Sasha’s March 2024 SF Voter Guide
Hello again! It’s been a couple years since I published a voter guide, but this year’s San Francisco election has got me het up enough I just gotta.
California Ballot Measures
Let’s get it out of the way, since there’s only one thing on the ballot.
Proposition 1, Mental Health and Housing Bond: Yes. You may have noticed that homelessness is an issue in California, and some substantial proportion of those experiencing homelessness have mental health or substance abuse problems. The idea here is to allow some of the existing mental health revenue from the millionaire tax we passed in 2004 to be used for substance abuse, and it would also authorize $6 billion in bonds to create more inpatient beds and build supportive housing. There are concerns that some of the new inpatient facilities will be used for involuntary commitment, but overall, this measure will help address a real problem, and is worth doing.
California Offices
Senator: Katie Porter. This is a hard one for me. I still remember the Barbara Lee Speaks for Me bumper stickers after Lee was the only congressperson with the courage to vote against the Use of Force bill after 9/11. A bill which has greased the US’s slide into many wars since. Porter’s definitely got a tendency to theatrics, which I think plays better in the House than the Senate, but her votes have been mostly solid. Ultimately, my decision here is based on the fact that Lee is 77 years old, and California has just finally gotten out from under a Senator too old for the job.
San Francisco Ballot Measures
Before I delve into the individual measures here, I want to set the scene a little. Over the last couple years, the Titans of Tech have realized that now that so many of the people who constituted the progressive base in SF have been priced out of the city, with enough money, almost anything is possible in San Francisco politics. It looks as if this year’s mayor’s race, for example, will be surprisingly expensive despite the fact that all of the candidates come from one pretty narrow slice of the city’s political spectrum. You’ll see this mostly not in the official campaign fundraising but in the supposedly independent committees that can raise infinite money with very little oversight. Daniel Lurie’s mom, for example, has put a million dollars into a committee supporting his run for mayor. You’re also seeing it in the spending on Props E and F, which was originally seen as a proxy way to pump up London Breed but has been hijacked by Lurie. And it seems likely that spending on the Democratic County Central Committee (a way to dump additional money into a supervisor candidate) will break all records as well. While by historical standards this all represents a huge step up in political funding in the city, it’s still a lot cheaper than propping up Uber for another year of multi-billion-dollar losses, so it probably seems like a bargain to the Y Combinator guys and their VC pals.
Which is great news if you think what San Francisco needs is more power for the people who brought you LootRush and CoinRule.
If, however, you’re more of the opinion that we ought not just lash out at the things that look icky but try to solve some of these problems, even if it might be longer and messier, then the onslaught of tech money will not be so welcome. Unfortunately, most of this new money seems to be targeted at bringing back the wildly unsuccessful ‘90s era War on Crime (along with its older sister War on Drugs and a guest appearance by friend of the family, Welfare Reform), and at increasing the power of the Mayor, who already has a huge amount of power by US city standards.
Anyway, that’s the lens through which it’s easiest to see what’s going on with this election.
A Note on Policing
Since crime and law enforcement are such big issues in this year’s election, I do want to point to one piece of data I’ve recently become aware of. From January 2014 to December 2023, the number of traffic citations issued by SFPD declined by 97%. That’s not a typo: 97%. Now, certainly traffic citations are problematic, but even for the most cynical police observer, that’s a remarkable statistic. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that, and I haven’t heard an explanation for why that happened, but if that reflects the general attitude of SFPD to their job, it’s not surprising people feel like crime goes unchecked.
Proposition A, Affordable Housing Bonds: Yes. This is a not-terribly-put-together bond measure to build affordable housing accessible to various income levels. Honestly, there’s no way San Francisco can solve the affordable housing crisis by ourselves, but this is one piece of a solution. Unfortunately, the folks that have seen the sense in, for example, donating $100,000 to Marjan Philhour’s campaign for Democratic County Central Committee have not bothered to actually back this measure, despite their well-publicized garment rending about San Francisco’s housing crisis.
