It’s a typical Sunday afternoon on Utah Street in Potrero Hill, the most affluent neighborhood in District 10 and home to supervisorial candidate J.R. Eppler, who, like many of his neighbors, is a professional — in his case, a lawyer.
With a flyer-stuffed messenger bag slung over his shoulder, Eppler is canvassing alone, trailed by me. We hear the occasional shout from residents streaming a football game and see others through bay windows, lounging in their pajamas.
Eppler, a polished, fit man who could be mistaken for a Little League coach, is wearing khaki slacks and has a white and blue “J.R. Eppler” pin tacked to his sweatshirt.
“J.R., are you with Connie or Scott?” a resident shouts from the stoop of his Victorian-style home as Eppler heads toward the next house.
“Oh, with Connie,” Eppler calls back without hesitating.
“People are happy when they see you showing up,” says Eppler, who estimates he has personally knocked on over a thousand doors in District 10 neighborhoods — that is, Bayview-Hunters Point, Dogpatch, Potrero and Visitacion Valley.
Add those to the upwards of 2,000 doors his campaign team has reached, and Eppler says he’s contacted around 10 percent of the district’s 30,751 households.
Eppler is running in what is essentially a three-way contest: There is rival Theo Ellington, the presumed frontrunner, who is a Bayview native and the executive director of the Ruth Williams Bayview Opera House. And there’s DJ Brookter, a Bayview-based nonprofit director who has Walton’s endorsement.
One of the three will replace termed-out Supervisor Shamann Walton, who has endorsed Brookter.
Eppler traces the beginning of his campaign back to when friends and residents encouraged him to run for supervisor.
By the beginning of 2025, he says, more serious conversations began about crafting a campaign based on his community work for groups like the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association and the Potrero Dogpatch Merchants Association.
“I’ve been working in the neighborhood for over a decade, and I’m making sure that we get the resources we need to be better connected to the rest of the city,” Eppler says to a resident who confesses to being hungover but stays for a conversation.
“It is nice to see a candidate,” she says back.
At another house, a resident asks, “So why should I vote for you instead of Ellington?”
He offers some background and tells the voter that he first visited San Francisco as a 12-year-old.
“That started my appreciation and love of the city,” he says. After attending Stanford University, Eppler went to the University of California, Los Angeles for law school, and finally moved to San Francisco in 2007 to take a job at a law firm, practicing business and corporate law, which he still does today. At first, he lived in SoMa, but moved to Potrero Hill in 2010.
So why should he vote for him?
“I’ve been doing the work for the last decade. I can point to concrete things that we’ve done in the district, that I’ve worked on and gotten done,” Eppler says.
Eppler is the only white front-running candidate in a district that has been represented by a Black supervisor since 2001, when supervisor district elections were resumed after a 20 year hiatus.
District 10’s demographics have changed.
In 2000, Black residents represented 28% of the district’s voters. By 2020, according to census redistricting data, that number had dwindled to 20 percent, with 42% Asian voters, 15% Latino voters, and 21% white voters.
Days before Eppler’s afternoon door-knocking in Potrero Hill, he and Brookter announced their joint “anti-billionaire” ranked-choice strategy, after a pro-Ellington PAC got $500,000, then another $40,000 in donations from cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen — the largest donations ever made in a San Francisco supervisor race.
As far as his own campaign donations, Eppler comes in second to Ellington at $181,777 through public financing and contributions as of Oct. 22. His campaign has raised nearly $59,000 from donors.
Neither the mega donation from Larsen or the anti-billionaire strategy come up on that Sunday afternoon.
Instead, there are oblique references, as when Eppler underlines to voters that he is all about community “as a volunteer from the community, not paid to be there and not representing a large interest.”
“It’s my form of service. It’s the work that I want to do. And I’ll do it in elected office, or I’ll do it as a volunteer,” he says to a resident. “But I think I’d be a lot more effective in elected office.”
Eppler says he began this work when he stumbled on a Potrero Hill Democratic Club poster taped to a lamp post shortly after moving to the neighborhood, and became involved with community groups.
As well as his work with the Potrero neighborhood and merchants’ associations, he says, he has negotiated with the University of California, San Francisco, to land the $5 million that went toward remodeling Esprit Park in Dogpatch, and worked to make other improvements, like, “a stair connection that connects the waterfront to the Potrero Hill Rec Center along 22nd Street.”
Eppler is also a member of the Potrero Gateway Park Steering Committee, and served as secretary of the Friends of the Dogpatch Community Hub from 2017 to 2025.
While Eppler has focused on Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, where income levels and voter turnout are highest in the district, he says he’s no stranger to the district’s lowest-income neighborhoods.
During the city’s contentious 2022 redistricting process, he said later in an interview, he reached out to residents in Bayview and Visitation Valley. In redistricting, District 10 lost some affluent Mission Bay residents.
But, Eppler said, “I worked with the coalition of Vis Valley and Bayview residents to try to hold District 10 together. Maintaining continuity for the public housing residents that lived in the southeast.”
Eppler said he also improved transit for the Bayview-Hunters Point community, serving on the task force that established the 15-Bayview Hunters Point express bus line to more quickly connect residents.
On this Sunday afternoon, however, his pitch is mostly about community service and getting his flyers hung when doors aren’t answered.
He attempts various ways to securely dangle his flyers to avoid having them drown in the piles of neglected political mailers building up on doorsteps.
“It is trash-can season,” Eppler said, pointing to one resident’s miniature doorstep trashcan seemingly designated for political mailers. “I hope they see the name before it goes in the can.”
A few doors down, at a house with a wooden fence, he meticulously rolls his flyer tight enough to fit between the planks.
A block further, a resident wearing paint-splattered utility pants scurries out of his house to tell Eppler a knock at his door isn’t needed, “We’re voting for you.”
Others simply give encouragement.
“I really appreciate that you came here, because I’ve lived here for 20-something years,” says one resident. “And you’re the first guy running for supervisor who’s ever knocked on my door.”
