District 3, which this week welcomed Danny Sauter as its next supervisor, is a unique marriage of a dozen neighborhoods: Some embody the charms of San Francisco (Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown, the Financial District and Union Square, Telegraph Hill and North Beach); others, like Lower Nob Hill, embody its challenges.
It’s a district that Aaron Peskin dominated for 17 years until he termed out, for the second time, on Wednesday. The 36-year-old Sauter is more moderate and a pro-housing YIMBY who won a clear-cut victory with 55 percent of the vote; he had strong support from every neighborhood in the district.
Likewise, the 15 community leaders with whom Mission Local spoke expressed a strong desire to collaborate with Sauter, and most — campaign allies and rivals alike — expect him to win re-election four years down the road.
Their wish lists, however, differ sharply. Residents in areas suffering from troubling street conditions want Sauter’s immediate attention; others, in the northern parts of the district that have remained vibrant, mostly hope for Sauter to leave them alone.
“District 3 is a beautiful tapestry of diverse neighborhoods. It is really, in many ways, a lot of the heart and soul of San Francisco,” said Peter Gallotta, a board member of the Lower Nob Hill Neighborhood Alliance. “I think sometimes, Lower Nob Hill has gotten lost in that mix.”
“You don’t pick a flower if you like it,” said Fady Zoubi, former president of the North Beach Business Association.
Leaders in other neighborhoods, however, want Sauter to be creative and give them a North Star to resolve issues like downtown recovery, Union Square vacancy and the economic vitality of Chinatown.
The common themes are more police officers and trash cans for safer and cleaner streets, and filling in vacant storefronts by incentivizing businesses.
What’s more, they want Sauter to be almost omnipresent. Just as Peskin told Mission Local during his exit interview: “I mean, people generally don’t call you when they’re happy. You’re kind of a group therapist and a social worker.”
The south: We need more love
Sansome St
Union St
BARBARY
COAST
Van Ness Ave
Clay St
POLK
GULCH
Market St
LOWER
POLK
LOWER
NOB HILL
Geary St
POLK
GULCH
BARBARY
COAST
Van Ness Ave
Clay St
Market St
LOWER
NOB HILL
Geary St
LOWER
POLK
Note: The boundaries of the neighborhoods are delineated based on information from neighborhood groups and Google Maps. Map by Junyao Yang.
Neighborhoods mostly in the southwest of District 3, areas near the Tenderloin, are calling for Sauter’s attention.
First and foremost is Lower Nob Hill, the neighborhood separated from the Tenderloin by Geary Street and sometimes referred to as “the Tendernob.”
In the midst of the pandemic, Lower Nob Hill fell “victim to the fentanyl crisis, along with the Tenderloin and SoMa neighborhoods,” read an April 2023 letter titled “Letter to Mayor London Breed: We Need Your Help & Attention,” written by the Lower Nob Hill Neighborhood Alliance.
“What was once a safe and clean place to live has turned into, for lack of a better word, ‘a hellscape,’” the letter continued.
Many of the residents have lived here for years because they love it being walkable, central, “urban, diverse and dense,” said Gallotta of this neighborhood. They didn’t sign up for the deteriorating street conditions in the past two years. “Many of our neighbors are saying they are not comfortable going out after 9 p.m.”
The neighborhood, however, often feels overlooked in the mix of nearby high-profile burgs that represent the heart and soul of San Francisco. They call themselves a “donut hole” that is so under-resourced that people entering Lower Nob Hill from Union Square can easily tell its boundaries by the state of streets.
“I mean, when Union Square needs something, it gets it,” said Gallotta — whether that’s community policing or street cleaning. “They always say the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We had to really become a squeaky wheel.”
Sauter said in December that he heard, loud and clear on the campaign trail, that Lower Nob Hill has been neglected. Gallotta hopes that, in the new year, Sauter will walk the streets with them, wrangle city departments to attend community meetings and, for instance, address small hiccups like illegal dumping or a trashed street. Peskin responded personally to email chains between community members and city departments, Gallotta said.
The dense neighborhood is also advocating for more open spaces; currently, there’s no functional open space in the area, according to a map from the Recreation and Parks Department. Potential sites for a park have been identified at 989 Post St. and 50 Cosmo Place, both currently parking lots, and Gallotta hopes Sauter can move conversations along.
Lower Polk, located on the west side of Lower Nob Hill, shares similar issues. It is also calling for more love from the new supervisor, according to Chris Schulman, executive director of the Lower Polk Community Benefit District. Schulman says the neighborhood gets little to no support from the city: “We just don’t qualify for anything, because we’re not downtown and we’re not Tenderloin, and we’re not Civic Center. We’re just lonely Lower Polk.”