Proposition B, Police Staffing Levels: No. So Mayor Breed and Supervisor and police propagandist Matt Dorsey (no, really, he was formerly Head of Strategic Communications for SFPD) proposed a ballot measure to reinstate a minimum staffing level for sworn peace officers (and add some other minor budget stuff regarding police staffing), which we removed in…2022. Aaron Peskin led a bunch of supervisors in adding a provision that the minimum staffing level would only take effect if there was a corresponding measure to raise revenue to pay for it (i.e. a new tax). Suddenly, the people who initially wanted more cops opposed this measure because it required us to pay for them, and the people originally opposed to more cops are now in favor of this because it makes it harder to increase minimum staffing in the future (and because it sticks it to London Breed). This is the kind of political maneuvering that makes for good news stories but bad governing.
Proposition C, Transfer Tax Modification: No. The headline item for this one is that it would exempt properties that have been converted from commercial to residential use from SF’s transfer tax on their first sale after conversion. Honestly, that’s not entirely a terrible idea. In theory it incentivizes property owners to convert their empty office buildings to housing. Whether it would be effective is unclear, but given the severity of the crisis, it might be worth trying. However, this proposition would also allow the board of supervisors to lower the property transfer tax at their whim, while requiring voter intervention to raise it. Now I’m the first to say that the Prop 13 strictures around taxes in California are stupid, and in a slightly smarter world they would be under control of the legislative body, we have a tax system entirely shaped by Prop 13, and so allowing the Supervisors (who are getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from people with a direct interest here) to lower it without being able to raise it means that short term political considerations will override the city’s financial needs and that’s bad.
UPDATE 2/26: According to a report by the Controller’s Office of Economic Analysis
it is unlikely that the proposed incentive [Prop C] will stimulate conversions unless and until market conditions improve
Proposition D, Changes to Local Ethics Laws: Fine. This is a reaction to the wave of scandals that’s shaken parts of city government over the last half-decade or so, and to that end will probably help a little but will not stop people from being corrupt if that’s what they wanna do.
Proposition E, Police Department Policies and Procedures: NO. There is a rule of thumb when designing ballot measures that you don’t want to include too many things, since it’s relatively effective for opponents to seize on one thing and use it to sink the whole measure. The designers of Prop E didn’t follow that rule at all. But honestly that makes sense, since each and every thing here (with one exception that we’ll get to in a minute) is a reanimation of a failed War on Crime idea that has failed for 30 years, so why not just chuck them all in here!
First, we have the notion that letting the police rip on some car chases like it’s Hazard County and someone stole Sheriff Coltrane’s hat. Turns out more than 1 in 3 SFPD car chases end in a crash, many of them resulting in injuries or even death. Or destruction of an entire storefront. To encourage that is nuts. Currently, car chases are only allowed when the target has committed a violent felony, or the officer believes they pose an immediate danger to public health and safety. Prop E would allow (among other cases) a car chase if the police officer “has a reasonable suspicion…a violent misdemeanor or felony…is likely to occur”. That, my friends, is a loophole (sorry) big enough to drive a paddy wagon through.
Next, we have the hoary old chestnut that the real problem is that police do too much paperwork, and if we just let them go out and walk a beat or investigate the bad guys, they would clean up our city right quick. Our city’s bike lanes are pretty good indication that not all stationary police are off doing paperwork. There are a couple items here, one of which is simply to reduce recordkeeping to the extent required by law, which, sure? The second is to remove the requirement that police officers file written use-of-force reports when they claim not to have injured someone they, e.g., forced into handcuffs. The theory is that their bodycam footage will stand in for a report. Anyone who pays attention to police activities is aware that police bodycams fail suspiciously frequently, and so aren’t a great source of truth. It’s also the case that treating this kind of low-level violence as routine will only encourage it. And of course cops aren’t doctors, and often aren’t the best judge of when they have injured someone.
