Why We’re Not Voting for Aaron Peskin
Aaron Peskin is running for Mayor of San Francisco under the banner of “A Mayor Who Knows How.” That’s accurate, as long as you fill in the space after “how” with your verb of choice, like “to bully,” “to obstruct,” “to corrupt…” What he doesn’t know how to do is solve the long list of major problems the average San Franciscan deals with every day.
Aaron Peskin has been pulling the strings in his district of San Francisco for over two decades. He’s got an exceptionally long track record, and he’s responsible for some of our more vexing problems. Every San Franciscan should know exactly what he would do if given the levers of power for the entire city.
Even before becoming District 3 Supervisor in 2001, Aaron Peskin allied himself with the progressive wing in San Francisco politics. It’s a little ironic, since Peskin has been an opponent of progress for almost his entire career. He’s passed more legislation than anyone else on the Board of Supervisors—he’s a master at crafting legislation that sounds good to voters, while disguising its true effects. He’s added more layers to city government until the entire system is so complicated that the average San Franciscan can’t get anything done, or even know which elected official is responsible when things go wrong. Aaron Peskin’s guiding principle throughout his political career has been manipulating government to benefit those he likes, and using it as a hammer to impede those he doesn’t.
Because at his core, Aaron Peskin is a bully. Rather than winning friends and influencing people, Peskin has opted to create a system in which he is the ultimate decider, and everything has to go through him.
Telegraph Hill Dwellers Make Life Hell For Outsiders
Instead of working toward a San Francisco teeming with exciting new opportunities for residents, visitors, and families, Peskin has co-opted the language and virtues of progressivism in favor of freezing San Francisco in a moment that benefits people like him: wealthy insiders. Consider the work done by the Telegraph Hill Dwellers (THD), the neighborhood organization Peskin and his wife Nancy Shanahan have demonstrated considerable influence over. Peskin was THD’s president for four years before he was first elected supervisor, and Shanahan has held various leadership positions as a member for over 30 years. Through their connections to the Planning Department and expertise in San Francisco’s land use systems, the THD operates as a kind of de facto permitting department for the neighborhood—if you want to open a new business or build new apartments (good luck) in Aaron Peskin’s fiefdom, you’ve got to kiss the ring.
One story that illustrates the Telegraph Hill Dwellers’ tactics comes from their dispute over a new yogurt shop. In 2008, the THD took a personal interest in opposing the opening of Swirl Culture, a small yogurt shop started by Thy Nguyen, a single mother who mortgaged her house to get funds to finance her venture. "The Telegraph Hill Dwellers gave us a very hard time," Nguyen said. "I think the whole point was to just keep delaying and delaying until we ran out of money. I had no idea that one little group of people could control everybody."
That’s far from the only example of Peskin’s golden gatekeeping that masquerades as anti-gentrification activism. In 2004, he used his position on the Board of Supervisors to seize an empty lot at 701 Lombard St through eminent domain and hold it for a park that the THD wanted, despite the owners wanting to build housing on the parcel. In 2007 through 2008, the THD waged a battle against local businessman Jalal Heydari, preventing him from setting up a retail wine dealership on Columbus Avenue. In 2008, the THD opposed the redevelopment of the abandoned Pagoda Theater, even though the theater had been vacant since 1994 and residents wanted to see it revitalized. From 2009 to 2011, the THD opposed demolition of an old North Beach library and the construction of a new one to replace it, claiming that the old library had historic value, despite the old multi-level building not being accessible for wheelchair users. And as a private citizen in 2013, Peskin and the THD opposed Prop B and Prop C, which would have allowed 134 new apartments to be built on an empty parking lot at 8 Washington Street.
Get all that? That’s just one small neighborhood group that Aaron Peskin works with, and they have had a stranglehold on the entire neighborhood for nearly 30 years. It’s symbolic of Peskin’s approach as a legislator: he claims to represent working people, but instead represents a minority of wealthy landowners with an interest in keeping their neighborhood frozen in an era that allowed them, and no one else, to thrive.
Remember, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers don’t have any formal political power, they’re just a (highly influential) neighborhood organization. How has Aaron Peskin used his actual political power as a supervisor? Read on.
More Housing? Not in Peskin’s Backyard
San Francisco is a desirable place to live because of the high concentration of exciting jobs, the temperate weather, and the area’s natural beauty. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough housing to meet demand. The solution that works in other high-demand areas is to build more housing. But Aaron Peskin isn’t one for research-backed solutions, unless the research backs up his own pre-existing beliefs. This is someone who threatened to sue California because they were forcing San Francisco to follow the same housing laws as every other city in the state.
Throughout his campaign, Aaron Peskin has tried to downplay his record as San Francisco’s NIMBY-in-chief, talking about the housing he’s approved over there, far away from the neighborhood he lives in. But when there’s 16 years of legislation to look over, Peskin’s record is crystal clear. Over his career, Peskin has voted against new housing developments that would have built thousands of new homes in San Francisco, or used noble-sounding land-use laws, like the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), to slow or block new construction.
