Supporters of Sunset Dunes park who are running a campaign to defeat Proposition G, the November measure that would reopen the Great Highway to cars, have raised seven times as much as their opponents, according to campaign-finance filings.
The No on G campaign has raised $279,500 so far in 2026, according to the filings. The bulk of those donations came from just eight people who gave recently, in August, and largely after park supporters held their campaign kickoff on Aug. 10.
In fact, the majority of the No on G funds were from just one person: Laura Yakovenko, wife of the blockchain platform Solana’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. She gave $200,000 in August to oppose Prop. G.
Yakovenko has donated to urbanist measures before: She gave to 2024’s Prop. L to fund Muni, and to 2022’s Prop. J to keep Golden Gate Park’s JFK Drive car-free.
The No on G campaign also received $25,000 each from Donald J. Edwards, a Miami-based investor, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, and Friends of Sunset Dunes, the nonprofit advocating for the park.
Lucas Lux, the No on G campaign director, said the official filings did not show the latest: The campaign has also received donations from 216 people who have given since July 23, and the median contribution of those was $50, he said. Mission Local could not independently verify the numbers.
“People really enjoy the park and want to support,” Lux said. “We’ve always had a lot of success finding a broad base of both small and large donors because the park makes a positive difference in folks’ lives. Some of those people happen to have more money and are able to donate.”
The Yes on G campaign, which supports reopening the road to cars on weekdays, raised just about $38,000, according to filings, and entirely in smaller sums: It had 92 individual donors who gave less than $5,000.
The campaign also said those numbers were not the latest: It has raised about $100,000 in total as of Sept 4, it said, though Mission Local could not verify the numbers.
Lisa Arjes, a District 4 resident and supporter of bringing cars back on the road, gave $5,000 to pass Prop. G. She was also one of the biggest donors to the Joel Engardio recall and a plaintiff in a lawsuit to overturn Prop. K, the 2024 measure that closed the Great Highway to cars and made way for Sunset Dunes park.
William O’Keeffe, Jr. and Selena Chu, both staunch advocates of reopening the Great Highway — and recall Engardio — gave $4,990 and $4,900 respectively.
“It shows we have lots of local support, all from working class people giving whatever they can,” said Jamie Hughes, the Yes on G campaign spokesperson. “When you have lots of grassroots support like we do, you may be at a disadvantage in paid media, but we have lots of volunteers who are really active. You can do a lot with less.”
Proponents of reopening the Great Highway to cars — whether financing ballot measure campaigns or funding lawsuits — have had a harder time raising money.
Sunset Dunes supporters raised more than $1 million over two election cycles, funding the pro-park Prop. K in 2024 to create the park, and this year fighting Prop. G, to keep it that way.
The Great Highway proponents, meanwhile, raised just $316,000 in those two races.
Even the group behind a lawsuit and the following appeal — a separate effort — sent out a GoFundMe in June pleading for community support. The group filed an appeal after a judge denied its challenges over Prop. K’s legality in January.
The funding difference is similar to the imbalance in the recall Engardio campaign of 2025, when those who wanted to keep Engardio in office out-raised the recallers nearly 3 to 1.
That recall, triggered by the former supervisor’s unapologetic support for the park, was successful in spite of that gap.
Hopefully those funds won’t be needed as Prop K is so utterly idiotic that it’s beat down should be significant.
And then those private $’s — and hopefully many more — can be confidently expended to make Sunset Dunes Park ever better and even more beloved than it currently is.
My prediction: Prop K loses overwhelmingly 67% to 33% — the largest margin of the entire election. (Note: The second largest will be Connie Chan’s flame-out.)
The City as a whole is tired of this petulant NIMBY Nonsense®.
Go Scott Wiener!
Sorry, meant to write “Prop G” — too many propositions regarding this never-ending saga to keep track of!