A goal is to “bring our nightlife economy back to where it was on Polk pre-pandemic,” said Schulman, who hopes Sauter champions a monthly entertainment night market to expand Lower Polk’s Fern Alley music series. “Like a first Friday, first Saturday or, pick a day of the month [night market] … to bring nightlife into the community,” he said.
The area also needs a stepped-up police or homeless team presence for drug dealing and alleyway encampments. Being on the borders of the police department’s Central and Northern stations, “sometimes we get in this little loophole,” said Chris Gembinski, president of Discover Polk Community Benefit District. They hope it’s an issue that can be addressed in the ongoing police redistricting, whether it’s aligning the boundaries of the supervisorial district and police districts, or being grafted onto Tenderloin Station.
On the edge of downtown, Barbary Coast (which encompasses the Embarcadero) is also looking for attention on public safety. Diana Taylor, president of the Barbary Coast Neighborhood Association, said, “Lower Nob Hill definitely has more of those kinds of problems. We’re kind of the second in line.”
The north: Please don’t change us
Bay St
Grant Ave
Columbus Ave
TELEGRAPH
HILL
Sansome St
NORTH
BEACH
Broadway
Washington St
Van Ness Ave
Market St
TELEGRAPH
HILL
Bay St
NORTH
BEACH
Van Ness Ave
Market St
Note: The boundaries of the neighborhoods are delineated based on information from neighborhood groups and Google Maps. Map by Junyao Yang.
Up on the hills, it’s a totally different story.
“It’s really important to understand the history of where you’re serving, in order to bring it forward,” said Nick Ferris, president of Telegraph Hill Dwellers, referring to the neighbors’ anxiety about preserving the status quo. When it comes to housing, for instance, it’s about protecting affordable housing and rental stock, with a strong opposition to “out-of-scale” buildings.
A concern some have about Sauter is that “he’s too closely aligned with the YIMBY movement,” said Howard Wong, president of District 3 Democratic Club and an architect. This, he said, implies a “predilection to build more market-rate housing, and luxury housing isn’t necessarily a good thing for a lot of neighborhoods.”
“North Beach or Russian Hill or Lower Nob Hill, all these neighborhoods have a certain character that, over time, will get better and better if it’s nurtured,” he said. “But [if] you keep on changing them, then it becomes like any other neighborhood anywhere else in the world.”
Zoubi of North Beach hopes the new supervisor will “understand how the district got to this point” and keep laws like the retail ban on chain stores intact. He’s proud that North Beach has the highest concentration of legacy businesses in the city. “If you walk in North Beach and walk into any business, you have an 80 to 95 percent chance to meet the owner of the business.”
For transportation planning, the attitude is: “Learn from previous examples of other neighborhoods,” said Zoubi, seemingly referring to the saga of the Valencia bike lane that has left few in the neighborhood happy. Last summer, a new San Francisco biking-network proposal encountered fierce opposition in North Beach, with many fearing a new bikeway might make it a second Valencia Street.
Sabrina R. Matlin, vice president of North Beach Neighbors, echoed the skepticism of new housing while citing an internal survey of 30 members, who said they wanted it all: protected bike lanes, speed control and parking. Sauter is a former president of North Beach Neighbors.
This probably represents the actual divergence among the constituents. Marc Bruno, vice president of the District 3 Democratic Club, suggested that Sauter, who began his career with a startup specialized in digital marketing, should probably survey the district to learn what residents want regarding building heights, bike lanes and homeless shelters.
Neighborhoods with citywide issues
FISHERMAN’S
WHARF
FINANCIAL
DISTRICT
Van Ness Ave
CHINATOWN
Market St
UNION
SQUARE
FISHERMAN’S
WHARF
Bay St
Broadway
Washington St
CHINATOWN
Van Ness Ave
FINANCIAL
DISTRICT
UNION
SQUARE
Market St
Note: The boundaries of the neighborhoods are delineated based on information from neighborhood groups and Google Maps. Map by Junyao Yang.
Some of the neighborhoods have “citywide issues, but they happen to be in District 3,” said Moe Jamil, a deputy city attorney and a 2024 candidate for District 3 supervisor, who finished third in the election. Those are the tourist and commercial areas of Union Square, Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown. Their recovery is essential to all of San Francisco.
Sauter has made downtown recovery one of his top three priorities for his first 100 days. The situation there is getting much better from the nadir of the pandemic thanks to hybrid work, but there’s still more to do, said Rodney Fong, president of San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.
