives prevailed in both of those places, huge. At the same time, I was running a campaign to create an office of the Inspector General, which the bought and paid for billionaire purchased San Francisco Democratic Party [opposed]—like, what, these guys are for corruption? They don’t want to root out corruption, right? And that passed overwhelmingly.
I ran another campaign, the yes on C no on D, yes on E real reform campaign committee. We were running out of my campaign headquarters, yes on C, no on D, yes on E, and we prevailed. And the Democratic Party was no on C, yes on D, no on E, and we won each and every one of those. And we were outspent not by 10 to 1, not by 50 to 1, but by 137 to 1.
You can always do worse. Sometimes it’s about preventing harm.
48HILLS Do you feel like that’s what a lot of your time was in office, preventing harm?
AARON PESKIN I mean there are ideas often proposed by powerful self-serving interests that could be devastating. We have to stop them from happening. Like filling in two square miles of the bay [an airport runway expansion that Peskin fought in the late 1990s and early 2000s]. There are sometimes ideas that come along that, if you got the right people and they’re willing to negotiate, you can turn from an idea that has unintended or intended harm and steer it in the right direction. Like Flower Mart.
So, hey, developer Kilroy Corporation, you can go and displace Flower Mart and build your 2 million square feet of tech office, but you gotta get them a new home that you have to pay for. So that was one where, I mean, it could have been a no, but we didn’t do no, we did take care of them.
48HILLS Looking back, what do you feel happiest, most proud of having prevented in terms of harm to people or the city?
AARON PESKIN I mean the biggest one of those was actually 20 years ago. If I knew what I know now about what I was up against, I would not have even picked that fight [against the SFO airport runway expansion that involved filling in significant portions of the bay]. But I was so young and so inexperienced that even at the time I thought there was no way that we would prevail. But I had this thing in my head that I wanted, 20 years in the future, somebody writing a doctoral dissertation to realize that somebody had put up a fight to prevent this environmental catastrophe from happening. Filling in two square miles of the San Francisco Bay to separate the runways at SFO.
And it was supported by the president of the United States, George Bush, the Federal Aviation Administration, the senior senator of the great state of California, Dianne Feinstein, the governor of the state of California, Gray Davis, the Pro Tem of the State Senate, John Burton, the mayor, with gusto and enthusiasm, of San Francisco, Willie Lewis Brown. There was no way to derail this thing.
It would have been financially ruinous to the airport. We’d probably have bankrupted the airport. But they were full steam ahead and let the chips fall where they may. [Peskin opposed the runway expansion before and during his time as supervisor, along with the Sierra Club, Save the San Francisco Bay Association, and others.]
There are so many pieces of legislation, and by the way a lot of them are not mine but I’m proud of them. This is the city that had quasi-universal healthcare, thank you Tom Ammiano, long before Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act, long before Barack Obama was even a candidate for President. We started making developers do on-site affordable housing, inclusionary housing in the year 2001, thank you Mark Leno. The controls on chain stores, the formula retail legislation, thank you Matt Gonzalez. I was a part of all of those things. The first city minimum wage in America, thank you, Matt Gonzalez. So many of those things that came out of boards that I served on and collaborated with, those are all pretty huge things.
I passed the first legislation in America to ban the use of facial recognition technology. At the time everybody thought we were, you know, nuts, but we were soon proven right by the United States Department of Justice relative to regulating price-fixing, colluding algorithms on residential rents. [This 2024 legislation by Peskin aims to ban AI-propelled price-fixing by real estate firms such as Real Page—a model that was quickly promoted by Peskin’s one-time kindergarten classmate, former Vice President Kamala Harris.]
48HILLS Why do you think people took on this idea that progressives ruined San Francisco?
AARON PESKIN Not to have run [for mayor] would have been to capitulate to the narrative that they have been shoving down San Franciscans’ throats. And the reality is, I got 89,000 first place votes and a bunch of second place votes. And had I [entered the race earlier], I would have come in second. I would not have beat Lurie, but I would have beat Breed. She and I were like 5,000 votes apart.
But it tells me that that narrative that has been thrown at us is not what almost 100,000 San Franciscans believe, because I was the unabashed progressive candidate in this race. That was a big slice of the electorate. I got 90,000 votes. She got 95,000 votes and Lurie got 102,000. So basically, a third of the folks in the election said that they embraced those [progressive] ideals. I mean, a third ain’t enough to get you to 50 percent, but it shows that we’re still alive and we’re healthy.
48HILLS What do you ascribe that to, given the flood of media that pretty much reported that [Doomloop, failed SF] narrative, pretty uncritically for the most part?
