Live from Manny’s: Joe Eskenazi and Supervisor Dean Preston

Mission Local managing editor Joe Eskenazi will sit down with Supervisor Dean Preston tonight, a political official he describes as ” San Francisco’s most prominent socialist elected official and the bête noire of the city’s angriest wealthy tech online political personalities.”

The supervisor of District 5 is up for reelection in 2024 and Grow SF and other moderate political groups want him out. Eskenazi will talk to Preston about his record, his caustic relationship with the mayor and what’s next for him and the city.

The following is as close to verbatim as I could get, which is to say, I paraphrased in sections, skipped over thoughts that I missed or felt redundant and tried to edit for wordiness.

5:50: We’re getting close to getting started.

6:07: Why are people here tonight, host Manny Yekutiel asks. “I’m new, and I want to learn about local politics,” says one woman.

Another told Yekutiel, “I want to see the tweets in realtime.”

6:07

First question: Eskenazi asks, “I wanna know, what’s it like running the entire city?”

Let’s keep going to Twitter, says Eskenazi. “You can’t show yourself in a public square anymore?

Preston: Most of my time — half is in hearings, and half the time out in the district. In recess, we get a little break and we’re out with the constituents.

Eskenazi: On Twitter, you like to engage with people who can’t be convinced. Is this the best use of your time?

Preston on Twitter: He’s learned that there are too many arguments can’t be won.

Eskenazi asks if there has been an intervention and, according to Preston, several.

Preston: And, so you’ll notice, I sort of spent less and less time doing that, but I certainly used to, and I think that is something, if I had to do it over again, I’d probably give up on most of the Twitter conversations.

Eskenazi: Why is the city not buying defaulting properties?

Preston: We should definitely do that. … We’ve been pushing that hard. The city has raised millions of dollars for this purpose … one of the frustrating things is that you quickly get into this, like, either/or mentality. We have to set our sights bigger. As a city, we have to expand and do large-scale social housing and acquire existing buildings for the Land Trust for limited equity co-ops.

6:16 p.m.

We have to look at other strategies, like the city directly buying properties, with the city being the landlord or owner. That is what Prop I was for, Preston reminds the crowd. Legally and technically, the mayor doesn’t have to spend it, and she has refused to. We’ve had some big successes and some big acquisitions for affordable housing, but not at the scale we need to be at.

Speaks to 400 Divisidero St., formerly a car wash. Some of you may have gotten your car washed there. That was slated for private development pre-pandemic — 20 percent affordable. We immediately wrote to the property owner, and it was this close to becoming housing. There was a contract to purchase it. That could have been, and still could be, 186 units of housing. The mayor pulled the plug on that deal, and has refused to do it. We could still do it. The seller wants to sell it.

It is a total eyesore now, and it’s really frustrating. I remain hopeful. Private developers are not doing much right now. The market is dead. I see this as an opportunity. We should be land-banking.

Folks close to the deal said the mayor’s senior people brought folks in, and the mayor’s office made it clear they weren’t going to fund that site. The good news is, that they did fund other sites.

You have a seller who wants to sell it? Worst kept secret in City Hall: Why the Mayor didn’t do it. The mayor didn’t want to do it.

6:23 p.m.

Eskenazi asks about Preston’s vote against 469 Stevenson St. Do you wish you had that vote back?

Preston answers that it was pretty straightforward. “I didn’t lose sleep at all.”

And Buchanan Hotel in Japantown, which the city wanted to purchase? Preston says it is one of only two tourist hotels in Japantown. Most others have disappeared over the years. Says that early in the pandemic there was a shelter in place at the Buchanan, and one of the deals with the community was that that would be temporary.

The mayor’s office announced reneging on that promise with no communication, and the community pushed back. Contrary to that, we said, “we are available to convene meetings between the community and the city,” but with the pushback, the owner pulled the deal.

We got the Gotham Hotel, 114 units, from being a tourist hotel to being permanent supportive housing.

Says the community should have been engaged, realized that he’s taken a lot of heat for it, but feels good about what he did.

6:30 p.m.

Eskenazi raises the fact that Preston was the only supervisor who voted against the budget. Why? Preston explains he wanted a commitment of looking at police budgets, and not just automatically increasing them every year. (This statement brings the first applause of the evening.) This year we had a $60 million increase after having given police $25 million a few months earlier, he says.

He also objected to Prop I funding not being allocated to housing and remains upset about the refusal to invest in social housing — actually defunding housing and increasing the police budget.

