By J.D. Morris Updated April 4, 2024 (SFChronicle.com)
Aaron Peskin, the progressive president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, says he is entering the city’s already-crowded mayor’s race partly because of what he sees as a chaotic governing strategy from incumbent London Breed.
Peskin, who plans to formally declare his candidacy with the city’s elections department on Friday, told the Chronicle in a Thursday morning interview that he would be a mayor who “loves the city and doesn’t beat up on it for cynical political gain.” He criticized Breed for what he described as an incoherent approach to solving the city’s most pressing problems, including drug abuse, homelessness and housing.
“There has been no consistency. There has been no follow-through. This is an administration that is largely driven by press,” Peskin told the Chronicle. “It is not an administration that is being run maturely.”
What is ranked-choice voting?
In the ranked-choice system, voters can rank up to 10 candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote on the first ballot, the candidate with the least number of votes is eliminated and his or her votes are redistributed to their voters’ next-highest choices. The tallying process gets repeated until one candidate secures a majority of the votes.
The comments from Peskin were a possible preview of a message he will promote after he kicks off his long-expected mayoral campaign during a Saturday morning rally in Chinatown, a storied neighborhood he has represented in the more than 16 years he has served on the Board of Supervisors. His entry into the November mayor’s race comes more than a month after the Chronicle reported he privately told associates he would run.
Peskin stands to be a formidable opponent to Breed. He has deep connections in San Francisco political circles and is likely to capture significant support from the city’s progressive voters, who have shown little enthusiasm for a field of candidates that lines up to his political right. But he’s also expected to be a polarizing figure among moderate-leaning voters. Breed and other candidates are already using his extensive record at City Hall to characterize him as someone who has repeatedly blocked needed progress, particularly on housing.
“We are living in a time that has a disproportionate amount of anger and hatred, and I think if we’re going to recover, yes, we need to be firm, and yes, we have to draw clear lines, but we have to be compassionate and uniting,” Peskin said.
“What I see in the other candidates is, rather than taking responsibility, they are all engaged in finger-pointing and blaming,” he said. “They’ve blamed compassion. They’ve blamed nonprofits. They’ve blamed judges. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with the mayor.”
A February poll conducted by the Chronicle found Breed may be at serious risk of losing reelection, with a majority of San Francisco voters disapproving of her performance as mayor. Her closest competitors in the poll, conducted before Peskin entered the race, were moderate candidates Mark Farrell, a former mayor and supervisor, and Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir.
The poll found about 40% of the electorate remained undecided, with those describing themselves as progressives in particular unsure of their vote. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is also running for mayor and has been seeking to attract progressive voters, including by coming out strongly against a March ballot measure spearheaded by Breed that expanded police powers.
Peskin’s candidacy adds more uncertainty to the race, particularly in how San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting will influence the results — and how campaign strategies may shift in the months ahead.
Peskin, 59, is a seasoned politician who is intricately familiar with San Francisco’s laws, procedures and history, and he often draws on that knowledge during policy debates with his colleagues or the mayor’s office. Over two separate stints since the turn of the century, he has represented District 3, which includes North Beach, Chinatown and the Financial District.
But Peskin’s long tenure at City Hall could also be a liability. Farrell and Lurie, who contend that Breed represents the status quo in a city in need of big changes, are extending that argument to Peskin.
“I am committed to doing everything I can to stop Supervisor Aaron Peskin from becoming Mayor,” Farrell said in a statement. “Peskin is abusive, toxic, and a documented obstructionist to the progress San Francisco needs to make to get back on track.”
Breed and her allies in the YIMBY movement, which supports an aggressive expansion of housing at all income levels, are likely to highlight Peskin’s record of opposing or seeking to slow down various development projects.
Peskin is known for his staunch support of rent control and neighborhood preservation. Supervisors recently passed legislation he sponsored that restricted development in parts of his district. Peskin described it as a necessary correction to an earlier city law that he said unwittingly allowed for overly tall towers he considers too tall to be built in historic areas along the northeast waterfront.
Breed vetoed the legislation, saying it “passes off anti-housing policy in the guise of historic protections,” but supervisors overrode her veto in an 8-3 vote last week.
Joe Arellano, a spokesperson for Breed’s reelection campaign, told the Chronicle in a statement that Breed “is happy to put up her record against Aaron Peskin’s, any day of the week” and said Peskin has “a well-documented career” of blocking major housing projects.
