Billionaires are trying to buy San Francisco’s election. It’s not too late to vote

Joe Eskenazi, Mission Local’s managing editor, is a good reporter, and some of what he says in his column this morning is true: The billionaires are trying to take control of San Francisco, and in many areas, are succeeding. The huge blunt-force trauma of $13 million for the mayor’s ballot measures is stunning. It’s easy to feel as if the progressives are desperately on the ropes.

But the progressives are always outspent in San Francisco, and big money has, at least for the past 30 years, made sure that the city’s mayors are friendly with big business. When I started in this business in the early 1980s, it was downtown developers like Walter Shorenstein, and corporations like Chevron, PG&E, Wells Fargo and Bank of America. Now it’s Big Tech and a handful of billionaires. (In the old days Eskenazi talks about, the hippie era, the town was run largely by Republicans and right-wing law-and-order Democrats.)

The names have changed, and the amounts of money have escalated, but it’s never been easy for the left in this supposedly liberal town. And yet, we have won some huge victories—rent control, office development limits, affordable housing mandates, district elections, free City College, and so much more.

The level of economic inequality has exploded during three tech booms; when I was a young reporter making $17,500 a year in 1984, the young MBAs who went into finance were making $50,000. Big money for that period, but nothing compared to the vast sums the tech industry has offered.

The displacement of those tech booms has, indeed, changed the demographics of the city. As my old friend Calvin Welch says, “who lives here, votes here.” Drive away all the working-class folks and you get a gilded city of the rich, who tend to vote with their economic interests (and tend to believe in deregulation and free-market capitalism, thus the rise of the Yimbys; hey, it worked for them).

And yet, you can read Joe’s piece and get the impression that there’s nothing anyone can do. The billionaires have won. The progressives have no agenda except

proposing revenue measures to soak big business, and using that money to fund programs and nonprofits that can barely patch the hole that the rising cost of housing (and everything else ) has torn in the city fabric. 

For the record: There is no such thing as a legitimate progressive agenda that doesn’t start with taxing the rich. Even if all the money we get from those taxes isn’t used productively, reducing the wealth at the top is critical to our survival as a society. If Mayors London Breed and Daniel Lurie hadn’t sidelined the Prop. I money. Add another thousand from Prop. C, and that’s 20,000 affordable units over ten years, maybe 40,000 people who aren’t forced out of the city. That’s more than a patch.

But I don’t think a majority of the voters in San Francisco today are purely rich and greedy. We have more rich and greedy folks than we did a decade ago (the Anthropic leaders and many of their workers are clearly willing to risk the future of humanity for the chance to cash in on an IPO. That’s about the worst greed I’ve seen here in my adult life.) But I still think a majority of the residents of this city are, in general, progressive folks. Tom Steyer won the primary for governor in June by an overwhelming margin in San Francisco.

The late Rev. Jesse Jackson got it in 1984: The people who could have defeated Ronald Reagan and changed the direction of the country forever didn’t bother to vote.

As of 5pm on the day before Election Day, the Department of Elections has received about 25 percent of the ballots that were mailed out. District 8, which has a contested supervisor race (and a lot of Wiener voters) is at 30 percent. District 10, which also has a contested supervisor race, is at 20 percent. District 4, which has no contested supe race but has a lot of folks who want to open the Great Highway, is at 25 percent. Connie Chan’s home district, D1, is at 27 percent.

In other words, a whole lot of people haven’t voted. If the city gets turned even further over to the billionaires, it won’t just be the result of gentrification; it will be the result of a lot of voters staying home.

Everyone who is registered in San Francisco got a ballot in the mail. It takes ten minutes to vote. You can drop it at any one of more than 500 voting places, or in any of the city’s drop boxes, or at City Hall. If you are new to town, you can still register and vote on Election Day.

It looks like rain tomorrow. That’s never good news on an Election Day. But the billionaire takeover and the Gilded City is not a done deal. It’s all about who votes.

It’s your city. You don’t have to let the big men take it away from you.

Polls open at 8am. We will be doing live election-night coverage when the first results come in, starting about 8:45 pm.

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