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.
“Can I ask you a question?” shouts the woman in athleisure, walking a dog on the other side of Clement Street.
“Of course you can,” Aaron Peskin shouts back.
The woman runs across the street to join Peskin and the small amoeba of campaign staff volunteers that are walking down Clement Street with him, carrying big stacks of campaign signs in English and Chinese. Her voice drops to a low, confidential murmur. “What about the Great Highway?” she says. “Keeping it open?” “What do you think?” responds Peskin.
A person who spends some time on the campaign trail with Peskin will notice that there are a few things that are non-negotiable. Peskin is unequivocally for rent control — and for expanding it to more buildings, if Costa-Hawkins ever gets overturned at the state level. He’s extremely in favor of low-income housing, whether it’s constructing more of it or keeping the existing kind from being knocked down. When a would-be voter challenges him on issues like these, his response, in the past, has been to smile pleasantly and say that they are always free to vote for someone else.
In other areas of city governance where passions run high, though, Peskin can be harder to pin down, possibly because there often is no pin until there is a specific decision that needs to be made.
“I want to keep it open,” the woman says quietly, of the highway.
“I’m hearing that from more and more people as I’m walking around,” says Peskin. “I was at El Rio in the Mission last night, and people were telling me that.”
“I mean, there are plenty of places to walk,” says the woman.
The situation with the Great Highway is that, back in June, a group of supervisors — Joel Engardio, Myrna Melgar, Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman and Dean Preston — submitted a ballot measure to close the section of the Great Highway between the San Francisco Zoo and the southwest corner of Golden Gate Park and turn it into a park. That section had begun closing to car traffic on the weekends during the pandemic, the measure argued, and closing it permanently would be in keeping with the city’s transit-first policy, the Rec and Park Strategic Plan, and the Climate Action Plan.
“Here’s where I started at,” says Peskin. “It’s not really cool to put that on the ballot, when you can think about it at City Hall and bring people in and try to reach some compromise. We reached some compromise, which was the weekend closure. There was a lot of back and forth, and it seemed like it was more divisive than it was helpful, but I’m still on my listening tour.”
“Putting it on the ballot was stupid,” says the woman.
“Some people last night told me that they’re starting a recall drive on Supervisor Engardio,” says Peskin.
“Oh, yeah,” says the woman.
“You do know that the piece of the Great Highway between Skyline and Sloat is going to close right?” adds Peskin. “Mother Nature bats last. I’m not gonna keep spending your tax money on fixing something that is falling into the ocean.” Yes, the woman agrees; if the ocean swallows the highway, that’s different. Peskin hands her a business card and tells her to call his office.
Earlier that day on Clement Street, before Peskin arrives, a group of volunteers and campaign staff wait for Peskin and Assemblymember Phil Ting to arrive for the election ritual known as the merchant walk — walking along a business corridor, schmoozing with shopkeepers, asking if they’ll put a sign in their window.
News is out that San Francisco Public Works is clearing out homeless encampments on Division Street today, at the behest of Mayor London Breed. “I don’t want to sound cruel,” says one volunteer, about the rousted homeless people, “but I’m kind of selfish. Every time they start sweeping Division Street, they just come out here. It’s not like they disappear.” It’s also, he adds, a transparent play to lock down conservative votes. “Even the Nazis — I mean, all the conservative people on Nextdoor — are saying ‘Oh, gee, it’s an election year.’”
Anthony Ching-Ho Leung, Peskin’s Chinese Community Campaign Director, is still riding high off of the success of Peskin’s duet, in Cantonese, with Jacky Huang, of the George Lam Canto-pop classic “To be a Real Man.” It’s all over WeChat, says Leung. The song turned out to be eerily perfect. The lyrics, which are about how a real man has to give something his all, even if he’s not sure he’ll succeed, echo the slogan that the team chose for Peskin’s Chinese-language signs (“A Person Who Can Get Things Done”). Also: Lam’s nickname in Hong Kong is “The Bearded Man,” the same thing that many Cantonese speakers call Peskin, on the grounds that the Chinese Romanization of his name is a lot harder for people to remember.
