Proposition G, the November measure that seeks to reopen the area now known as Sunset Dunes Park to cars on weekdays, has cleaved the two San Francisco congressional candidates: Sen. Scott Wiener is against the measure, and District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan is for it.
It may yet become a key issue in the race, and it is not clear who will come out on top.
Prop. G is a favorite on the Westside, where more than 60 percent of voters in the Richmond and Sunset neighborhoods opposed the 2024 proposition that closed the Great Highway to cars and turned it into a permanent park.
Chan, the Richmond supervisor, is certain to profit from an aggrieved base of residents heading to the polls in a long-shot attempt to revert the park back to a road. But the congressional race is citywide, and there Wiener may take the advantage: San Franciscans voted 55 to 45 in favor of the park two years ago.
While Chan’s stance is seen as a winner on the Westside, Wiener is banking that it’s a winner for him across San Francisco.
“For every vote on the Westside that potentially is Yes on G, there’s also many folks in the center, north and eastern parts of the city that are No on G,” said Wiener campaign spokesperson Joe Arellano.
Wiener is embracing the difference. He has authored the official argument against the measures, which will be printed on the information pamphlet sent to every voter, and spoke at the No on G campaign’s Aug. 16 kickoff.
His satellite campaign office in the Richmond, created to court Westside voters, features posters reading “We love Sunset Dunes.”
Chan is more reticent. She supports Prop. G, according to her campaign, but has not publicly interacted with the Yes on G campaign. The measure’s opponents, in fact, did not realize Chan had taken a position until they were contacted by Mission Local.
“I always heard she was not going to get involved with G,” said Jane Natoli, a Richmond resident and YIMBY leader involved in both Wiener’s race and the No on G campaign. Others echoed Natoli’s remarks.
Chan’s recent timidity is notable. Before June, she was a standard-bearer for reopening the Upper Great Highway. In April last year she wrote in the Richmond Review that she wanted to explore a ballot measure to partially reopen the road, and in January she was the first to sign an ultimately failed measure that would have done so.
Asked to comment on the perception that she is now keeping the issue at arm’s length, Chan said in a written statement that Prop. G is a community-driven effort by Westside residents to “put forward their vision for the future of the Great Highway and let their fellow San Franciscans decide.”
Observers of the congressional races say Prop. G will help both candidates with voters they need. But it isn’t clear who will benefit more.
Having Prop. G on the ballot “will probably bump the turnout on the Westside, particularly areas where the Great Highway has a direct impact,” said political consultant David Ho, who runs a pro-Chan political action committee. That may bring out less politically engaged residents to vote for Chan.
Prop. G supporters are also more likely to use the measure as a litmus test when weighing who to send to Congress, said Jamie Hughes, leader of the Yes on G campaign. Already, observers of the race said, many Yes on G voters are for Chan — and against Wiener.
Even the official rebuttal from Prop. G proponents attacks Chan’s rival: The statement, titled “Scott Wiener turns his back on serious safety concerns,” will also appear in the voter pamphlet.
“We’re angry out here,” said Sunset community leader and Chan supporter Albert Chow, one of the early opponents of Sunset Dunes. “She is true to her Richmond folks. She’s listening to them. They’re being boxed in and so is the Sunset, of course.”
Still, Ho acknowledged, “it makes sense for Scott to preserve and maintain his core base of supporters” by being vocal in support of the park — that is, YIMBYs and urbanists, who have long counted Wiener as the dean of pro-housing, pro-transit policies.
Wiener being the poster child for No on G gives him a chance “to remind some of those more progressive voters that he’s on the right side of the issue,” argued Natoli, the No on G and pro-Wiener organizer.
About 36,000 more voters in 2024 opted to open the park than keep it a road, after all. And the California 11th congressional district is even more pro-park because it excludes the Excelsior area, which voted for keeping cars on the road.
Prop. G has put Chan in a bit of a bind, because it is “an issue that doesn’t fit neatly within our political divide,” said Natoli.
The No on G coalition, for example, also includes Chan endorsers and former supervisors Eric Mar, Gordon Mar and Dean Preston. Wiener and Preston are “not the kind of people that you see on the same side of stuff that much,” but both have endorsed No on G.
