Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Aaron Peskin. Read earlier dispatches here.
When Aaron Peskin first started getting involved in San Francisco politics, he fancied himself as someone who could get along with anyone. Someone who would forge enduring bonds with everyone from the most real-estate obsessed downtown power broker to the most Bay Area progressive that ever progressived.
But then the downtown people were cold and snooty. A business lobbying organization called the Committee on Jobs started trying to dig up dirt on him and get it in the papers. Meanwhile, the progressive people were fun, and kept inviting him to parties.
That’s at least part of the story of how he has come, several decades later, to be in the back room of El Rio surrounded by dancing people in overalls, as local singer/songwriter Kelley Stolz and local band The Barney’s sing a dreamy, surf-inflected ballad about a man who sells kimchi tacos. The amp is cranked up so high that the sound is almost tactile. Around the room, “high decibel level” warnings pop up on cellphones.
Earlier this week, Peskin’s events manager, a tall, stylish woman named Hana Haber, forbade — or at least strongly discouraged — Peskin from wearing a tie to the concert, which Haber finangled as a fundraiser for Peskin’s mayoral campaign. Try to look cool, she said, kindly, but firmly.
“It took me a long time to learn to dress like this,” Peskin replied from the low-elevation velveteen depths of the phone-banking sofa (the sofa is on loan from someone who had it packed away in a storage unit, but no one could find the legs). He flipped through a folder of photos on his phone sent to him by his mother four years ago, when his former kindergarten classmate, Kamala Harris, was first announced as Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick. The photos spanned a wide range of years and all seemed to take place at some kind of political event. In one, Peskin’s mother, Tsipora, sits next to Harris while former state Sen. Mark Leno’s beautiful teeth glow behind them in the darkness.
In another, Peskin stands in a row of political figures that includes Harris. “There,” he said, zooming in on the photo. Everyone else is wearing a dark suit and tie. Peskin is wearing blue jeans and an orange, shiny, short-sleeved dress shirt that looks like the formal wear of a more equatorial country — the kind of thing that a globe-trotting uncle might wear to a college graduation. Peskin kept zooming until the orange filled the phone screen. “That’s what I used to dress like.”
By the night of the concert, speculation on what Peskin is going to wear has reached a fevered pitch among the younger staff and volunteers. When he arrives at El Rio in a Juanita More T-shirt (black) and a San Francisco Flower Market hoodie (also black) and the general vibe of a record store clerk who won’t judge your musical choices, the huddle of staff and volunteers at the front door react as though they are witnessing a minor miracle.
This is the Peskin campaign’s second event at El RIo this summer if you count the San Francisco Tenants Union fashion show, which the campaign helped sponsor. When the city backed $8.5 million in loans so that MEDA, a housing nonprofit, could buy the building that houses El Rio, it fulfilled the Small Sites program goal of preserving existing affordable housing — but it also preserved the site of a whole lot of dance parties (Salsa Sundays, Queer Emo, Experimental Queer and Trans Cumbia) and fundraisers for local nonprofits and political campaigns. Also, says Sunny Angulo, Peskin’s chief of staff, having a rent-paying commercial space in a Small Sites building helps float the residential rents — other small sites, which have nothing but low-income residential tenants, are harder to finance.
Angulo is about to take a leave of absence as Peskin’s chief of staff, to start next week as Peskin’s campaign manager. Peskin is jubilant at this state of affairs. Angulo, less so. It’s Peskin’s last term as supervisor, so the team at his office in City Hall won’t be together for much longer no matter what happens. But leaving now feels rough. The person who is filling in for her is great, she says, but there are so many projects that she’s in the middle of — plans for women’s housing, parks in the Tenderloin, arts and entertainment in the theater district.
“Yeah,” Peskin interrupts her. “But if we’re mayor we’ll get them done in our first 100 days.”
“No, I understand, Aaron.” says Angulo. “These are all things I care a lot about. Today I got a call, like ‘Oh, do you know that in the pandemic when we called for the SROs to get their ballots? Well, apparently it’s still a legal issue and they’re not getting their ballots.’”
“Mother Teresa don’t quit,” says Peskin.
“No, it’s not that,” says Angulo. “This is the shit that we’re supposed to be doing. This is our fucking job.”
For years, she explains, residents of single room occupancy hotels have been in a power struggle with the U.S. Postal Service, which says delivering mail to individual SRO residents, the way it does to residents of apartment buildings, is not its responsibility because SROs are technically hotels. Being dependent on SRO staff to pass along mail makes it hard for residents who live in more dysfunctional buildings to do basic things like get their bills on time, collect Social Security checks — or participate in mail-in voting.
“He said, ‘Who should I call?’” continues Angulo. “I’m like, ‘Everyone. SRO Families Collaborative. We need to call the city attorney’s office. This is not okay.’”
Peskin takes another swig of his Athletic non-alcoholic IPA. Earlier in the evening, he told a story about visiting an SRO that had just been acquired as part of the Small Sites project. One of the residents asked him how he had stopped drinking. “It’s not like I had a choice,” Peskin told him. “I’m a public figure. It was all in public.”
