Mission Local has been following the District 4 candidates on the campaign trail. Read dispatches on Alan Wong, Natalie Gee, and David Lee.
The Sunset, in Albert Chow’s estimation, has become a red light district. And he wants to put a stop to it.
“Every other street, you see another red light,” said the candidate for District 4 supervisor at a recent rally, referring to the L-Taraval project. “Do we need these red lights?”
“No,” responded some 30 campaign volunteers.
“Do we need to get our left lanes taken away?” Chow said, referring to the change where drivers can’t turn left onto Taraval Street from the avenues.
“No,” the crowd responded.
“Do we need to have walk-along boarding islands and lose 140 spaces in parking?” said Chow, referring to the structures designed to help passengers get on and off the light rail more safely.
“No,” they said, louder this time.
It was the final stretch of Chow’s run for District 4 supervisor and the mood was buoyant. Great Wall Hardware, Chow’s business on Taraval Street and 28th Avenue, was nearly rebuilt after the fire that closed it in 2024. Exposed wire and plastic tarps were still around, but Chow said it would reopen in five to six weeks.
Meanwhile, announced Otto Pippenger, Chow’s campaign consultant, the campaign had identified some 9,000 voters who said they would cast their ballot for Chow.
Was this announcement a move to hype up volunteers in the room so that they sign up for more shifts on the last days before the June 2 election? Perhaps. But in a primary election where the expected voter turnout is about 25,000 in District 4, 9,000 votes are a lot.
“Mr, Chow here is in a very good place,” Pippenger said to Chow’s supporters.
Chow, president of the nonprofit People of Parkside Sunset, does not have government experience, which he considers a point of pride. “I am neither a progressive. I’m neither a moderate. I’m not a NIMBY, I’m not a YIMBY,” Chow said. “That’s going to drive City Hall crazy.”
“That means I’ll be a tie breaker. And guess what? All eyes will be on us,” he continued. “We will drive the conversation. We will drive the decisions. And for once, they will look at us as important.”
Supporters in the room — many of them familiar faces from the fight to recall Joel Engardio, District 4’s former supervisor — seemed to largely share Chow’s sentiment that the city of San Francisco, as a whole, has failed to respect Sunset residents.
“We’re the property owners. We pay our property taxes, but we get so little back,” Chow said.
“Yeah!” echoed the audience.
In half an hour, Chow’s supporters filed out of the door, formed a parade, and marched five blocks up Taraval Street to the Parkside library ballot dropbox, where they planned to turn in their ballots, en masse. “Albert Chow, he knows how! Albert Chow, vote him now!” they chanted, with Chinese drums beating in the background.
At 3:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Chow, having shed the suit and orange tie that matched his campaign fliers, arrived at the intersection of 47th Avenue and Lincoln Way, just two blocks away from the Great Highway, to begin canvassing.
He parked his pickup truck and pulled out a dolly borrowed from his wife, who once used it to haul photography equipment for weddings. Now, it’s a handy tool to carry window signs, campaign flyers and a strawberry-flavor Gatorade.
As he walked down 47th Avenue, Chow pointed at a blue house. He had done work there some 15 years ago, as a general contractor. “I was crawling underneath the house, and there was so much rotten wood I couldn’t figure out what was holding the house up.”
Chow has been going door-to-door talking to Sunset residents about this campaign for months now, he said. At first, he would start his pitch by talking about himself and his policy priorities. But, he said, “99 percent” of the voters he talked to only had one thing on their mind: the Great Highway.
“That’s it,” Chow said. “Very few people ask about family zoning. Very few people would even ask about public safety. No, Great Highway.” So now, that’s what he opens with.
Chow’s position that the newly created Sunset Dunes park should be turned back into the Great Highway on workdays has been so unwavering and public, that he did not bother trying to get support from Sunset Dunes advocates.
As Chow continued down 47th Avenue, residents who answered their doors to talk to him showed a wider spectrum of thoughts on the issue.
One flat-out disagreed with Chow and closed the door on him. Another said that Chow’s platform was too weak — he wanted the Great Highway open to cars 24/7, instead of only on weekdays. Another resident, who described himself a “transplant” in tech, told Chow that while it was “lame” that Prop. K closed the road to cars even if most District 4 voters hated it, it was “a loss that we have to accept.”
Chow disagreed on the acceptance part.
Along with his campaign literature, he carried a clipboard with a petition for a November ballot measure to bring car traffic back on the Great Highway on workdays.
“Out of all the candidates, I’m the only one with a petition,” Chow told a woman in a floral shirt. “They want to close everything, and that’s not good for the families,” she said.