And that may be why Chan is taking more of an “if asked, I’ll answer, but I’m not going to bring this up” approach toward Prop. G, said Natoli. “It’s a shrewd way of approaching it.”
Not surprising at all. Chan was against the JFK Promenade, Geary bus lanes, and the tax to save Caltrain as well.
How does anyone take her seriously?!?
I was just out there today, there were ~40 people max using it, and it’s sunny.
So, in November of 2024, Measure K (“Permanently Closing the Upper Great Highway to Private Vehicles to Establish a Public Open Recreation Space”) PASSED 55% to 45%—a difference of about 36,000 votes.
So the Yes-on-Prop G folks are betting that they can convince 36,000 people who voted FOR the Park to change their votes to restore the Great Highway?!
36,000 votes is TWO TIMES the capacity of the Warriors’ home court at Chase Center. Two times!
That’s a LOT of minds to change, and this doesn’t even consider the significant number of folks who voted AGAINST Measure K but, in the two years since, have fallen in love with Sunset Dunes and now plan to vote against re-opening the highway (former Supervisor Gordon Mar among them!).
Are pro-Prop G folks not good at math? How are they going to “keep” their 45% coalition AND convert 36,000 pro-Park voters?
Answer: they aren’t. Proposition G is going to fail, and the more people hear about Connie Chan’s support for it, the worse it is for her prospects!
This is an interesting problem for the Chan campaign. I am a no on G-Chan voter, and I would understand an explanation from her campaign that this is an example of representation on her part, that she understands that a big part of the job is representing the desires of constituents. But this is difficult needle to thread as she moves from representing the west side on the BOS to representing a much larger swath of San Francisco in congress. I hope voters can give her some grace on this issue and place it in a larger context. Which is really tough because a big part of the reason we’re in this situation is that the yes on G/re-open the great highway crowd can’t do that, they see this issue as a bellwether.
Whatever would be the largest possible context, the obvious larger context is NIMBY-vs-YIMBY and car-centricity vs walkability: Sunset Dunes is a synecdoche for the replacement of questionably-useful decaying car infrastructure with new amenities for people on foot, which in turn is a seen as a harbinger of infill apartment/mixed-use development taking the place of (at least some number of) former single-family homes.
To at least some people, the NIMBY position of trying to preserve existing single-family neighborhoods like a fly caught in amber has successfully positioned itself as the “progressive” alternative to a pro-developer corporate centrism; to others, the NIMBY position is a conservative/reactionary stance by privileged long-established homeowners seeking to maintain their seven-figure property values by artificially restricting the growth of housing supply, regardless of the resulting unaffordability for less-privileged renters and new homebuyers.
Like it or not, this issue is by far the most clear-cut policy distinction between Chan and Wiener, and how one sees this issue in relation to the left-versus-right spectrum will probably determine whether Chan or Wiener comes across as the “real” left-winger/centrist in the race.
Connie Chan is unfit for higher office.
She is a nothing-burger when it comes to leadership and forwarding-thinking legislation.
She is a reactionary and a status quo NIMBY in “progressive” garb.
A vote for Scott Wiener is a vote for Connor Johnston AI chatbot impersonation, defense of genocide, gentrification, and putting PR before the actual job at hand.
Connie Chan can say no to big money, Wiener can only say “how much?”
Chan is nothing more than a local politician. The idea that she is ready for national office is a joke. She has accomplished nothing. She is a naysayer, not a doer. We need someone in Congress who is going to do something about climate change, not pander to drivers. We already have enough of them in Congress; they are called Republicans. The Great Highway is falling into the ocean because of climate change, and Chan wants to spend even more money contributing to the problem.
I’m just amazed at how the ‘gish gallop’ (so many lies you can’t possibly sit and rebut each one before an audience loses interest) is basically part of the modern playbook now. Yes on G wants to peddle lies about safety, about traffic data, about how you can freaking get to Daly City from Great Highway (answer: you can’t take the cutoff anymore. The Coastal Commission closed southbound lanes last year and is now trying to figure out how to close the northbound lanes and maintain access to SF Zoo.) , about who was involved in Prop K (I am quite sure Scott Weiner was not), about how many people visit the park each week, and so on.
