In one of the city’s most closely watched races this election, the District 5 seat held by the city’s first and only elected democratic socialist, Supervisor Dean Preston, is being challenged by a range of four candidates positioned to his right — whether on housing, the role of law enforcement, or approaches to the drug epidemic.
Halfway through our weekly Q&A leading up to the election, certain differences among those newcomers have become clearer, as have similarities between them and Preston.
Law Enforcement
In the realm of policing, all of the candidates including Preston believe some law enforcement is necessary to deal with the drug epidemic. They generally call for substance abuse treatment, housing options, and a need to improve street conditions like rampant public drug use, alongside their calls for enforcement.
Some take it to another level: Autumn Looijen, a former software engineer who initiated the school board recall in 2022, and Scotty Jacobs, a marketing professional who joined the race in recent weeks, both support deportation of foreign-born dealers and compelled treatment for users.
Bilal Mahmood, Preston’s primary challenger, takes a more tempered approach. He supported arresting dealers and providing substance abuse treatment, but did not suggest deportation or compelled treatment.
Preston, too, supports law enforcement and arrests as parts of a larger strategy, despite his opponents efforts to imply he doesn’t. He supports a “Four Pillars” approach that has seen success in Switzerland to tackle the drug epidemic, balancing law enforcement with prevention of drug use among youth or vulnerable communities, easy access to substance abuse treatment, and harm reduction strategies to mitigate risks involved with drug use.
On the topic of drug use and harm reduction, Mahmood and Preston both said they support safe consumption sites, which would allow drug use under city supervision. These would prevent deaths but also can be a gateway to someone entering treatment, addiction specialists argue. Mahmood again tempered his response, adding that he also wants abstinence-based treatment options alongside those sites.
All of the candidates but Preston supported Prop. E, a ballot measure empowering the police chief and rolling back certain reforms of the police department.
“Unfortunately, Proposition E offers nothing that will make us safer,” Preston wrote about the measure before it passed. “The measure reduces oversight of police, blocks crucial reforms, encourages dangerous, high-speed car chases through our streets, and unleashes unchecked surveillance on San Franciscans.”
The proposition shrank reporting requirements on the use of force, and gave the police new surveillance powers not subject to city privacy laws. It also moved to cripple the power of the Police Commission, an oversight body that has been persistently cast as a boogeyman for the city’s police problems by Breed and others.
For Mahmood, that issue apparently resonated as “reducing bureaucratic bottlenecks.”
He called the Prop. E’s loosening of car chase restrictions “questionable,” but still voted for it.
Bureaucracy
Like Preston’s other challengers, Mahmood emphasized his distaste for bureaucracy in many of his responses.
As with his apparent support for limiting the Police Commission’s powers, Mahmood called for reducing the number of commissions, apparently in support of political action group TogetherSF’s proposed ballot measure for November.
Preston took the opposite tack and pointed out just how powerful San Francisco’s mayor is: “The mayor appoints commissions, hires and fires department directors, and has unilateral control over spending the $14.6 billion budget.”
In fact, while the city’s budget is vast, the portion directly controlled by the mayor this fiscal year was more like $2.3 billion; the portion controlled by the supervisors, however, was much smaller still: Just $42 million.
Instead of weakening or cutting commissions, Preston said, he wants to make commissioners more independent.
Looijen did not answer this question, though she has in other responses referenced a desire to “reduce administration” and audit nonprofits. And while Jacobs had not yet joined the Meet the Candidates series at the time, he told Mission Local that a major focus for his campaign will also be to cut away at inefficiencies in the city’s budget and to audit and track the performance of city services.
“San Francisco doesn’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem,” wrote Jacobs in response to a recent question about this year’s budget decisions. “On Day 1 in office, I’ll demand an audit of outside vendors,” which receive billions of the city’s $15 billion budget. (He did not say what departments he would give more or less money to.)
Housing
Bureaucracy is a big topic in the race, in part because housing is often tied up in it. Most of the newcomer candidates in District 5 want to do away with the processes they say hinder the building of new housing.
Mahmood, when asked about his number-one issue this election, took a tone similar to Jacobs’: “We are the slowest city to approve new buildings in the entire state,” Mahmood wrote in February, counting up the required fees and permits to build. “It’s not progressive, it’s embarrassing. We must tackle the bureaucracy holding us back.”
Looijen, too, has said she wants to “start by fixing the process,” which she said is too slow to effectively build more housing.
Preston, meanwhile, championed his record voting for and building new housing —a record his opponents seem to dispute; one YIMBY advocate filed a lawsuit this week accusing Preston of lying.
Preston’s first moves would include prioritizing certain sites he wants to see housing on, like the DMV parking lot and Parcel K, a contested city-owned plot of land in Hayes Valley, intended to become affordable housing.
But therein lies the rub—for all the talk of cutting red tape and jumping on any opportunity to build housing, each of the candidates has different opinions and reservations about specific sites, like the 400 Divisadero former car wash and the Nordstrom parking lot at Stevenson and 6th streets.
Looijen wanted to focus on the carwash site, and she accused Preston of not allowing housing to go through there. Preston opposed a market-rate development on the site in favor of affordable housing, and accused Breed of blocking affordable housing there.
Looijen and Mahmood have also pointed to the Nordstrom parking lot as an example of Preston blocking housing. In a 2021 vote, eight of the 11 supervisors voted against the development. Preston and his colleagues on the board ultimately approved it, but the property owner has opted not to start building.
When it comes to Parcel K, the city-owned lot next to Patricia’s Green designated for affordable housing that has been stalled, many of the purportedly pro-housing candidates stepped back. Looijen insisted that the area has become a town square and cannot be developed. Jones agreed with Looijen, while Jacobs wanted mixed-use housing on the site.
Mahmood sought a compromise. He suggested building adjacent to Parcel K, or building affordable housing there, “but with an atrium on the ground floor to preserve the open space.” Or — dropping the long-debated issue altogether.