You had me until the parenthetical. I’m another one of the many No on G + Connie Chan voters. Yes, I prefer Wiener’s stance on this single issue, but I’m not a single-issue voter. Our next member of Congress needs to stand up for what’s right, not sell us out to crypto and AI and vote to arm a genocide abroad. I will overlook Chan being wrong about the park to elect someone who’s good on the big issues that are decided in Congress, and I’m not the only one. That’s why, while she is the underdog, Connie’s election is very much winnable, while Prop G’s is not.
connie chan has done…. what exactly?
you really need to write “neo-nimby”, because everyone in the country *except* the yimby people think NIMBY is the person who doesn’t want a homeless shelter or section 8 housing or a food-bank “in their back yard”. In SF people hear they’re putting up a highrise of million dollar units next to their house and they’re like, “ew. that’s kinda awful” and 102340923402378239743980893204 yimby people react like MAGAs defending pedophiles.
I love the sunset dune park, but I really don’t care much. I don’t like the safeway condos in the marina, but i really don’t care much. But tossing out this “petulant nimby” business makes me look at your entire post and all those numbers and think they’re less than credible.
Correct! Go vote on Prop K, and at the same same time don’t forget to also re-vote yes on SB145.
Karl, you haven’t the foggiest. It’s Prop. G we’re talking about here.
Hopefully Connie Chan will beat Wiener.
Go Connie Chan!
Scott Wiener is the disinformation AI chatbot candidate.
Go indeed, Congress needs more liars?
On a given day it’s like 1000 people all day long, you performative political online types pushing your spin doesn’t change the fact that the Great Highway is basically unused even by the pro-park clowns who drive there with bikes on the roof.
You don’t live here.
“The City as a whole is tired of this petulant NIMBY Nonsense”
That might well be true, but who is the NIMBY here? Is it “no park in my backyard” ? Or “no road in my backyard”?
Personally, I think that either this proposition should be for only the two districts affected, or else the opponents of the park should instead have adopted a direct-action guerilla strategy of sabotaging the park infrastructure, which started well but then was abandoned.
To give a serious answer to an unserious question, “NIMBY” is a widely understood shorthand for opposition to infill development and urban densification, which is tied to the question of how much urban land should be given over to cars versus pedestrians and cyclists. Sunset Dunes isn’t anybody’s literal backyard, but it’s a prominent rallying cry for or against the idea of transforming the Sunset into a more walkable/bikeable place, especially since the late dearly departed “Great Highway” was such a flagrantly useless/nonfunctional piece of car infrastructure that it’s hard to imagine a defense that doesn’t boil down to an all-encompassing general fealty to car-oriented urban geography as such.
There are degrees of wealth, sure, but are folks really going to try to pretend that anybody who can afford to drop $5K on an individual campaign donation for a likely-futile ballot initiative should somehow be seen as “poor” or “working class”?
NIMBYs like to act as if millions of dollars in net worth doesn’t really count as “well-off” depending how much of it consists of equity in an extremely valuable parcel of urban residential real estate, but anyone who’s genuinely poor would sure know the difference, and the working-class cosplay game of “oh look at poor little me with my poor little house” is undignified for everybody involved and an insult to the intelligence of the audience.
Well said. The part I don’t know is how vicious the tax bill is when someone sells their majorly appreciated house. On the other hand what money you do make is basically for nearly no work. If someone gave me a check for $1M you wouldn’t see me bitching about how it should have been 3 (or whatever) and of course long time real estate owners in San Francisco are on shaky ground any time they complain about getting the short end of an unfair tax system…
Lpe, you have to pay capital gains tax when you sell a property, The first half million of gain is exempt for a couple. But then CGT is paid on the remaining profit, usually at 15%
Thanks for the informative response!
Lpe, I should have added that that is the Federal take. California taxes gains as ordinary income, with the same half million allowance. The county collects a transfer tax on the proceeds.
So each layer of government takes a slice, as you might expect.
NIMBY is someone who doesn’t want a homeless shelter in their back-yard, or a food bank, or a soup kitchen or section 8 housing. What do you call someone who wants to have those things, and petitioned for them, and helped get them set up, while the very people who opposed them and donated money to PACs to get them stopped and donated money to politicians to start smear campaigns are now the biggest “yimbys” I’ve ever met.
I’m sensing a MAGA level re-definion of words. Is this the alternate-fact version of NIMBY? where if you don’t want a giant building full of units you will never be able to afford, but SUPPORT literally any affordable housing? WTF is that called now?