Take one of Aaron Peskin’s signature achievements, the Historic Preservation Commission. In 2008, Peskin authored the ballot measure that created this unelected, unaccountable commission with the power to deem buildings and even entire San Francisco neighborhoods as “historic.” That designation means those buildings and places are immune to the California state laws that encourage development, effectively limiting new housing in large parts of San Francisco. Who cares if homelessness is rising across the city if your Victorian is still in pristine condition?
The Historic Preservation Committee is already a powerful tool, but Peskin didn’t stop there. In 2009, he led an effort to rewrite the city’s planning code and designate almost every single building in San Francisco a “historic” resource. Thankfully, that effort failed, but it would have seriously constrained the city’s ability to grow, adapt, or change in the future.
Aaron Peskin has blocked hundreds of homes from being built in his district, and delayed thousands more across the city. He says he only wants affordable housing to be built, but that’s a classic NIMBY stalling tactic. Affordable housing is necessary, but the primary way it gets built is with developer fees from market rate housing. If no market rate housing gets built, very little affordable housing gets built either. Now, we could list every single housing project Aaron Peskin has blocked as supervisor, but that would be incredibly boring. Instead, here's a curated selection (Peskin’s greatest hits, if you will), of some of the most egregious methods Aaron Peskin has used to try and block new homes in San Francisco.
In 2018, Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution opposing State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 827, a bill which would have incentivized building housing near transit. The research around building high-density housing near public transit is clear. These areas are some of the best places for new housing, because it creates a virtuous circle, where people replace car trips with transit trips, leading to fewer fossil fuel emissions and more funding for public transit. SB 827 failed.
In 2022, Peskin killed a bill in Rules Committee that would have made it easier to build housing projects with 25 or more units. In that same year, Peskin voted for Prop E, a cynical measure he named the “Affordable Housing Production Act” that would have made it more difficult to build new affordable housing in San Francisco. The measure failed, but it achieved its intended purpose: confusing voters enough to also vote down Prop D, a measure that would have made it easier to build more affordable housing.
As is his style, Peskin isn’t content just killing bills that would allow for more homes, he also blocks new housing projects on a case-by-case basis. In 2021, Peskin voted to oppose a new 495-unit development with 24 percent affordable apartments on an empty Nordstrom parking lot in SoMa. The reasoning? Planners hadn’t fully accounted for new shadows the building would have caused—shadows that would have increased by only 0.56 percent annually. Peskin has used the threat of shadows to block new homes a few times, from projects as small as 10 new townhomes in North Beach to a 15 parcel rezoning project that would have allowed more density in SoMa.
Aaron Peskin is also happy to change San Francisco’s laws when the type of housing being built isn’t up to his standards. When relatively affordable micro apartments, with shared facilities like bathrooms and kitchens, started popping up in San Francisco, Peskin introduced legislation changing the definition of “group housing,” effectively limiting the kind of new housing that could be built in the city. And just this year, Peskin downzoned an entire swath of his own wealthy, waterfront neighborhood after new legislation allowed taller buildings near downtown.
And just last week, Peskin proposed a sweeping rent control bill that would apply to every apartment and home in San Francisco. The research around rent control is clear—it works for tenants who live in rent-controlled homes, but only those tenants. Rent control increases rents overall, depresses new housing construction, and negatively affects housing quality. It’s a perfect metaphor for Peskin’s conservative principles, where benefits flow to residents Peskin considers “real” San Franciscans, and no one else.
If it seems like Aaron Peskin largely wants to live in a city where anyone who wants to do anything has to ask him first, that’s a pretty fair assessment. But he doesn’t just limit his restrictions to new housing—he has a pretty terrible record in almost every other legislative area, too.
He Don’t Give a Damn ‘Bout His Bad Legislation
Aaron Peskin has even applied his guiding principle of amassing more power to the very structure of San Francisco’s government. Since his first election in 2000, Peskin has consistently introduced legislation that gives more control to either the Board of Supervisors, or unelected commissioners he can influence.
Let’s start with commissions. These government oversight committees, staffed by unelected appointees, are meant to keep watch over city departments. But San Francisco keeps adding more commissions— duplicate commissions, commissions for city departments that don’t exist, commissions that tangle San Francisco’s government in red tape. We have over twice as many commissions as similar cities, thanks in part to Aaron Peskin—since his first term, San Francisco has added 55 new commissions.
There’s the aforementioned Historic Preservation Commission, created by Peskin in 2008. But Peskin also supported the creation of the Sanitation and Streets Commission to oversee the city’s newly formed Sanitation and Streets Department. When the Sanitation and Streets Department was folded back into Public Works in 2022, the commission remained, leaving a commission overseeing a department that no longer existed. Peskin supported the creation of the Homelessness Oversight Commission, San Francisco’s fifth oversight body related to homelessness. He created the City Hall Preservation Advisory Commission, a separate historic preservation committee dedicated singularly to City Hall.
