SF District Five candidates spar over supervisor’s eviction of low-income tenants
Trisha Thadani Oct. 29, 2019
Accusations and attack ads have been flying back and forth in the District Five supervisor campaign, as the two major candidates hope to tip the scales of the highly competitive race just days before the November election.
Current Supervisor Vallie Brown and Dean Preston, a tenants rights activist, have spent much of the campaign taking jabs at each other’s personalities, professional histories and bases of support. But their latest spat reaches much further back: it centers on Brown’s record as a landlord in 1994, when she evicted three low-income African American residents from her Fillmore home.
A lawyer for one of the former tenants, Mary Packer, has demanded the supervisor apologize and threatened her with a defamation lawsuit on Monday over Brown’s statements that she was evicted because of delinquent rent. Documents provided to The Chronicle by the San Francisco Tenants Union — which endorsed Preston — show Packer and three other tenants paid rent until April 1994, the month they were evicted.
“I paid my rent every month,” said Packer, who now lives in the Western Addition.“She is not getting away with this lie on me.”
The Chronicle could not reach the other two tenants Tuesday afternoon.
Brown said she “sincerely” apologizes for saying the tenants did not pay rent. She said she was told by her attorney 25 years ago that the tenants had “rental payment issues.”
“It was my understanding over all these years, which made sense when we saw the condition of the building, but I accept that was not correct,” she told The Chronicle in a statement.
In a letter to Packer’s attorney, Brown said that she and her campaign “apologize to Ms. Packer, and to the other tenants, for that misstatement, which they retract and which they have removed from their website.”
Preston’s supporters hope news of the eviction — first reported by SF Weekly this month — will not only roil voters in a city where housing stability is a chief concern, but also tarnish Brown’s image as a neighborhood activist who has been evicted three times herself.
Brown, though, discounts news of the 1994 eviction as an 11th-hour attempt by her opponents to weaken her campaign over a long-ago case.
“The fact that Dean has based his entire final campaign on an incident from over 25 years ago is telling,” said her campaign consultant, Leo Wallach. “He’s out of touch and short on accomplishments on issues that matter to District Five.”
Wallach criticized Preston’s record over what he said was his decision to oppose “new rental housing near his mansion” and his “huge portfolio of tech stocks.”
Preston responded that he’s “fought for affordable housing, not luxury condos, my entire career and will keep doing that as supervisor.”
Attacks both personal and professional are expected in a campaign with as much at stake as this one: not only will the outcome determine the political makeup of the Board of Supervisors, but it could also have major implications for Mayor London Breed. The mayor appointed Brown to the seat when she was elected to office, and she is seen as one of her few allies on the board.
Preston, on the other hand, is seen as an adversary to Breed. He challenged her for her district seat in 2016, losing by about 1,800 votes out of 41,000. If he wins, he will tip the already progressive-leaning board even further to the left.
Documents about the 1994 eviction, unearthed by the Tenants Union and reviewed by The Chronicle, show that in April 1994, Brown served a 30-day eviction notice to the tenants at 148-152 Fillmore St. Brown and three other friends had recently bought the home — which she said was in a decrepit condition — for $275,000. She said in a statement this month that the tenants hadn’t paid rent in years, and after unsuccessfully negotiating a rent they could all agree on, she and her friends were left with no choice but to serve them an eviction notice.
Packer disputes that Brown tried to negotiate with her.
“She did not negotiate rent with us and she did not ask me to stay,” Packer said. She said if Brown negotiated a rate with her that she found fair, “she would have paid it.”
Brown sold the home for about $2.6 million in 2014. She said she made about $600,000 on the sale after buying out her co-owners.
Preston said the eviction “goes to the heart of the issues for tenants in the district.”
“One of the top fears for people in the district is a fear of displacement, and this is how it happens,” Preston said. “Voters want to feel like they can trust a candidate, and if she’s not being truthful about something like this, I think that will be harmful to her campaign in the final week or so.”
Brown has built her campaign largely around the empathy she has for San Francisco residents who face housing instability. She has said she lived out of an RV with her mother when she was a child and was later evicted from three different homes in San Francisco when she moved to the city as an artist.
Rev. Arnold Townsend, a Brown supporter, said in a statement “Supervisor Vallie Brown is here for our community when it counts. Not just during election season or when it’s politically beneficial. This attack attempts to distract from that fact. But I’m not fooled, and neither is anyone else.”
James Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco, said the surfacing of the 25-year-old eviction is an attempt to paint Brown as “an out of touch liberal.” But he said it’s not likely to impact the outcome of the election, as support is typically solidified for a candidate at this point in the campaign.
“Where has this charge been before?” he said. “Timing is everything. The sincerity of this would be taken with greater weight if the charges had been made when she was first appointed.”
While both candidates have similar lists of goals — increase affordable housing, address the city’s mental health and homelessness crises and improve public transportation — they have different styles on how to achieve them. Preston says City Hall needs an outsider to pursue sweeping change in the city; Brown says San Francisco needs someone who already knows how the city’s political apparatus works.
They diverge most on their approaches to increasing the supply of new housing. Brown supports a mix of market-rate and affordable housing and argues that making it easier to build housing will help address the crisis. Preston is a staunch advocate for higher levels of affordable housing — with an ambitious goal of adding 10,000 units of affordable housing in the next 10 years.
Brown began as a neighborhood activist, then became a legislative aide in City Hall for several years. Preston is a tenants’ rights activist, well known for writing Proposition F, the June ballot measure that gives tenants facing eviction the right to a lawyer. He is also the founder of Tenants Together, a statewide renters’ rights group, and a homeowner on Alamo Square.
Taylor, the political scientist, said it is common for campaigns to unearth such attacks at the last minute.
In this case, he said, the revelations are unlikely to move the needle given how old they are. But, any vote counts: with just a few days to go until the election, City Hall observers say the race is still neck-and-neck.Trisha Thadani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tthadani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @TrishaThadani
Trisha Thadani
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Trisha Thadani is a City Hall reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. She previously covered work-based immigration and local startups for the paper’s business section.
Thadani graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism. Before joining The Chronicle, she held internships at The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and was a Statehouse correspondent for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.