“We need to think about downtown as the next coolest neighborhood of San Francisco” he said, referring to a shift from a 9-to-5 area to one that’s 24/7. The new downtown should encompass everything from office to retail to parks to events spaces.
That takes creativity from the new supervisor, said Fong. The Chamber of Commerce, for instance, recently explored the potential of having a professional women’s soccer stadium in place of the Westfield shopping center, or creating a collective of universities that share gymnasiums, auditoriums and even dormitory housing.
Similarly, for Fisherman’s Wharf, “the bones are great,” said Fong, who’s also the third-generation owner of the Wax Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf. “It needs a little bit of organization and some love and a little bit of a North Star.” One suggestion: For Sauter to conduct studies to learn how people move around Fisherman’s Wharf.
Throughout the neighborhood, there is also concern about the looming $876 million budget deficit. The constituents want Sauter to both preserve existing services, and secure new services. The 30-Stockton bus line that Chinese seniors rely on is at imminent risk of service cuts beginning in March. And it’d be key to downtown recovery, should the city add express buses from the neighborhoods to downtown; currently, the 14R is almost the only line that feeds downtown and has decent ridership.
Chinatown’s vibrancy has also suffered from remote work. “A huge piece of Chinatown’s economy was the lunchtime traffic from downtown office workers. That hasn’t come back yet,” said Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center. “Another huge piece of Chinatown’s economy was, basically, tourists and visitors from China. That hasn’t come back yet.”
Chinatown is in the process of several large projects that are “going to define the future of Chinatown,” said Yeung. Those include renovating Portsmouth Square, building a new facility for the Chinese Cultural Center, and erecting a 15-story affordable housing project at 772 and 758 Pacific Ave., all of which are expected to happen during Sauter’s first term.
Yeung hopes Sauter will continue to push for it all.
Beyond that, there’s also an ongoing fight for the living standards of SRO tenants, especially those in Chinatown. “The living space is so cramped that many children do their homework in bed,” said Sandy Jiang, a community organizer at the Chinatown Community Development Center, who hopes to get Sauter’s support while they advocate for 150 permanent rental subsidy slots for citywide SRO families. Currently, they have 110.
It’s a big job Sauter has, but it’s not entirely Mission Impossible. All the community leaders concur: Sauter’s predecessor, Peskin, was very good at “empowering” his constituents, looping in city departments, advocating for them if they ran into trouble, and connecting them to those who could help or object to a new idea.
“Our supervisor is our number-one advocate within the government,” said Schulman of Lower Polk.
A good first step for Lower Nob Hill would be strong, effective traffic calming for Sutter, Bush, and Pine, along with some wider sidewalks.
In a word, nope. Those are major thoroughfares. Closing down on those is a classic fail that hasn’t made the city any safer nor more walkable, and the opposite is in fact true due to the deficits impacting actual law enforcement that does make a difference.
There’s not enough traffic to justify 3 lanes.
Bush and Pine are two of the few roads in SF that do an efficient job of moving people at reasonable speeds and thruput. They are crucial vehicular arteries.
Not any more.
Fantastic article. As evidenced in these interviews and story, THE primary role of a district supervisor, first and foremost, is to engage, meet with and listen to district constituents in all decisions. Finding solutions and compromises is the delicate challenge for a district supervisor elected to represent myriad neighborhoods and communities. Aaron Peskin was a master of this balancing act and consequently, would have made a skilled, responsive and excellent mayor.
“A concern some have about Sauter is that “he’s too closely aligned with the YIMBY movement,” said Howard Wong, president of District 3 Democratic Club and an architect. This, he said, implies “predilection to build more market-rate housing,”
An architect who hates new construction – this one always gets me. It’s like being a militantly vegan butcher, or a cop who wants to abolish the police.
It’s nonsense to assume that someone who disagrees with the YIMBY movement automatically “hates new construction”.
New market rate construction does jack the eff for the housing crisis. It will never keep pace with the deep pockets of yuppie demand which will always make it unaffordable for the service and city workers we need as a functioning system. YIMBY politics are as mindless as those “opposed to housing” in general when it comes to actually solving the problem they are advertising to be the solution for.
I’m about to blow your mind, so I hope you’re sitting down for this: Market-rate housing is not the only kind of housing. Affordable housing developments are also a form of new construction that employs architects.
Am I supposed to believe that the Telegraph Hill Dwellers will welcome a high rise in their quaint little neighborhood with open arms as long as its inhabitants are lower income? Riiiiiiiight.
Thanks for running these interviews! Paradoxically, trash cans seem to lead to more trash on the streets. On a trip to Japan it was hard to find a single trash can, and just as hard to find street litter. Sadly, those who litter won’t be making an effort to use these new trash cans.