by Bay View Editorial Board
This week, San Francisco voters face what is in effect a referendum on the Willie Brown machine. This paper proudly endorsed Willie Brown in his first bid for San Francisco mayor and was sorely let down by a corrupt style of machine politics that turned its back on poor and working-class families and communities. It is well-known that the City’s subsequent mayors including Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee and London Breed have been part and parcel of the political machine Willie Brown has kept well-oiled for many decades.
Mayor Breed’s administration is currently embroiled in on-going corruption probes as various former department heads are now behind bars. Instead of supporting recent efforts to institute direct reparations for Black San Franciscans, Breed opted to pour tens of millions of City dollars into non-profits overseen and run by political cronies. Her signature Dream Keepers program is now mired in ethics violations. Don’t get us wrong. We believe in the Dream Keepers mission and hope the program survives with an emphasis on much needed financial literacy and ethics compliance for inequitably under-resourced community-based organizations. But the recent meltdown underscores the problem with Breed’s style of politics. Gatekeepers instead of end-users benefit most and mismanagement erodes confidence in support for Black causes. For these reasons, we can’t give her our #1 endorsement.
Nevertheless, Breed has overseen a period of improved quality of life in Bayview Hunters Point for which she deserves partial credit. Police cruisers no longer prowl the Third Street corridor looking for the slightest pretext to arrest Black and Brown youth. After world-wide protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and subsequent movements across the United States to defund the police and demand accountability for police brutality, it would have been more than odd for a mayor who grew up in housing projects in the Fillmore to revert to the pre-2020 status quo. Breed rode this wave of change and has had a positive role to play in keeping the peace in typically embattled neighborhoods. If she wins re-election, we expect this progress to continue and hope for increased attention on equitable development in the neighborhood, the issue which defines our support for Aaron Peskin this year.
Aaron Peskin recently came to speak with our editorial board. We were impressed by his candid pitch to change the tone of leadership at City Hall and do for every neighborhood in the city what he has accomplished for his district as one of the longest serving supervisors in San Francisco history. He promises a full, independent audit of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard cleanup and offered to open doors at City Hall to better address concerns about the wider development of the Southeast sector, including Hunters Point and Candlestick. He understands that hard fought community benefits agreements with Lennar/Five Points represent a microcosm of all the issues that directly impact the long-term survival and well-being of Black San Francisco: affordable housing, workforce development, education, and school-to-jobs pipelines for employment in equitable neighborhood development and 21st century jobs.
He spoke with passion about San Francisco’s duty to make reparations for the Redevelopment era and heard our call to replace Thor Kaslofsky as director of OCII, Redevelopment’s successor agency, for blatantly repeating mistakes of the past and rubber-stamping broken promises. Peskin has a track record of taking on corruption, promoting affordable housing, funding universal healthcare, raising the minimum wage and protecting tenants. He also approached our conversation with appreciable humility and awareness in seeking a Black newspaper’s endorsement while running against a Black incumbent. He asked for our #2 endorsement and got our #1.
As we previously editorialized, we are adamant about preventing Mark Farrell from becoming mayor. His answer to every policy question is a combination of more cops and tax breaks for rich corporations. As district supervisor, he tried to kill the new Booker T. Washington center. He’s anti-Black and, politically, he is San Francisco’s version of Donald Trump. If you seek a fuller ranking than we have to offer please consider checking Daniel Lurie, Asha Safaí and basically anybody but Mark Farrell on your ballot.
To contact the SF Bay View Editorial Board, email Kevin Epps at [email protected].