Additionally, this would allow police to use drones in car chases and in “active criminal investigations”. As noted above, I’m not a huge fan of police car chases, but having a drone to track targets could potentially mean less mayhem. However, allowing drones in active criminal investigations will likely lead to a lot of drones peering in people’s windows. Some of them might even be the people under investigation!
Finally, this measure would make it easier to install surveillance cameras and allow the police to use facial recognition technology in these cameras and in drones. Face recognition technology is a) terrible, and b) more terrible the darker one’s skin is. So this would allow SFPD to adopt a technology that is known to discriminate against people of color. And it’s a technology that doesn’t consistently work on anyone. Madness.
Prop F, Drug Testing for People on Assistance: No. There is a very real drug problem in this city. This will not help. It would require city employees who are not trained in assessing people’s substance dependence or mental state to say whether they “reasonably suspect” a general assistance recipient of being dependent on illegal drugs and if they have that suspicion, force that person to go through an evaluation and perhaps get treatment or forgo the $1–800 they receive from the city every month. In addition to being punitive, this will further stress the already overwhelmed treatment infrastructure, crowding out people who voluntarily seek treatment, with people forced into treatment, who are substantially less likely to succeed.
Prop G, 8th grade algebra: Yeah, no, whatever. This is an advisory measure and will noy compel the school board (who actually controls this stuff) to do anything. The school board has already started pilots to figure out how to reintroduce algebra into 8th grade as fairly as possible.
San Francisco Offices:
Judge races. Superior Court judges are required to run for reelection every 6 years. This is normally a pretty pro forma thing. In fact, there are actually something like 15 judges up for reelection in SF, but since only two of them have opposition, the rest don’t even appear on the ballot. However, the same people trying to bring you more cops and more car chases have also targeted two of the judges running for reelection this time. Why these two of the dozen-plus judges running for reelection? Who knows?
The sitting judges are clearly competent, and the attempt to unseat them is a cynical political move.
Superior Court, Seat 1: Michael Isaku Begert.
Superior Court, Seat 13: Patrick S. Thompson.
Assembly, District 17: Whatever. Look, Matt Haney’s gonna win reelection, thereby advancing the one cause he truly believes in: Matt Haney’s Career. Plus, there are only two people running and it’s a top two primary (meaning the top two candidates in the primary make it to the general) so both people will make it to the general election, whatever the vote is.
Assembly District 19: David Lee. Lee proposes to address homelessness by concentrating on housing first. Honestly, this is the one thing that’s really seen success (in radical places like Utah, among others). It’s hard to do (because it’s expensive), but it’s the right way to approach the problem. He also has a big focus on education, which is one area the state can have a real impact. The other main candidate here, Catherine Stefani, has been unimpressive at the Board of Supervisors, and were she to be elected to the assembly, I’d expect her to continue to be unimpressive there. I expect we’ll see these two again in the general.
State Senate, District 11: Scott Wiener. I have pretty complicated feelings about Scott Wiener, but whatever my issues are, Scott’s gonna easily win reelection.
Democratic County Central Committee:
For the first time that I can remember, the DCCC race has (d)evolved into a straight-up slate battle. In the interest of getting this document out before the election I won’t go into too much detail about the candidates, but as I said at the top, there’s a huge amount of money trying to influence SF politics and it’s as clear here as anywhere. So I’m going mostly with the Working Families Slate here. Special shout out to Michal Nguyen, with whom I served on the board of Livable Cities!
Democratic County Central Committee Assembly District 17: Peter Gallotta, Kristin Hardy, John Avalos, Vick Chung, Patrick Bell, Gloria Berry, Adolfo Velasquez, Michael Nguyen, Sidney Simpson, Joshua Rudy Ochoa, Sal Rosselli, Jane Kim, Anita Martinez, Jeremy Lee
Democratic Central Committee Assembly District 19: Natalie Gee, Connie Chan, Queena Chen, Greg Hardeman, Hene Kelly, Frances Hsieh, Leah LeCroix, Sandra Lee Fewer, Gordon Mar, Mano Raju