“The voters of San Francisco shouldn’t be fooled. Aaron Peskin is the architect of obstruction on the Board of Supervisors,” Arellano said. “He’s led the Board during five different mayoral administrations and the divisiveness in city government has continually ramped up over the years to the fever pitch where it now resides. Now, he’s seeking the Mayor’s Office to try and finish the job of turning San Francisco into a NIMBY state and the City of ‘No.’ ”
In his interview with the Chronicle, Peskin defended his record on housing policy and said he supported building more affordable homes for middle-class families instead of “a wall of 200-foot luxury housing towers for the international elite along the Embarcadero.” He said other candidates’ reactions to his campaign so far showed “they have something that they are scared of.”
Peskin has worked with Breed in some areas, collaborating with her on legislation to lower affordable-unit requirements in housing developments, promote office-to-housing conversions and allow police to access live feeds from privately owned surveillance cameras. But he’s also expressed frustration with her leadership on the fentanyl crisis, notably confronting her at a 2023 hearing he called in United Nations Plaza, where he argued she hadn’t done enough to shut down the city’s “drug supermarkets.”
Peskin and Breed also backed dueling housing measures on the November 2022 ballot. Both failed.
Peskin has not been immune to controversy during his time on the board. In 2021, he entered treatment for alcohol abuse after some elected officials, department heads and others accused him of being visibly intoxicated on the job and of bullying colleagues and lower-level government staff members.
“There’s no question that, in the last 24 years, I have behaved poorly, and I have apologized for those things,” Peskin told the Chronicle. “Stopping drinking alcohol has been a remarkable change in my life three years ago that I am deeply grateful for.”
Peskin indicated he would draw on his experience recovering from alcohol abuse while campaigning for mayor, saying that he thought “San Francisco needs to recover” from its current crises and he thought his “new lease on life” makes him uniquely qualified to accomplish that.
His extensive time in office may turn off many voters eager for fresh leadership in City Hall. Such criticism is especially likely from Lurie, who is trying to position himself as an outsider with a moderate agenda who would bring much-needed new perspective to the mayor’s office.
Tyler Law, a consultant for Lurie, said in a statement that Peskin’s candidacy would prompt “the chattering class” to cover the mayor’s race as “a fight between moderates and progressives — but that completely misses the point.” He said Lurie’s campaign “stands in stark contrast to the gang of City Hall insiders who have failed to get the job done.”
“The people who got us into this mess are not equipped to get us out of it,” Law said.
Safaí, meanwhile, said Peskin’s decision to become Breed’s fourth major challenger shows that she faces unusually stiff competition in her bid for another term.
“I think Aaron getting in is more of a statement about London Breed,” Safaí said Thursday. “But it’s a democracy, and if he’s choosing this journey in life, God bless.”
Peskin first won election as District 3 supervisor in 2000, as part of a wave of progressives who defeated moderate former Mayor Willie Brown’s allies. Peskin had risen to prominence in the late 1990s, when he helmed a powerful neighborhood group called the Telegraph Hill Dwellers.
By the time he finished his first two terms on the board in early 2009, Peskin, labeled by some as “the Napoleon of North Beach” (he once remarked that he stood 5 feet 4 “on a good day”), had become a polarizing political figure who often clashed with Brown and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom. But he also commanded respect.
Peskin was under consideration to become the city’s appointed mayor after Newsom won election as lieutenant governor in 2010. But he was one of several people passed over by the Board of Supervisors in favor of Ed Lee, then the city administrator.
After Peskin’s District 3 successor, David Chiu, won election to the state Assembly in 2015, Peskin staged his return to the Board of Supervisors.
Peskin was reelected to represent District 3 in 2016 and 2020. He served four years as board president in his first stint as supervisor and regained the presidency in an upset in January 2023 after the former board president, progressive Supervisor Shamann Walton, was unable to secure enough votes for another term.
Peskin plans to frame his City Hall experience as an asset in his campaign by arguing that his deep familiarity with the myriad levers of San Francisco’s sprawling bureaucracy would make him an effective mayor. He’s also trying to present himself as a dealmaker.
“I fight hard, but in the end, I bring people together,” he said. “I think that I can spread some joy and some unity.”
Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @thejdmorris
April 4, 2024|Updated April 4, 2024 2:03 p.m.
By J.D. Morris
J.D. Morris covers San Francisco City Hall, focused on Mayor London Breed. He joined the Chronicle in 2018 to cover energy and spent three years writing mostly about PG&E and California wildfires.
Before coming to The Chronicle, he reported on local government for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, where he was among the journalists awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2017 North Bay wildfires.
He was previously the casino industry reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. Raised in Monterey County and Bakersfield, he has a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from UC Berkeley.
He can be reached at jd.morris@sfchronicle.com.