AARON PESKIN Well, it’s a very educated electorate. You can quibble over whether it is a liberal or progressive electorate, and there’s both. But the conservatives, 72,000 of them, 20,000 votes behind me, were the minority in this race. So, the people who went with MAGA Mark [Farrell] were a distant fourth place. What this election really said is that San Francisco’s center is liberal and progressive.
48HILLS Interesting. It’s not what at least some people are saying, even on the left.
AARON PESKIN We have had losses. And when I say losses, I’m not talking about at the ballot box. I’m talking about our organizational capacity. For a host of reasons, a lot of anchor progressive voices and institutions have become less powerful at this moment. And they include reasons of incredible people dying, like Ted Gullicksen [former longtime director of the Tenants Union], and a Tenants Union that has never quite regained its footing.
It also interestingly enough comes at a moment because of the economic time that we are in where evictions are down, which is a good thing, but tenants are feeling less threatened.
We had a big loss in March, the progressives’ hold on a majority, although usually a very slim majority, and not always, on the Democratic Party, was lost in a tidal wave of money and we didn’t organize for it well enough. Although if you look at the Democratic Party endorsements from November, it was worthless. Their one and only mayoral candidate, they didn’t do ranked choice voting, she lost. I shellacked them on [Props] C, D, & E. So, I mean, their recommendations were worthless.
The Bay Guardian doesn’t exist [as a weekly newspaper] anymore, so that voice is gone. I mean, there are no more weekly alternative newspapers that were ubiquitous and were important. Other institutions have been taken over, like the Yimbys made a very concerted, intentional effort to have several hundred of their members join the Sierra Club and take over its leadership.
48HILLS The landscape of progressive politics, where do you see that now and what do you think it needs?
AARON PESKIN As San Francisco went through periods of super overheated, super economic spasms, and parts of the city got increasingly gentrified, the Mission, a whole bunch of our people decamped for other places, they left, they got Ellis Act evicted for the third time, and they were like, fucking I’m going. That’s a big deal too, but these things ebb and flow.
I actually think this is a good time for us to regroup. Things shouldn’t stop on November 6th, the day after the election. We need to do it all year round. I think we need to knit together what is there but knit it together better, which is the relationship that progressive organizations and individuals have had with labor, with a set of political actors and institutions and with neighborhood organizations that, while they are not self-identified nor should they be as progressive or moderate or conservative or whatever label, these are people who care about their community who felt very dismissed and ignored by the Breed Administration and the politics of Scott Weiner and the Yimbys, who have this kind of noblesse oblige fanatic belief that their ideas are better and have to be imposed in a one-size-fits-all solution on every corner of the city, when the realities of the Bayview are very different than the realities of the Richmond district and Chinatown.
So, harnessing a connection between labor, progressive political organizations like the Harvey Milk Club, and the neighborhood organizations… I think that those roots have not been watered and tended to in the ways that they could.
48HILLS Where would you like to see progressives turn their attention in the next two to four years?
AARON PESKIN What the AstroTurf billionaire-funded moderate organizations have done is to create a social infrastructure that historically existed on the left with arts and culture and entertainment that we need to reinvigorate. We have to be more interesting and fun to hang out with. Which is great, I mean, what better than to actually remember why you love being here and living here, and understanding the history of this city and just reveling in not just, like, it’s a beautiful place with nice views and some cool buildings, but why are we so proud of the progressive history of San Francisco?
Let’s remind ourselves and new people who come here who are looking to make connections and are gobbled up by Together SF. They think they’re giving back to their neighborhood by going to a trash cleanup and the next thing you know, they’re being inculcated into the cult of you know, Michael Moritz and Kanishka Cheng. I think we’ve got to invigorate getting new San Franciscans to understand the progressive history and future of the city.
48HILLS What is the progressive movement about?
AARON PESKIN Far be it from me to insert what everybody puts into a word that means a lot of things to a lot of people. For me, I believe that the root of progress is having a city that bends towards justice for everyday people. It’s creating job opportunities. It’s making sure that you still have blue-collar jobs in San Francisco. It’s making sure that the people with the most means are paying their fair share and fundamentally above everything being progressive means that you take care of your community. You take care of your neighbors. You take care of people who are less fortunate. That is the progressive history of America, bring us your poor and your huddled masses, as compared to, we’re here to mine the town and move on.
48HILLS Looking forward, it seems like there’s this real kind of growth development model, no matter who’s mayor, right? The tone changes, the language changes maybe, but there’s this model of being a center of capital and a center of growth. What do you think is a better alternate vision of what San Francisco is or should be?