Another teenage volunteer has taken the bus up alone from Daly City. “’I’m here to get a feel of what kind of a candidate you are,” he tells Peskin when he arrives. It’s not uncommon for Daly City kids to get involved in San Francisco politics, since their parents often send them to Chinese school in Chinatown, where they run into groups like the Chinese Progressive Association, which runs programs that train teenagers in grassroots organizing.
Ting and Peskin arrive and begin going from door to door. There are signs that at least one other candidate (or their representatives) have been through here. A store that sells roast duck and lottery tickets has a Daniel Lurie sign in the window, and several issues of Wind, a bilingual Chinese/English newspaper. Each issue has a large ad for Lurie’s campaign on page A1.
Ting and Peskin met in the early 2000s; Peskin was serving his first term at the Board of Supervisors, and Ting was at the Asian Law Caucus, working on the case of Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese American scientist who had been falsely accused of espionage. Peskin was unusual at the time, Ting says, for understanding how important Lee’s case was; that it was about larger issues of racism and civil rights, rather than one bad FBI investigation.
Working at the state level has turned out to be a whole new toolkit for tackling local issues, says Ting. Locally, he says, the most powerful tool you often have is zoning. At the state level a lot more is possible. For years, Ting had been part of an effort to lower speed limits in certain parts of San Francisco as a public safety measure. It took being elected to state government to actually make headway.
A block later, Ting and Peskin spot Eric and Gordon Mar, twin brothers and both former supervisors, eating lunch at Tenglong Chinese Restaurant. The group catches up on mutual friends and reminisces about memorable lawsuits the city has filed — the one that kept City College from getting shut down, the one against the developers behind the Millennium Tower. “It’s one of my secret tools,” Peskin says, adding that his lawsuit ideas still get turned down all the time. Everyone wants to get the City Attorney to sue someone.
Peskin’s District 3 — North Beach and Chinatown — is one of the most densely populated in the city. The western end of the city, where we are now, is one the least dense; part of the 40 percent of the city that consists almost entirely of single-family detached homes and one-story commercial buildings.
It’s unlikely to be that way for much longer. For the last several years, Peskin has been involved in a plan to re-zone the entire western side of the city in order to comply with a state-mandated housing element that requires the construction of 82,000 new housing units in the city by 2031.
The zoning changes are already extremely unpopular with some residents, but to Peskin, having six- to eight-story buildings along an existing transit corridor like Clement sounds like a pretty good way to meet the city’s housing goals. It also sounds a lot like North Beach, where Peskin lives — or like most parts of San Francisco that were built out in the early 1900s. “The world I live in Is RH-3 or denser,” he says. This,” he says, gesturing down the street, “but with three floors on it.”
“Let’s go to Toy Boat!” he says, enthusiastically.
At Toy Boat, Peskin chats with the teenagers working behind the counter. He recognizes a couple of burly men sitting at a cafe table and tries to persuade them to go swimming with him in the Bay. People who swim in the Bay embody a particular type of San Francisco: The kind where a disparate band of individuals are drawn together by an obsession with something very few other people even want to try once.
Earlier that morning, he swam out with an intern, an educator named Elizabeth Boyarsky who applied for an internship in Peskin’s office because she wanted to learn about local politics during summer break.
After the two of them compared feet on the balcony of the South End Rowing Club, a volunteer-run athletic club that dates back to 1873, Peskin determined that Boyarsky would fit into his swim fins, and walked off to the locker room to grab them. On the sliver of beach below the balcony, swimmers walked into and out of the water, hailing each other casually like patrons at a coffee shop. The general look was muscles upon muscles upon muscles. One swimmer kept going back and forth between the bay and a plastic tub filled with ice water; training for the Dál Riada, a swim from Scotland to Ireland.
“This shows when the high and low tides are out,” said Peskin, opening a booklet and flipping past the entry on high and low tides. “We only look at this page: The velocity. Today at 6:36 at the Golden Gate, it was slack tide. And 9:24 is the maximum flood tide of 2.8 knots. Which is pretty smoking.”