When media coverage of his aggressive behavior on the job reached a peak during 2021 — along with rumors that drinking was a factor — a friend who was a retired police officer invited Peskin to join an AA group. It turned out to be almost entirely composed of other retired police officers. “I knew every single one of them,” he says. “I’m like “Oh, hey, Captain. Hey Chief. Hey Commander.”
The 12 Steps didn’t work for him, but other people’s stories of how bad a person’s life could get if they didn’t stop did. On Wednesday, the party is still going strong when he quietly slips out into the night.
“The 12 steps didn’t work for him…”. There is a phenomena that alcoholics that don’t drink and don’t change (maturity, forbearance, and humility) exhibit; it’s called a ‘dry drunk’. And it isn’t pleasant. Alcoholism is called ‘the family disease’. Donald Trump’s father and brother were both alcoholics (his brother died from it), but 45 doesn’t drink (never). I would postulate that part of what we see in DJT is ‘dry drunk’ behavior (denial being a chief element). I sure hope we don’t see that in AP, although I kinda do. Anyway, file for future reference.
Everyone’s a shrink.
Re: SRO mail. I thought it was routine for tenants to distribute mail that USPS leaves inside the door. That happens in the building I live in even though it’s not an SRO. Ever since people pried the building’s mailbox from the wall (repeatedly) USPS has been kind enough to leave the daily bundle for us to sort. Nearly all buildings in the neighborhood have had mailboxes pried open. 3 of us (out of 13–the rest probably assume the mail sorts itself) take turns doing it. It has become a habit.
Writing in this piece was beautiful. Lovely work.
Love your writing style,
You make me share Angulo’s anger at USPS and SRO connects to tenants.
Nice voice.
h.
Thank you H.R. Smith for this delightfully fun and colorful piece.
I’m really loving Willie Brown’s Stockholm Syndrome buddy, Aaron Peskin’s, attempts to appeal to low-income San Franciscans (more than half of us, and currently we’re all at risk of homelessness) using the faux humility of superficial symbolic stylistic messaging. Perhaps Peskin should try wearing shorts and a black hoodie like John Fetterman (D-PA). Us poor folks are so dumb, of course we’ll all for this political theater. What’s next, will he suggest circulating a petition to stop the violent and immoral sweeping up and dumping of human beings? A petition ought to really scare those U.S. oligarchs presently wagging their cucumbers in our low-income faces, while laughing their arses off. After all, what are we going to do about it? We’re not organized, as in truly independent labor unions, therefore we are truly politically impotent, and the US oligarchs know it.
“We’re not organized, as in truly independent labor unions”
If you’re actually an SF renter, you should be aware of Peskin’s union-at-home legislation that gave tenants unions real political power. Landlords are required to sit down and negotiate with their tenants. Dozens of buildings have organized and many have won real victories, such as rent reductions and refunds. That, along with Peskin’s work to ban algorithm software that increases both rent prices and vacancies, prove he doesn’t just talk the talk.
Why so heavy on the angry sarcasm?
I asked Peskin in person in June why San Francisco had not taken advantage of the Faircloth to Rad Act, a program potentially transforming well over 3,000 EXISTING units into LOW INCOME rentals (not “affordable”) at Federal expense. Shockingly, HE DID NOT KNOW WHAT FAIRCLOTH to RAD ACT EVEN WAS, in spite of being the President of the Board of Supervisors! This program could have saved many lives during Covid if local activists and politicians demanded the city apply for it. But on one made such demands. No local activists filled the streets. NO local journalists wrote one word about the program until it was nearly too late to apply (a couple of months ago, even though it was initiated in 2020, I think). But tons has been been about the well organized defense of the Castro Theatre. A documentary about this activism was made. However, when police are literally used to cleans the poor from SF streets with “sweeps,” as if poor human beings are equivalent to physical garbage, at a time when no low-income housing has not been made available for years anywhere near SF, our local “progressive activists” offer to circulate petitions, as if that is an appropriate response.
P.S. It was IATSE workers who put up the gates keeping citizens off public streets during APEC. With government captured unions like this, who needs “right wing Republican thugs.” The “progressive left” apparently has no problem doing their dirty work using union hands, as long as Party members can continue sipping free coffee and tea over at the Chestnut Tree Cafe–oops, I mean at a certain cafe in the Mission supported financially by a certain Party.
Sounds mostly like a single-issue purity test for you. There’s still no mayoral candidate stronger on tenant issues than Peskin.
Sounds like a like single party state that uses sanctions, social ostracism, denial of physical space, and unjust police force to impose its will, is what those like me are expected to smile and accept without question.
P.S. Peskin said I was right to pressure him, and his office has since actively looked into the Faircloth to Rad act and supported San Francisco’s application for this much-needed aid. Your simplistic patronizing of political figures like Peskin is NOT HELPING ANYONE, least of all those who most rely those in power being trustworthy. They’re called honor and courage, two of the four Socratic virtues.