Memorable lawsuits and other small talk on a Richmond District merchant walk
Sign up below to get Mission Local’s free newsletter, a daily digest of news you won’t find elsewhere.Sign up
“Can I ask you a question?” shouts the woman in athleisure, walking a dog on the other side of Clement Street.
“Of course you can,” Aaron Peskin shouts back.
The woman runs across the street to join Peskin and the small amoeba of campaign staff volunteers that are walking down Clement with him, carrying big stacks of campaign signs in English and Chinese. Her voice drops to a low, confidential murmur. “What about the Great Highway?” she says. “Keeping it open?” “What do you think?” responds Peskin.
A person who spends some time on the campaign trail with Peskin will notice that there are a few things that are non-negotiable. Peskin is unequivocally for rent control — and for expanding it to more buildings, if Costa Hawkins ever gets overturned at the state level. He’s extremely in favor of low-income housing, whether it’s constructing more of it, or keeping the existing kind from being knocked down. When a would-be voter challenges him on issues like these, his response in the past has been to smile pleasantly and say that they are always free to vote for someone else.
Stay informed on local elections — sign up for Mission Local’s free daily newsletter today!Sign up
In other areas of city governance where passions run high, though, Peskin can be harder to pin down, possibly because there often is no pin until there is a specific decision that needs to be made.
“I want to keep it open,” the woman says quietly, of the highway.
“I’m hearing that from more and more people as I’m walking around,” says Peskin. “I was at El Rio in the Mission last night, and people were telling me that.”
“I mean, there are plenty of places to walk,” says the woman.
The situation with the Great Highway is that back in June, a group of supervisors — Joel Engardio, Myrna Melgar, Matt Dorsey, Rafael Mandelman, and Dean Preston — submitted a ballot measure to close the section of the Great Highway between the San Francisco Zoo and the southwest corner of Golden Gate Park and turn it into a park. That section had begun closing to car traffic on the weekends, during the pandemic, the measure argued, and closing it permanently would be in keeping with the city’s transit-first policy, the Rec and Park Strategic Plan, and the Climate Action Plan.
“Here’s where I started at,” says Peskin. “It’s not really cool to put that on the ballot, when you can think about it at City Hall and bring people in and try to reach some compromise. We reached some compromise, which was the weekend closure. There was a lot of back and forth and it seemed like it was more divisive than it was helpful but I’m still on my listening tour.”
“Putting it on the ballot was stupid,” says the woman.
“Some people last night told me that they’re starting a recall drive on Supervisor Engardio,” says Peskin.
“Oh yeah,” says the woman.
“You do know that the piece of the Great Highway between Skyline and Sloat is going to close right?” adds Peskin. “Mother Nature bats last. I’m not gonna keep spending your tax money on fixing something that is falling into the ocean.” Yes, the woman agrees — if the ocean swallows the highway that’s different. Peskin hands her a business card and tells her to call his office.
Earlier that day on Clement Street, before Peskin arrives, a group of volunteers and campaign staff wait for Peskin and Assemblymember Phil Ting to arrive for the election ritual known as the merchant walk — walking along a business corridor, schmoozing with shopkeepers, asking if they’ll put a sign in their window.
News is out that San Francisco Public Works is clearing out homeless encampments on Division today, at the behest of Mayor London Breed. “I don’t want to sound cruel,” says one volunteer, about the rousted homeless people, “but I’m kind of selfish. Every time they start sweeping Division Street, they just come out here. It’s not like they disappear.” It’s also, he adds, a transparent play to lock down conservative votes. “Even the Nazis — I mean, all the conservative people on Nextdoor — are saying ‘Oh gee it’s an election year.’”
Anthony Ching-Ho Leung, Peskin’s Chinese Community Campaign Director, is still riding high off of the success of Peskin’s duet, in Cantonese, with Jacky Huang, of the George Lam Canto-pop classic “To be a Real Man.” It’s all over WeChat, says Leung. The song turned out to be eerily perfect — the lyrics, which are about how a real man has to give something his all even if he’s not sure he’ll succeed, echo the slogan that the team chose for Peskin’s Chinese-language signs (“A Person Who Can Get Things Done”). Also: Lam’s nickname in Hong Kong is “The Bearded Man” — the same thing that many Cantonese speakers call Peskin, on the grounds that the Chinese romanization of his name is a lot harder for people to remember.
Another teenage volunteer has taken the bus up alone from Daly City. “’I’m here to get a feel of what kind of a candidate you are,” he tells Peskin when he arrives. It’s not uncommon for Daly City kids to get involved in San Francisco politics, since their parents often send them to Chinese school in Chinatown, where they run into groups like the Chinese Progressive Association, which runs programs that train teenagers in grassroots organizing.
