By Aldo Toledo Dec 12, 2023 (SFChronicle.com)
Supervisor Dean Preston argues in a new documentary that capitalism is to blame for San Francisco’s ills including rampant drug use, homelessness and crime in the Tenderloin, prompting critics to question the logic of the supervisor, who’s the only Democratic Socialist on the board.
The new investigative documentary by the British outlet UnHerd — founded by British Conservative Party political activist Tim Montgomerie — explores how San Francisco has failed to deal with its homelessness, drug use and crime problems and how the Tenderloin is ground zero for the city’s ills.
Preston said in the film that the neighborhood’s problems are “absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs” of society.
“The biggest driver of why folks are on the street is because they lost their jobs, income, or were evicted from their homes, usually for not being able to pay rent,” Preston told the UnHerd interviewer. “So, you have major landlords literally causing folks to lose their homes, and real estate speculation making it impossible for folks to find an affordable place to live.”
Critics of Preston point out that San Francisco’s housing crisis has helped drive the homelessness crisis by driving up rent. The city has been deemed the toughest place to build homes in California. They point out that San Francisco has some of the toughest renter protections in the country, making it more difficult for speculators to push out vulnerable tenants.
Since the documentary aired, Preston’s face and quotes have been plastered over conservative outlets like Fox News, the Daily Mail and Daily Wire. Preston is up for reelection in 2024 and moderate groups are trying to unseat him, including the political action group GrowSF, which is running the “Dump Dean Preston” campaign.
“Dean Preston votes against building more housing, votes against businesses, and he doesn’t care about crime that’s affecting our residents and our small business community,” the Dump Dean website says before listing “31 Reasons to Dump Dean Preston.”
Preston, who represents District 5 — which encompasses the Tenderloin, Japantown, Western Addition and Haight-Ashbury — has consistently criticized Mayor London Breed and other lawmakers for leaning on law enforcement to address open-air drug use and rampant drug dealing.
“The approach that we’ve taken is very inconsistent as a city — ramping up enforcement activities, whether it’s sweeps of homeless people or drug users, doing a series of arrests usually tied with some news cycle — and then, a few days later, a few weeks later, a few months later, the same thing happens,” Preston said in the film. “Arresting drug users has not made our city any safer. It’s actually made it less safe: it increases overdoses.”
UnHerd has been criticized for its often conservative-leaning bias in the way it reports certain stories. Montgomerie has been a longtime conservative political commentator and worked in the administration of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He also has promoted far-right, antisemitic views in the past that misrepresent Marxist scholarship, according to the Independent, a United Kingdom news outlet.
In an interview with the Chronicle, Preston said it was “pretty clear” to him that UnHerd has a “strong bias” about him and his policies when he began the interview for the documentary.
He said that homelessness is a “prime example” of what happens when “you turn the basic needs of human beings over to private interests,” which is “the heart of the approach under capitalism.”
Asked why other cities have been able to deal with problems that San Francisco can’t seem to address, Preston said cities across the U.S. are also facing affordability crises, and that San Francisco is not unique.
He said a UCSF study that noted that 90% of unhoused people in California are from the state “shows how economic pressures, people losing income, and losing their jobs” is one of the “biggest drivers of homelessness in California.” He said people can’t exit homelessness because of “runaway housing prices” due to “very wealthy owners who continue to profit from our cities.”
In a more socialist society, Preston said, San Francisco would look like Vienna, Austria, where about 60% of people live in “social housing” — public housing and other limited-profit housing. If the state were to repeal the Costa-Hawkins act — which limits a city’s ability to impose controls on rent prices — and the Ellis Act — which allows landlords to give just-cause reasons for evicting tenants — and then invest in permanently affordable housing options, San Francisco could start to look more like Vienna, which has all but eliminated homelessness.
But he said the “problematic combination” of capitalism and its “corporate Democrat” defenders are making that goal nearly impossible. He criticized Mayor London Breed for her refusal to spend money raised from property sales over $10 million to buy more land for affordable housing.
“For the folks who argue that more capitalism and less regulation is a solution to San Francisco’s housing costs, I would argue it’s the exact opposite: It’s only the market interventions around rents, around creating affordable housing, that continue to allow any low-income or working-class people to exist here,” he said.
Reach Aldo Toledo: Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com
Dec 12, 2023
By Aldo Toledo
Adalberto “Aldo” Toledo is a city hall reporter with The San Francisco Chronicle covering the mayor and Board of Supervisors. He is a Venezuelan American from a family of longtime journalists.
Before joining the Chronicle in 2023, he reported on Peninsula governments and breaking news for the San Jose Mercury News. He also has bylines in the Dallas Morning News, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Champaign, Illinois News-Gazette.
Raised in Texas, he studied journalism with a print news focus at the University of North Texas Mayborn School of Journalism, where he worked as News Editor for the North Texas Daily student newspaper.
He can be reached at Aldo.Toledo@sfchronicle.com.
