The District 4 supervisor race will be nasty, brutish and short

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There’s an old joke in which two old ladies are sitting down to dinner. One complains that “The food in this place is terrible.” The other responds, “I know! And such small portions!” 

That, in a nutshell, will be your District 4 supervisor race. It’s going to be a reductive, and nasty, and terrible slog. But Sunset residents will be voting in less than six months.

The sleepy Sunset, the Outer Boroughs of San Francisco, has, counter-intuitively, become San Francisco’s political Wild, Wild Westside. In September, voters overwhelmingly recalled their supervisor, Joel Engardio, for championing the transformation of the  Upper Great Highway into a park. 

It was the first of many regime changes. Mayor Daniel Lurie on Nov. 6 launched a thousand Google searches by tapping unknown 29-year-old Beya Alcaraz to the role.

But she resigned a week later, after post-appointment vetting by the media revealed allegations of appalling conditions at Alcaraz’s former pet shop and her own text messages copping to paying workers “under the table” and skimping on taxes. 

A game show-like process to anoint the next supervisor followed, with a game-show-like number of would-be supes getting the Whammy after the media pointed out issues like not voting, being a Republican or “forgetting” to file tax returns.

Alan Wong, a 38-year-old National Guardsman, former legislative aide and City College trustee, was nearly the last contestant standing. 

Will Wong become the first District 4 supervisor to win re-election since Katy Tang, or will regime change come for him, too?

The angriest people in District 4 want cars on the Great Highway and high-rises to stay on the east side of town. Wong has remained coy about his hopes for the Great Highway and alienated upzoning critics immediately when he threw in for the mayor’s upzoning plan at his first board meeting.

This only added to Wong’s challenges; being saddled with this vote is akin to swimming from Alcatraz to Aquatic Park and, at the last moment, being tossed a cinder block to carry. 

Beneath the surface of what could be San Francisco’s most serene neighborhood, great vengeance and furious anger are roiling.

It’s possible that a figure from the Engardio recall will jump into the race. But, even if that doesn’t come to pass, Sunset residents are still simmering over the specter of Fontana Towers by the beach, and inordinately preoccupied with crime in one of the city’s safest neighborhoods. 

In case you’re wondering, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” in Cantonese is 我好嬲，真係唔會再忍啦！

The D4 stage is set for hyperbolic and specious arguments in a race that promises to be nasty, brutish and short. Here are a few to look out for: 

Who wants to take stuff away from cops? 

Your humble narrator wrote earlier that it was a curious decision on the part of the mayor’s office  to have progressive candidate Natalie Gee participate in the “Who Wants to be a District 4 Supervisor?” game show-like process when there was never any real chance she’d be appointed.

Wong’s electability was not helped by this spectacle, and Gee emerged as a stronger candidate because of it. In the one event in which participants were allowed to vote for their preferred supervisor, Gee won a majority of votes in a straw poll — in a four-way contest.

Wong either can’t or won’t give the most fervent opponents of Sunset Dunes Park and Westside upzoning what they want. That put him in an immediate hole.

But he — or, more accurately, his backers  — can deflect from Wong’s shortcomings, past, present and future, by attempting to render Gee unelectable. This is already underway via attempts to immolate Gee as an anti-police extremist. 

Last month, police union president Louis Wong signed his name to a stern letter to the mayor.

Wong inveighed against Gee’s potential appointment in part because of an answer she provided in a 2024 Harvey Milk Club questionnaire supporting the use of Tasers by law enforcement and writing that she’d rather officers use less-lethal weapons than firearms.

With disarming speed, this kompromat found its way all the way to the British tabloid the Daily Mail, which did not disappoint with the headline “Democrat set to control huge swathe of San Francisco believes police should be banned from carrying guns.” 

That’s how you spell “swath” in Britain, where, incidentally, only around 3.9 percent of cops carry guns. It’s not clear a British reader would find this story all that salacious.  

Neither should an American reader: Reached for comment, Gee said she simply would rather police officers use weapons that are less likely to kill people. She never wrote anything about taking cops’ guns away, and does not support doing this — because that would be crazy. 

San Francisco politics can be confusing, even to good-faith outsiders, so it warrants mentioning that, by local standards, Gee’s answer to this question was less progressive than Alan Wong’s.

He wrote, in the same questionnaire, that the SFPD should not have Tasers at all. This is our status quo and one needn’t be a wild liberal to espouse such a position: Tasers fail at an alarmingly high rate, and, even when they work, they can be ineffective when the person being Tased is, like every Northern Californian, dressed in layers. 

Many of Wong’s past positions on policing appear to be out of step with the law-and-order policies District 4 residents, per recent polling, crave today. In a 2020 questionnaire, he answered, in writing, that 25 percent of the police budget should be reallocated to “housing, homeless services, social workers, health, and education.”

Far from defunding the police, every candidate who will be running for D4 supervisor next year will say that they want the police department to recruit and retain more officers.

The SFPD staffing crisis is real and costs the city a fortune in overtime. But that’s not something a district supervisor has any control over; the mayor runs the police department.

And, even down 500-odd cops, crime rates in San Francisco are at their lowest in decades. A historical analysis reveals a surprisingly erratic correlation between police staffing, arrest rates and crime rates. 

There is a nuanced conversation to be had here. Don’t expect it to take place during this campaign. 

Who wants Fontana Towers by the Beach? 

Westside residents were clearly incensed by the closure of the Great Highway. They’re livid about the upzoning as well, but it’s difficult to foresee it being quite as galvanizing a force. That’s because when the Great Highway was closed, it closed. Nothing is going to be upzoned for a while. 

Zoning, in and of itself, does not cause buildings to spring from the ground as if erected via hypnosis. Not, at least, while access to capital is low and interest rates are high. Not Jimmy Carter high, but plenty high. 

So, for the foreseeable future, upzoning remains a concept, not a reality. In harnessing it as a political issue, however, upzoning critics’ strategy harks to a line in the “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy” song: I don’t think you’re happy enough! That’s right! I’ll teach you to be happy! 

Now substitute “scared” for “happy.”  

So, yes, that was candidate Natalie Gee saying on Instagram that 20,564 units of rent-controlled housing are exposed to potential razing and redevelopment via the upzoning plan. Is this correct? Yes. Is it accurate? That’s harder to claim. 

Buildings with three or more units that qualify for rent control are protected by an amendment to the upzoning plan. So those 20,564 units citywide are primarily in duplexes that haven’t been converted to condos.

To casually state that 20,564 units are at risk to be razed would assume that every duplex in San Francisco is on a lot big enough to build a larger housing development — a housing development lucrative enough to offset the ordeal of evicting tenants, getting city approval to demolish rent-controlled housing and then getting the financing to pay for something big and new.

Unless the Ellis Act is used to empty the building, the tenants evicted from said housing will also have the right to return at their former rent under both state and local law. 

But Wong voted for this, and now it’s his to defend. 

Into these rough waters sails a  third notable entrant, David Lee, who recently filed papers to run against Gee and Wong next year. Something of the William Jennings Bryan of San Francisco, Lee has already run three times for District 1 supervisor (he lost) and once for state assembly (he didn’t win).

Earlier this year, he moved from the other side of the park into District 4. Will the fifth time be the charm? 

If Wong and Gee tear each other down, Lee could absolutely be the beneficiary. There’s even a precedent for this: In 2006, real-estate investor (and future prison inmate) Ed Jew landed the D4 supervisor position as other, better-known candidates savaged each other. 

The 2026 race will be strange and terrible — and such small portions. Bon appétit.