Eskenazi asks, what would the better use be of that money?

I think feeding people is more important than having another officer in front of a high-end hotel. There are all kinds of things: Street outreach in the Tenderloin, expansion of treatment. In the general conversation around public safety and police budgets is the assumption that increasing police will make the city safer.

Objects to the horse unit. “Why do we have that?” Preston asks.

6:35 p.m.

Eskenazi asks, well, what is the role of police?

Preston: So I’m in touch with the captains all the time. Despite the fight over the budget, we have a functional and good relationship. We are tracking cases and reaching out to small business owners and did the only small-victim-assistance funding in the country.

When you ask what the role is, right now, you hope that there is some level of deterrence, and you hope that police are solving some of the crimes.

Preston asks, what progress are we making in curbing crime? He announces that the Board of Supervisors will be having a hearing on car break-ins.

He wants to know what police are spending the money on to stop car break-ins; what’s working, what’s not working.

6:41 p.m.

Eskenazi: What do we need to do in the Tenderloin?

Preston says the Tenderloin has been a containment zone for many things. If you’re going to have all these folks out there, why not have them focused on violence prevention? He says there is no strategy.

To see clearly there is incredible community organizing, people who can tell you 50 things to do to make the neighborhood safer, practical things, to support the community, and instead we get the stuff made for Fox News, he says, referring to the crackdown. And not a single person arrested has accepted treatment, he adds.

I think people, especially at night, see a role for law enforcement.

6:45 p.m.

Eskenazi brings up the injunction against homeless sweeps, and Mayor London Breed and Governor Gavin Newsom attacking the judge who ordered the injunction.

Preston says it gets old blaming the DA, blaming the BOS, and now it is about blaming the judges.

We have a homeless crisis because people have no place to live, he says. This claim that people on the street don’t want to be housed — that’s the narrative that is out there, he says.

Is that just people wanting to get people out of sight?

It’s not the case that we are going out and offering people housing and they’re turning it down. Sometimes we’re offering it with all sorts of conditions and, for some on the street, that is worse.

When you get HSH and outreach teams, and you have housing to offer people, people take it. That is the experience of the shelter-in-place hotels. People don’t want to go to the bathroom in public.

Except for the most extreme cases, people will take decent housing, and you have a judge who has the courage to say that. I don’t find that so objectionable, he says. It’s not a proud moment when we have the mayor and my fellow supervisors out protesting a judge for enforcing constitutional rights.

Eskenazi asks why people are not trying to work things out.

Preston says you can’t do an all-shelter strategy. Shelters are not permanent housing.

“Should we be doing something quickly?” Eskenazi asks.

Preston answers: We have the capacity to massively ramp up both shelter and affordable housing.

Let’s go on a buying spree for affordable housing, Preston suggests. The mayor’s statement that the Coalition for the Homeless is holding the city hostage, he says, is a wild statement.

6:54 p.m

Eskenazi asks, Do you feel these taxes you put on the ballot — do they work, or do we have to reconsider for fear of pushing business out?

Preston answers that, thanks to those taxes, San Francisco didn’t have major deficits, and didn’t have the nightmare financial scenarios of other places. He attributes this to the progressive taxes.

Business interests always want to revise taxes, Preston says. If that is the case, they should come in and make the argument. My door is open, he says. But he thinks that it would not be a smart move to cut back on taxes now.

7 p.m.

From the audience. What to do about downtown?

Preston says office-to-housing conversion is not so easy, but he is in favor of it. I would urge folks to give equal weight to looking at our neighborhoods and not just downtown.

7:04 p.m.

A question from the audience on tech being demonized:

Unfortunately, some of the most wealthy have acted in a way that leads to demonization. I increasingly see toxic vitriol coming from some of the folks with an ends-justifying-the-means mentality. Mentions the tech investors going into Solano County. Some of the demonization is brought on by some tech leaders acting in vile ways.

I think where it gets unfair is when that characterization is extended to many, many people who work in that industry. There are a lot of great folks doing a lot of great work.

7:11 p.m.

Eskenazi asks Preston how he will win re-election in 2024 against a possibly moderate candidate, someone nicer on Twitter and someone backed by people who want him out and have already raised a reported $300,000 to make sure that happens.

Preston: We’ll be doing it the same way as we won reelection against those same interests in 2021. That is grassroots, meeting people in the district.

His constituents, he says, want independence from the machine of big business, big real estate and big tech.