There’s not much to say other than—I hope in this election cycle people finally learn to screen out the BS and actually empathize with people with every vote they cast. Prop G is a just plain silly stab at revenge for having their very backwards way of thinking rebuked by the City’s electorate. It’s so fitting that two of the most prolific commenters on this article’s Facebook post are calling Sunset Dunes supporters ‘cockroaches’ while another person is throwing around wild allegations that the new playground under construction is not safe.
There are a lot of city dwellers who hate that other people enjoy city living. It’s pushing them to some pretty concerning levels of delusion. I can’t think of anything sadder than that.
and this is why connie chan will lose.
It’s not a real proxy battle, it’s a district 1 and 4 consideration that politicians from other districts have used for their perceived advantage. 1 and 4 voted no.
Districts 1 and 4 do not “own” the public realm.
Sunset Dunes is of Citywide concern — just as adequate housing creation is of Statewide and National concern.
As a D1 resident — but more importantly citizen of San Francisco and of the United States — I reject nativism in all its forms and support both the Sunset Dunes Park and increased housing creation.
1 and 4 are the affected districts. Everyone else is voting to take from 1 and 4 to benefit tourists who don’t live in the area.
If you insist on demanding unilateral control the territory of the “Sunset Dunes City Park” (former known as the “Great Highway”), then, by all means, secede from San Francisco and form your own new city and government.
Best of luck with that! 😉
(The Southern States attempted to do that once, in order to deny an entire race their human rights, and look how that turned out.)
The vote is citywide. Not D1/D4. City voters are motivated by issues important to them. They look for differences between candidates’ positions on those issues. This issue is one differentiator between Chan and Wiener. That makes it a proxy for choosing between them. Other issues where Chan and Wiener differ are also proxys.
My vote for Chan (because she’s not Wiener) will in no way threaten Sunset Dunes, which I support.
Same.
Oh, it’s a proxy battle alright – but not at all in the way covered in this article. Scott Weiner is emblematic of the current establishment of the Democratic Party, the one that never does enough to stop wealth consolidation and the decimation of the middle class, he’s the corporate Dem that takes big money from wealthy special interests, the type of leader who is poised to continue the horrors of national status quo. Connie Chan meanwhile is the opposite. She is much more so the candidate who is focused on the working class, and most likely to push hardesr for the bread and butter policies that can rebuild our middle class. The Great Highway / Sunset Dunes measure is largely incidental to all this, but if you follow the money (and wider agendas) behind the two opposing camps on G, the proxy battle just described might just come into view.
I love the “ Nativism “ crack. I guess by Nativism you mean people who were either born, raised and still reside in the neighborhood they grew up in or people who have lived in the Sunset for a very long time and have a vested interest in the workings of said neighborhood? As opposed to the majority of people who live in the city who are here for an average of three years at the most. Funny. If someone tries to change the fabric of the Mission they’re accused of gentrification. I’d say the damage done by non native Sunset residents to the fabric of where I grew up is on scale with the gentrification of the Mission.
–“As opposed to the majority of people who live in the city who are here for an average of three years at the most.”
I’ve lived in the Mission for more than 20 years and use Sunset Dunes regularly. Sorry I don’t fit into the clever binary you’ve cooked up to make yourself feel better!
Anyhow, long live Sunset Dunes, and I’ll toast “Michael from the Sunset” with champagne when Prop-G demonstrably fails this November. Cheers!
Meanwhile, for born-and-raised San Franciscans who’ve been forced out of San Francisco altogether by NIMBYism-fueled housing cost increases, any San Franciscan with the financial flexibility to be able to stay in the neighborhood they grew up is part of a privileged elite, and the feud between “native San Franciscans” versus “newcomers” is captioned with the old promotional tagline from Alien vs Predator: “whoever wins… we lose.”
From that standpoint, every step in the direction of a denser and more walkable city is a step in the right direction, and the struggle by Sunset residents to preserve their low-density suburb-in-all-but-name is just a slightly more cultural-liberal-coded version of a McMansion dweller in some soulless Sunbelt suburb fighting to stop the addition of a fifth color to their HOA’s list of approved house paints (the current four options all being barely-distinguishable shades of beige).