AARON PESKIN I always chafe at this. I mean, cities grow, they evolve. The question is, for who? We’ve made some terrible mistakes. San Francisco is by far not alone in these mistakes. But people who thought they were smarter and were definitely more powerful went and ripped intact communities apart. Yes, it had racist undertones. It had anti-poverty undertones. It came from a worldview that people who experienced neighborhoods and communities that weren’t like theirs could have their way with the Western Addition and Japantown and Manilatown, and urban renewal. That was development and it was growth, but it is largely and correctly looked at as a tragic mistake.
It’s not just this simplistic binary, are you for housing or against housing, which is the way the Yimbys, you know, their whole thing is like ‘all lives matter.’ People who are making a quarter of a million dollars a year, and much more than that, they’re gonna be able to figure it out. The guy who is bringing the flowers to the flower mart, that’s the guy who needs housing. The nurse needs the housing, the teacher needs the housing, the artist needs the housing, the other folks are gonna figure it out.
48HILLS Is that your vision of what government is about?
AARON PESKIN Yeah, absolutely. I mean, government’s about a lot of things. As I’m fond of saying, and I stole this quote from someone, but there are no moderate or progressive potholes. They’re just fucking potholes and the city’s job is to fill them. Now, are you filling them first in rich people’s neighborhoods or poor people’s neighborhoods? And that becomes the politics. You gotta be able to deliver the basic services. And then on top of that, it’s making sure that people get taken care of.
I was talking to a reporter yesterday, and I said, hey, look, everywhere you cover in America has their skid row. You can go to rural Wisconsin and find people who are OD’ing and dying from fentanyl. It’s the scourge of America. And by the way, brought to you in large part by the fucking opioid pharmaceutical induced epidemic. But people like to go focus on, you know, a bunch of square blocks in the TL [Tenderloin]. And yes, government has a role to do the best it can to address that human misery.
48HILLS What do you want to do next?
AARON PESKIN I’m a lucky person. All the way since before I was on the board of supervisors, and as reported on my form 700 statement of economic interests, and as allowed under the [San Francisco] Charter, I’ve always had another job. Before I ever ran for office [looks through his desk for a business card], what is my title, President, Great Basin Land and Water. So, I am back in the world headquarters of Great Basin Land and Water, working on my budget for 2025.
There’s a lot of connections I want to make [between people who don’t know each other]. I want to knit those neighborhood organizations together with those progressive organizations and labor organizations. I’m not looking for a job. I’m not looking to run for office, but I would like to take all of this knowledge, experience, human connections, and use it to build on what this last seven-month campaign was.
48HILLS Anything that’s on your mind about San Francisco that I didn’t ask?
AARON PESKIN I hate to say this because it sounds like such a bullshit statement, but it’s totally true, I woke up this morning, it was dark, and I went down and I swam in the bay and watched the sunrise. I hung out with 700 of my friends last night [at an event in North Beach celebrating Peskin’s 25 years in office, with speakers including former mayor Willie Brown and many city and community leaders]. I can’t not be optimistic. It just requires some work, and I think there’s still a lot of people who know that this is still our city and they’re ready to double down.
I acknowledge the losses, people who’ve migrated out and organizations that are at a low ebb, and organizations that have been taken over and all of that stuff. None of that’s new. There’s always been a [version of] Together SF. How many of them can I count for you? There was a group called SF SOS, if you recall that. There was the Committee on Jobs, they don’t exist anymore. There’s been a ton of them. The only thing that’s different [now] is that a handful of venture capital tech billionaires are investing the level of money that they are investing, and that they’re not just doing it in election cycles, but they’re doing it 365 days a year, and they’ve stepped up their game. That part is relatively new. Which just means we got to step up our game.
I mean, they behave ugly. Not around being fascist about an issue, but the politics of tearing people down and tearing people apart. Interestingly enough, the progressives actually, weirdly enough, are kind of more respectful. We actually are a more loving bunch. We’re actually a more tolerant bunch. The narrative is that we’re insane and we’re mean and we’re terrible, and it’s not true as a matter of fact.
Part of the reason I became board president three times isn’t because I boss people around. It was actually because I was there to bounce ideas off of and collaborate. And they were like, hey, you know you’d be a good board president. You’re not the guy who thinks that he’s in charge of shit. And that, by the way, is a problem for progressives, we don’t actually have that kind of hierarchical command and control structure, that paramilitary structure that the moderates do.
48HILLS Is there anything we can do about the flood of money here?
AARON PESKIN There are many things we can do. We can certainly shame them more and better. And we can certainly, and this is something I’m thinking about doing in 2026, we can actually put a ballot measure on the ballot. The state of Maine just did this in the past that limits political action committee contributions to $5,000. It will shortly end up in the United States Supreme Court where it will be stricken. But we can do fun shit like that. Which makes a point. Their money is toxic. There’s nothing else we can do on transparency. It’s their world, we just live in it.