If you stay within the boundary of the Aquatic Park Pier, you don’t have to worry too much about velocity, he added. But if you’re headed farther, to someplace like Alcatraz, it’s important to time it around a slack period, so that you don’t wind up getting swept out to the Golden Gate Bridge.
He showed Boyarsky a few more highlights of the clubhouse (framed photo of the group of women who successfully sued to join in the club in the 1970s, framed photo of Peskin in a Speedo) and then the two of them disappeared into the gray water.
Calling Clement St a “transit corridor” is a bit ironic, given muni effectively ended the bus that ran down it without any formal review. Officially it’s still suspended from 2020, but muni tried to kill it just before the pandemic and had to back off after community pushback. No one thinks it’s returning, even though muni is still enforcing no parking at bus stops and upgrading bus shelters despite over four years without a bus.
On top of that, muni announced too many people are boarding the California bus in the Richmond and so it’s too crowded for people to board in Pac Heights, so they’re cutting service to the Richmond to run buses from Presidio Av inbound.
They never brought back any of the original express buses, instead returning a single one that expresses from Fillmore to the fidi, making it far less useful. Just the one express bus in the neighborhood, when there used to be 6.
And the 38, while running strong, is routinely fighting capacity issues before it leaves the neighborhood. Muni already backed off Geary BRT, reducing it to painting bus lanes, effectively cancelling it.
I’m all for building housing density, but when they are cutting transit that’s struggling, and declining to properly invest, it’s not tenable to go crazy. We don’t have trains like the Sunset.. although given what’s happening with the Taraval line, it doesn’t inspire any confidence in how much muni cares about the avenues.
The difficulty with this argument is that it’s a catch-22: We can’t have more housing because the transportation can’t handle it, but we can’t have more transportation because there’s not enough housing to support it.
Unfortunately, the catch-22 is sometimes the point: it’s how opponents of growth fight back against new housing _and_ new transit. Win-win for them.
The trouble is, there has been no “compromise” in the past. Drivers got pretty much everything and everyone else got next to nothing. Now that the third of the city that does not drive is fighting for something, we are asked to compromise. Where was all the compromise from drivers? And even now, “compromise” ends up meaning alternatives to driving giving up everything they’ve won — democratically, BTW — and giving drivers everything they want – again.
Ocean Beach Park is going to win big. People love parks and most of us don’t use this road to nowhere. If Peskin’s smart, he’ll endorse the ballot measure to get that energy on his side.
Why on earth are we spending so much energy trying to preseve an auto thoroughfare of marginal utility at best when ever-increasing maintenance requirements are making it more and more unreasonable? It makes no sense, and is just based on cultural inertia and nostalgia. Even Peskin knows this, whatever political pressures he may feel. The highway is gonna be sand dunes in a few years – time to accept it and work out a way around it.
It would already be sand dunes if not for the constant sweeping!
“this road to nowhere”. Went for a walk down at GH today, a random workday, not even rush hour, to find a fair bit of traffic. That included semis destined to set up Outside Lands. Enough to wonder how the neighborhood would fare with all that traffic getting pushed there. I predict Sunset Blvd gets so slow, ppl will cut through the side streets, running stop signs etc. to make up for lost time while a park would mostly be empty honestly.
That might be true, but one event a year involving big trucks and reckless drivers do not legitimize an excuse for keeping a road to nowhere open to cars. Event planners can figure out how to get the trucks into GGP and MTA can start installing raised crosswalks and traffic circles in the avenues.
As said, GH was pretty busy, even discounting the OSL semi trucks. Go down there and see for yourself.
Enough with Peskin already!
Aaron Peskin voted to put cars back on JFK so I’m not optimistic about his judgment here.
Either leave the highway open or let it return to the natural sand dune state. There’s no use in creating a park that also necessitates closure for sand abatement (despite optimistic gaslighting on maintenance costs by the park crowd.
If it was so easy to abate sand near park structures there’d still be steps at Ocean Beach.
