Why We’re Not Voting For Dean Preston
“Downtown is for drug users.” That’s a real sign that popped up next to District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston at a rally he held on the steps of City Hall last year. The sentiment expressed by the person holding the sign is almost obscene, because at that moment, over two people a day were dying of drug overdose deaths in San Francisco. But it’s characteristic of the kind of support Preston has amassed over the years—loud, righteously ignorant, and detrimental to our city.
Dean Preston has served one term as District 5 Supervisor—in that time he’s been an uncompromising ideologue who puts his own personal values ahead of San Francisco’s wellbeing. He’s the only Democratic Socialist on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, and he’s not doing the organization any favors. So far, his primary accomplishments as an elected official have been calling for studies and yelling at people on X (formerly known as Twitter) before finally logging off for good last year. Instead of advancing genuinely progressive policy that improves people’s lives, he uses populist language to empower himself at the expense of his constituents.
His Way or the Highway
Dean Preston’s uncompromising approach to governing has been a big factor behind the gridlock at City Hall over the last four years. He’s said that “we [should] not hold up compromise as a value in and of itself.” This is not a winning strategy for someone who needs to work with 10 other supervisors and the mayor to develop policy for a major American city.
About that: since his election in 2019, Supervisor Preston has made it his business to stoke a counterproductive personal feud with Mayor London Breed. It’s not realistic to expect every supervisor to be perfectly aligned with a mayor’s vision, but there needs to be some kind of working relationship to keep City Hall functional. By all accounts, that cooperation is non-existent between Supervisor Preston and Mayor Breed.
One reason for their feud might be found in Preston’s continued battle against the city budget. Preston has been the only vote against the city budget for the past four years. Why? He felt that San Francisco’s Police Department was getting unfair increases to their budget, so he threw the baby out with the bath water. Of course, San Francisco was dealing with the effects of post-pandemic crime, so the budget increases were needed to address the ongoing staffing crisis. But that doesn’t matter to Dean Preston.
And why should he listen? Dean Preston has made it very clear throughout his time in office that he prioritizes his own ideology over delivering citywide results. That doesn’t allow Preston much policy flexibility, even when the evidence shows his preferred programs aren’t working. Drug overdose deaths and homelessness have been on an upward trend for years. Prior to this year’s decrease, crime had been rising steadily as well. Instead of focusing on policy that would measurably improve the drug crisis, the homelessness crisis, and public safety, Preston seems to be basing his policy on the last Jacobin opinion piece he read.
When crime was going up in San Francisco, Preston yelled that we needed to abolish prisons and defund the police. He voted to strip police staffing minimums from the city charter. He voted against funding overtime for SFPD, a routine labor agreement between the city and the police, a bill that updated SFPD’s crime prevention technology, and a resolution to support increased penalties for participating in sideshows. In 2022, he called President Biden and Vice President Harris a “national disgrace” for supporting police funding during the State of the Union address.
Fentanyl epidemic? He thwarted attempts to curb open-air drug use, voted to reject 2021’s Tenderloin State of Emergency and $5 million in funding for the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center, and said arresting fentanyl dealers is “pointless.” This year he’s also rejecting Prop 36, saying it will not “prevent crime…or address drug dependence,” despite Prop 36 explicitly being a crime prevention and drug treatment bill.
Preston campaigns on his obstinance, describing it as a principled stand for causes he truly believes in. But Preston’s record of actual accomplishments is thin. He’s not fighting to improve people’s lives, he’s fighting to raise his own profile. Activists have their place in society—we just don’t think they belong in City Hall, where politicians have a mandate to work together for the good of the city.
Blocking Progress (But Progressively)
Dean Preston positions himself as a tenant advocate, backing policies that might help renters in the short term, but limit San Francisco’s housing supply and drive up costs for everyone overall. He routinely blocks, opposes, or delays new home construction, including market-rate homes built by private developers and affordable homes subsidized by taxpayer dollars. That might seem counterintuitive given how much he talks about needing to support working class people, but Dean is a true hard-liner. The only new housing Preston supports is social housing—government-financed, government-controlled, and rent-controlled.
San Francisco needs to build around 82,000 new homes by 2031 to keep up with growth. Currently, each new unit of housing costs builders over $1 million. San Francisco already has strict affordable housing requirements for new market-rate development, and there’s demand for new homes in the city. With as many problems as San Francisco needs to solve, spending a theoretical $82 billion of taxpayer money on housing that could be built by private developers would be an incredible misallocation of resources.
Supervisor Preston’s unforgiving stance has led him into some pretty ridiculous situations. When the University of California, San Francisco (i.e. a government institution) wanted to expand their Parnassus campus in 2021 to add 2,450 new student apartments, Preston delayed approval for months, stating that the public needed more time to “understand the implications of this project.” This despite UCSF holding 28 community meetings over the previous two years and committing to build exactly the type of housing that Preston claims we need.
A 2021 report found that Supervisor Preston had opposed over 28,000 new homes during his time in office, including nearly 8,500 affordable homes (reminder: Preston had only been in office two years at that point). He voted to reject SB 50 in 2019, which would have built thousands of homes near public transit. He opposed Prop D in 2022, which would have made it easier to build more affordable housing. And he was the only supervisor who voted against cutting fees to incentivize new housing.
In fact, Preston’s signature piece of housing legislation, really the only notable housing bill he’s voted for, was based on flawed math. He was a primary backer of Proposition M in 2022, contributing $45,000 to the effort to place a vacancy tax on empty apartments in San Francisco. Supporters argued that the vacancy tax would apply to about 40,000 units in the city, but a report from the Controller’s office later found the tax only applied to about 4,000 total apartments. Preston believes this kind of vacancy trutherism because it absolves him of any responsibility. If San Francisco already has enough homes to meet demand, and they’re just being kept empty by a shadowy cabal of wealthy real estate speculators, Dean Preston doesn’t have to deal with any new construction.
Prop M is a prime example of the kind of policy that Preston favors—legislation that sounds good to voters, but doesn’t actually solve the problem.
Paid for by TogetherSF Action (tsfaction.org). Not authorized by any candidate or committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.