I’m really tired of the absolute most reprehensible and soulless people I know have massive investments in these fancy condos spend piles of political money pushing new housing condos and fighting affordable housing. (now they’re on a massive anti-bmr campaign as well). Those very same people, the ones who literally brag about jacking up the rent so they can get people to leave and put in new AI tech bros at 20% more. THOSE are the ones who look at me with condemnation.
The rich people you moan and groan about ARE THE YIMBY people. those ARE the ones who can afford these condos. You know what the rest of the yimby folks are? They’re the left wing version of trump supporters who think he’s going to make everything cheaper for them.
They don’t realize how widely hated they are, I guess. Hurts me to have it pointed out that I’m on the same side as the likes of yelp man. That said, if I have learned anything in the post-boudin-recall era of San Francisco politics it’s that money will most likely get them what they want.
Prop G funding isn’t about a road. It’s barely even about a park.
It’s a proxy war for Wiener vs. Chan. Wiener donors backing “No on G”.
The Chan campaign is trying to distance themselves from hot potato loser “Yes on G”. So few big donors there.
scott just makes me feel so cynical about politics in general and this way of running is probably why the largest political group is not either party but the voters who choose not to vote or get involved which seems to be what many jaded politicians and the rich and powerful want.
Every story about the elections begins and ends with money. Is that any way to run a campaign? Start with money instead of issues and perhaps even a conversation with the voters about what they want to do? Society is turned on its head when the conversation starts with money.
So it’s about what works for everyone anymore, but who has the most disposable income.
Every SF election cycle it seems big tech and big real estate team up to bankroll their interests. So why are they so interested in keeping cars off that road? Enquiring minds would like to know.
They’re not; not really. These are small sums next to crypto billionaire Chris Larsen’s $500k to support Theo Ellington, the GrowSF D10 supervisor candidate, let alone his $1 million toward Mayor Lurie’s power grab Props D, E, and F, or Michael Moritz’s $2 million toward those same measures.
Sunset Dunes just happens to be loved by a lot of people, and a few of those are quite wealthy. If this were actually a priority for big tech or big real estate, we’d see much bigger donations, we’d see familiar names like Larsen and Moritz, and probably Lurie endorsing; instead, they’re all staying out of it. The specific rich people mentioned in this article just like the park. Big tech as a whole doesn’t care. Real estate doesn’t care because they win either way: sell a park as an amenity, or sell a highway with convenient access to Silicon Valley as an amenity.
Except as far as real estate is concerned, taking car traffic at Lincoln and depositing it at Sloat or vice versa doesn’t actually offer any kind of convenient access for residents along the middle of the route, the only real convenience would be for people going to/from the north or south looking to bypass those areas altogether.
That observation seems to track with the fact that (at least in an era before the Venn diagram circles for “affordable” and “San Francisco” started moving away from each other at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light) the closer you got to the Great Highway has historically been regarded as a less desirable and therefore more affordable place to live, which aside from the general question of distance from the rest of the city, probably has a lot to do with the Great Highway having functioned as an anti-amenity that offers nearby residents nothing but car noise and a Frogger-style barrier to beach access.
(This does present a potentially tempting argument that we should try to preserve unpleasant and harmful anti-amenities like the Great Highway in order to artificially depress real estate values in the name of affordability, but following that idea to its logical conclusion would basically mean that poorer neighborhoods should be deliberately cut off from public services, reducing them to state-sanctioned slums if not literal fenced-off ghettos.)
The data is a bit old, more current:
https://campaign.sfethics.org/elections/2026-11-03/measures/measureg.html
The opposition to Prop G isn’t a grassroots effort exactly, it looks more like an effort from a band of billionaire-class gentrifiers.
Daniel, why would any billionaire live in the outer fogbank?
Strange take – the people behind tearing down the Fillmore were going to live there.
they don’t want to live there, they want to *invest* there. I have some real-estate investing in-laws. SOMA and North Mission District were massive investment area. They worked policiticans like crazy to get stuff built there, not because they’d ever live there, but because they wanted to buy buildings and resell/lease them for twice as much. (and they did).
This isn’t rocket science. It’s just that rich people like to become more rich.