I live on the Peninsula. I have no problem with the closure of the GH between Skyline and Sloat. Erosion’s gonna take it out anyway. But there’s a caveat. Something needs to be done at the intersection of Skyline and Sloat. During the school year, that three way stop sign gets cars backed up past the cutoff from Lake Merced Blvd, and that’s with a percentage of the traffic making the left onto Great Highway near the entrance to Harding. If the GH is closed, all the traffic will funnel onto Skyline and traffic will back up well past the Great Highway turnoff.
As for the GH between Sloat and Lincoln, I’d say keep it the way it is (closed on weekends/holidays only). If it’s closed permanently, 41st Ave is going to be deluged with traffic, as Sunset and 19th are quite inconvenient to get to the Outer Richmond.
Out in the outer Richmond and Sunset (and the Peninsula too, come to think of it), the number of people is far less than in and equivalent area of the Mission, yet there are faster roads and more lanes. The whole 20th century experiment of trunk roads with dead-end streets feeding them creates traffic.
The citywide vote on the GH is terrible. Why can’t it be decided by the people most affected – those who live in the Sunset? Listen, I don’t even own a car and never have so I am down for walkable streets but the streets in the Sunset , particularly Sunset Blvd, have become more deadly as cars Zoom through residential streets with many older residents and tons of young kids (especially during the school year when the numerous public and private schools are open). Also, why do we need a park when we already have OB and GG Park not to mention Stern Grove and other smaller parks throughout the Sunset? I don’t get it. Also I’ve been on the closed GH on most weekends and when it’s foggy (most of the time) it’s less crowded than OB or GG Park. Who wants to hang out on an old highway when you can be on the beach or in one of the world’s loveliest parks?
Because it’s part of the city we all share. And pay for.
Bicyclists don’t pay.
That’s news to me (and my wallet!)
It was very wrong to make this a ballot measure. There’s no funding to create or maintain a park. This should be decided by the Supervisors with input from their constituents. Vote no!
It’s not currently funded, and is still the 3rd most visited park in the city. Modest improvements like benches are only possible once it becomes a park full time. JFK Promenade wasn’t funded either, and is enjoyed by lots of people. The road is expensive to maintain, and a park would cost the city less in the long term.
I read the article but am annoyed by the writing. Why “woman in athleisure” as a descriptor? Do you write “man in athleisure” as a descriptor with the same intention? Sorry, this is not acceptable and once again puts a woman’s clothing/hairstyle/makeup as some loaded descriptor meant to imply what exactly? Is it meant to diminish her credibility? Do better.
I know what you mean, but I took it just as an interesting descriptor, not meant to diminish her credibility. Everyone wears athleisure now- even men! Also, I just love H.R. Smith’s writing – I wish she wrote more article for ML! She’s second for me behind Joe Esketnazi.
Aaron’s Aces,
Aaron tried to teach me to swim and Luke Thomas has the photos.
After, we did the Sauna with wrinkled old cops who didn’t like me.
Aaron is maybe the most open and authentic people I’ve met under Willie’s Gold Dome.
A thousand people probably more have stories about their adventure with Aaron and every one of them is an honest interaction cause he generally shows up alone and you get all of his attention.
I’m a serious SF History buff (Gary Kamiyah club) and it is absolute fact that Aaron Peskin is the best prepared person who has ever run for Mayor in San Francisco.
He knows every gatekeeper from bar bouncers to Sean Elsbernd and every single person who ever got or applied for a City Contract or bought or built an office building or a deck on their house.
I ran into his crew on my daily walk around Dolores Park today and Sunny Anguello was there with a half a hundred others every one a D-3 looking vet and I did verbal jabs at a couple and did half-hug of Sunny and fist bump of Tim Redmond’s kid coming off a huge victory as Manager of some campaign or other last election cycle and I took pics there and it’s all somewhere on my site.
I signed up for a Recurring 25 bucks a month when I got home and have another Classic ‘h. brown sign’ half done for him and I cut out pieces of literature and made a collage I’ll accentuate with 3 Molly bolt fasteners and seal in heavy gauge clear plastic tape.
Will carry that sucker on my daily 4 mile walk from now til November 5th !
Aaron for Mayor !!
And, Go Niners !!
h.
I’m all for Aaron!
Well, this bay swimmer is voting for him.