By the end of the conversation, she had agreed to vote for him, and signed the petition.
For a man running on a platform of grievances, Chow kept things light. If someone agreed to take a campaign sign, he handed it over with a joking order to “take this sign and you can make the world’s biggest paper airplane afterwards.” He marveled at the original curved glass windows at a voter’s home. “You know how they do that?” Chow said. “They make a wooden radius barrel and then take glass and let it just melt.”
On the sidewalk, Chow ran into a man named Anthony, carrying a blue-eyed baby in his arms. “She may be surfing Sunset beach one day,” said Anthony, and the two shared a laugh. They bonded over their Hawaii connections (Anthony man was from Hawaii, Chow has family there) and a city regulation that fines businesses that fail to paint over graffiti.
Anthony, who has lived in the Sunset for over 20 years, regards himself as a local. And Chow quickly introduced his own Sunset history: living in the Sunset for almost 50 years and being the president of the People of Parkside Sunset for nearly two decades.
“My big thing is I want to keep little places like the gem association around the corner open,” Anthony said, referring to the San Francisco Gem and Mineral Society’s nondescript storefront on Judah Street. “They got tagged recently and it wasn’t their fault.”
“That’s the stupidest law,” Chow responded with enthusiasm. His hardware storefront was also tagged a month ago, he continued, and Chow was frustrated when the Department of Public Works issued a graffiti notice. “That’s double victimization.”
Chow’s solution? An ordinance to require anyone caught doing graffiti to do “community service and clean stuff up,” he said.
After two hours, a little sunburnt around the neck, Chow stopped for the first time to drink some Gatorade before continuing to 46th Avenue.
Days before the June 2 election, does he think he has benefitted from the frontrunners spending resources attacking each other?
“Oh yeah! I have been keeping my message the same, and they are kind of tearing each other down,” Chow said. “I’m sitting in the middle and the missiles are flying over my head in both directions. It’s hurting both their reputations because they are screaming at each other.”
This is such a bizarre display. Getting people furious about…platforms that allow people using wheelchairs to get on and off streetcars as required by federal law and basic decency? That’s really what this campaign has turned into?
Meanwhile, Chow demonstrates not just a lack of experience, but a lack of will to use Google, when he announces that his big plan for graffiti is “an ordinance to require anyone caught doing graffiti to do ‘community service and clean stuff up.'” State law has already had that authority for decades and we already have the probation department and the Sheriff’s Work Alternative Program.
So it’s unclear why Chow thinks we need a new law. Moreover, a quick scan through SFPD incident reports shows that SFPD only issues adult citations or arrests for graffiti around 5 times or less most months for the entire city (juvenile data is not publicly available, but such cases appear to be extremely rare based on the summary information that is public). Specifically in District 4, it sure appears that SFPD has cited or arrested just one adult in the last six years for a graffiti-related offense.
So Chow has jumped right to concluding that he’s the first person to ever propose making vandals do community service cleaning work instead of understanding the programs that already exist and how they are and aren’t working. He can pass all the ordinances he wants; nobody is going to order anybody to clean if nobody is getting caught.
Inexperienced Supervisors thinking that every problem needs to be addressed by passing some new law establishing yet another new program is how we end up with a bloated bureaucracy filled with duplicative efforts. Actually doing the job requires real knowledge and research to understand how the system already works and what needs to be done to fix it, not more quick slogans and pet projects.
Well, there’s no denying those boarding platforms are terrible in every way. They are there, because Muni couldn’t find it in themselves to switch to low floor light rail at the couple points they had the opportunity for it. Like pretty much every last light rail operator in the world did.
With all the problems in the city it is very telling that people in the sunset are most concerned with small boarding islands that make the Muni train slightly less worse. And stop lights. Its embarrassing.
Oh there’s lots more that obviously ppl haven’t heard of? For starts: Expanding the auxiliary water supply system to the West Side, finishing putting utility cables underground, securing the water treatment plant at Sloat. fixing N Judah in the Inner Sunset.
Most of us figured out by elementary school that, yes, we actually “need these red lights,” because that when the light is red for us, it’s green for somebody else who needs to go the other way. That’s how we live together in a society.
It must be awfully frustrating to go through life thinking that red lights and streetcar wheelchair ramps were installed solely to inconvenience you as though “cross traffic” and “people with disabilities” aren’t daily occurrences. Yes, it would be lovely to be able to drive anywhere I want without having to stop for red lights, but I learned that the world doesn’t revolve around me. It is strange that Mr. Chow did not.
Also, the number of stop lights that were added to Taraval in District 4 is a whopping three, not “every other street.”