Ting and Peskin arrive, and begin going from door to door. There are signs that at least one other candidate (or their representatives) have been through here. A store that sells roast duck and lottery tickets has a Daniel Lurie sign in the window, and several issues of Wind, a bilingual Chinese/English newspaper. Each issue has a large ad for Lurie’s campaign on A1.
Ting and Peskin met in the early 2000s — Peskin was serving his first term at the Board of Supervisors, and Ting was at the Asian Law Caucus, working on the case of Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese American scientist who had been falsely accused of espionage. Peskin was unusual at the time, Ting says, for understanding how important Lee’s case was — that it was about larger issues of racism and civil rights, rather than one bad FBI investigation.
Working at the state level has turned out to be a whole new toolkit for tackling local issues, says Ting. Locally, he says, the most powerful tool you often have is zoning. At the state level a lot more is possible. For years, Ting had been part of an effort to lower speed limits in certain parts of San Francisco as a public safety measure. It took being elected to state government to actually make headway.
A block later, Ting and Peskin spot Eric and Gordon Mar, twin brothers and both former supervisors, eating lunch at Tenglong Chinese Restaurant. The group catches up on mutual friends and reminisces about memorable lawsuits the city has filed — the one that kept City College from getting shut down, the one against the developers behind the Millennium Tower. “It’s one of my secret tools,” Peskin says, adding that his lawsuit ideas still get turned down all the time. Everyone wants to get the City Attorney to sue someone.
Peskin’s District 3 — North Beach and Chinatown — is one of the most densely populated in the city. The western end of the city, where we are now, is one the least dense — part of the 40 percent of the city that consists almost entirely of single-family detached homes and one-story commercial buildings.
It’s unlikely to be that way for much longer. For the last several years, Peskin has been involved in a plan to re-zone the entire western side of the city in order to comply with a state-mandated housing element that requires the construction of 82,000 new housing units in the city by 2031.
The zoning changes are already extremely unpopular with some residents, but to Peskin, having six to eight story buildings along an existing transit corridor like Clement sounds like a pretty good way to meet the city’s housing goals. It also sounds a lot like North Beach, where Peskin lives—or most parts of San Francisco that were built out in the early 1900s. “The world I live in Is RH-3 or denser,” he says. This,” he says, gesturing down the street, “but with three floors on it.”
“Let’s go to Toy Boat!” he says, enthusiastically.
At Toy Boat, Peskin chats with the teenagers working behind the counter. He recognizes a couple of burly men sitting at a cafe table and tries to persuade them to go swimming with him in the Bay. People who swim in the Bay embody a particular type of San Francisco — the kind where a disparate band of individuals are drawn together by an obsession with something very few other people even want to try once.
Earlier that morning he swam out with an intern, an educator named Elizabeth Boyarsky who applied for an internship in Peskin’s office because she wanted to learn about local politics during summer break.
After the two of them compared feet on the balcony of the South End Rowing Club — a volunteer-run athletic club that dates back to 1873 — Peskin determined that Boyarsky would fit into his swim fins, and walked off to the locker room to grab them. On the sliver of beach below the balcony, swimmers walked into and out of the water, hailing each other casually like patrons at a coffee shop. The general look was muscles upon muscles upon muscles. One swimmer kept going back and forth between the bay and a plastic tub filled with ice water — training for the Dál Riada, a swim from Scotland to Ireland.
“This shows when the high and low tides are out,” said Peskin, opening a booklet and flipping past the entry on high and low tides. “We only look at this page: The velocity. Today at 6:36 at the Golden Gate it was slack tide. And 9:24 is the maximum flood tide of 2.8 knots. Which is pretty smoking.”
If you stay within the boundary of the Aquatic Park Pier, you don’t have to worry too much about velocity, he added. But if you’re headed farther, to someplace like Alcatraz, it’s important to time it around a slack period, so that you don’t wind up getting swept out to the Golden Gate Bridge.
He showed Boyarsky a few more highlights of the clubhouse (framed photo of the group of women who successfully sued to join in the club in the 1970s, framed photo of Peskin in a Speedo) and then the two of them disappeared into the gray water
H.R. SMITH
Heather Smith covers a beat that spans health, food, and the environment, as well as shootings, stabbings, various small fires, and shouting matches at public meetings. She is a 2007 Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism and a contributor to the book Infinite City.More by H.R. Smith