Please tell me we’re not going to elect the “why do we have to stop for red lights” guy.
Are these people genuinely unaware that they can still use Santiago or Ulloa as a throughway while only having to deal with traffic lights at 19th Ave and Sunset Blvd? Or are they just that entitled?
That red light thing’s probably about the new traffic lights on Taraval that nobody asked for (other than SFMTA so they can make business for their contractor)
Albert Chow and his supporters are the worst this city has to offer. They want to keep the Sunset a playground just for themselves. They are rich and unwelcoming people who want to make a gated community. Don’t be confused about their talk of safety: they want the roads to be unsafe. And when they run someone over, they want leniency.
This article starts with who they are : the kinds of people who want to zoom down the street and don’t want you to be safe from them when you’re waiting for a bus.
They may smile but they are dangerous people.
Very tragic to hear that Albert Chow doesn’t take safety on our streets seriously. Turns out those red lights and boarding platforms are there for a reason. Often the reason is found out too late unfortunately
These are the killers Albert Chow wants to protect: Mary Fong Lau. Zhou Ming Lu. Valentino Amil.
It is these people who killed with their cars that Albert Chow wants to defend.
Who will be the next car killer Chow will let back on to our streets?
Chow can claim he’s not a NIMBY, but his entire campaign is based on what he wants to keep out of his backyard.
just a loud reactionary.
The Sunset is not full of rich people. We don’t have any billionaires and if you don’t count home equity, we don’t have too many millionaires.
People drive because transit options do not exist as they do elsewhere. For instance, if I want to ride the bus to get to the Richmond, I have to walk 10 blocks to either the 28 or the 29 lines and, since most of the access points in the park have been closed over the years, Crossover Drive is a choke point for traffic and transit.
The problem with the stop lights and the Taraval streetcar line is that SFMTA didn’t engage the community. Stop lights were put in place without discussion. The project took a very long time, very little explanation about anything. Islands were installed for both accessibility and safety, but installing platforms that don’t address accessibility wasn’t discussed or discussed broadly. People feel left out.
Albert feeds on the unhappiness of people who feel like no one listens to them, a city government that can’t be bothered to talk to them, and politicians who largely talk down to them except when they want their votes. Which, BTW, is how we ended up with our current president.
I wish I had home equity that I could “don’t count.”
My favorite kind of millionaires are the ones who lie about it. That’s Albert Chow and his supporters in the sunset. Don’t believe their lies.
the average sunset home is worth over $1M what are you talking about.
SFMTA had a series of video conferences for SF citizens to participate in the Taraval planning process. Out of curiosity, I called into one. There were only a handful of people. No Albert Chow or other rep from the merchants’ association either. So that one’s on them.
That said: This would have been a futile exercise. Every time somebody brought up substantial changes, SFMTA’s engineer on the call explained how the decisions were already made. All that parking gone? Oh, let’s have more yellow curb. Essentially, SFMTA let you chose what kind of artwork you might wanted to try beautify the boarding platforms.
Shame on SFMTA for the lacking engagement in their yearslong pursuit of converting Mission, Valencia, 16th Street and beyond into drab transportation facilities.
That’s demonstrably not true. SFMTA proposed converting parking on adjacent streets to angled specifically in order to create more parking spaces for merchants on Taraval to make up for spaces that would be removed to make space for accessible platforms.
Contrary to your claims that nobody listens to the neighborhood and the decisions were already made, they gave every one of the impacted streets the opportunity to vote on the idea. And the neighborhood rejected it overwhelmingly—81% said no and only 19% said yes (https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/angled-parking-vote-update). Yep, Prop K and Joel Engardio were both more popular in the Sunset than the angled parking Albert Chow still wants to add.
I attended the call in person, so you tell me what was said there. Bravo, textbook paternalistic gaslighting behavior.
At any rate, surveys for angled parking were done years earlier. If anything came later on, I and many others did not hear about it. Perhaps now is the time for another, earnest go at it?
typical, can’t face the facts and so you scream and holler and accuse the other side of gaslighting.
Interesting comments there. See my responses. it appears commenters have no clue what moves the West Side. Imagine these ppl there came out like, House of Brakes, put housing there as proposed, who cares about murals.
Soo much people on comments showing Anti Car behavior. I will be putting Albert Chow on my 2nd choice or 1st choice as he proven to have Community input heard on both sides rather one side. Also worked to ensure Balanced Safety.
Your average Chow supporter thinks it’s “balanced” when cars kill people. After all, those red lights slow them down!
Watch out for them on the roads. They’ll kill you and your kids.