This year, Aaron Peskin introduced Prop E, a ballot measure he says will reduce San Francisco’s overreliance on commissions. Interesting that suddenly the architect of the commissions system decides it needs reform, the same year almost 80,000 dissatisfied voters placed a commission reform measure on the ballot. But Prop E doesn’t actually require any reduction in the number of commissions in San Francisco, it just sets up another commission to study the commission. Don’t get duped—just like the Prop E he introduced in 2022, his 2024 edition of Prop E is also designed to kill real legislation (Prop D) he doesn’t like.
Supervisor Peskin has been openly hostile to the technology sector, one of the biggest industries supporting San Francisco’s budget and economy. In 2016, he said he “would like a little of the air to come out of the tech economy,” and in 2018, he introduced an ordinance that tried to forbid employee cafeterias in new office construction.
Now that he’s running for mayor, Supervisor Peskin says that’s in the past, and he’s now embracing the tech industry. Unfortunately, Peskin’s idea of “embracing tech” is creating a city-sponsored center to study the development of tech. Who does that help? Silicon Valley is just down the road and some of the world’s most promising startups are already based here. Government is a tool to stabilize society and provide services that the private market can’t—Peskin embraces government for government sake.
His work around public safety is similarly telling. Aaron Peskin has authored and voted for a number of bills which collectively hampered the San Francisco Police Department. There’s his 2019 ban on facial recognition technology that added extremely strict guidelines around the use of a technology that had been used successfully by other cities for years. In 2020, Peskin voted to remove police staffing minimums from the city charter. Today, SFPD faces a major staffing shortage, and has trouble addressing the type of crime that disproportionately affects the very groups progressivism claims to uplift.
In 2020, Supervisor Peskin advocated for redirecting SFPD’s entire budget away from policing, moving it towards housing, homelessness services, social workers, health, and education. If Aaron Peskin followed through on his promise in 2020, San Francisco would literally not have any kind of crime prevention officers. There are plenty of ways to improve policing in America, but at a baseline, cities need some kind of police force to keep the peace. Aaron Peskin apparently doesn’t think so.
The Tyrant of Telegraph Hill
There are more examples of Peskin’s aggressive behavior than we have space for here, but let’s run down some lowlights. In 2007, he harassed and threatened to fire Port of San Francisco employees because they disagreed with his legislation to limit building heights on San Francisco’s waterfront. Port Executive Director Monique Moyer was shaken by the threats, saying “Supervisor Peskin’s behavior is intimidating and unnecessary. The threats appear to be extensive and real.” Peskin brushed the incident off, saying “things get heated in the legislative arena.”
That same year, he tried to gut the Department of the Environment and fire 64 city employees after the department’s director disagreed with Peskin’s plan to build a new fossil fuel power plant in Potrero Hill. The budget for the Department of the Environment is largely funded by grants, not the city budget, but Peskin still tried to spin his legislation as a budget-saving measure. The next year, the Mayor’s Director of Climate Protection Initiatives told reporters that Peskin had previously threatened to eliminate his job out of spite as well.
Current Recreation and Parks General Manager Phil Ginsburg dealt with Aaron Peskin’s harassment for years when he was the Chief of Staff to Mayor Gavin Newsom. In 2021, he detailed the frequent and regular late-night phone calls he received from Aaron Peskin, berating Ginsburg for some perceived slight or failing. Reminder: the Board of Supervisors has no oversight for the Mayor’s Chief of Staff, but that didn’t stop Aaron Peskin from stepping in to frequently yell at a co-worker he personally disliked.
Peskin has a pattern of publicly belittling people. He called former supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier a “whiny brat”, former mayor Ed Lee a “puppet”, and was forced to apologize to the LGBTQ community after he implied a transgender candidate for supervisor was not a real human. And of course, there’s the time in 2018 he tried to micromanage the fire department, yelling at the fire chief and telling them how to douse a raging North Beach fire while firefighters were still inside the burning building. When SFFD Deputy Chief of Operations Mark Gonzalez told Peskin to go away and stop distracting the firefighters trying to do their jobs, Aaron Peskin told Gonzalez “I’m going to destroy you.”
Politics can be rough in San Francisco, but this kind of behavior is incredibly out of line for anyone, let alone someone who’s supposed to be representing San Francisco. It’s ironic (but not surprising given Peskin’s history), that someone who publicly espouses the virtues of tolerance, progressivism, and acceptance would be so vindictive behind closed doors.
TogetherSF Action’s Choice For Mayor
Aaron Peskin isn’t fit to be Mayor of San Francisco. He doesn’t have the temperament, the policy, or the right kind of management experience to move San Francisco forward. Mark Farrell is the only competent candidate for mayor, and he’s our top choice by far. But because San Francisco uses ranked choice voting to decide mayoral elections, we’re also recommending you rank London Breed and Daniel Lurie on your ballot in any order you choose, and leave Peskin off your ballot completely.
Both Breed and Lurie have major flaws, but if you don’t rank them, these three candidates with similar platforms could split the vote and pave the way to victory for Peskin. And, well, if you made it to the end of this blog post, you probably really, really don’t want that. As you are now well aware, over the past two decades, Peskin has delivered some of San Francisco’s worst policy decisions, ground the gears of government to a halt, and proven to be a vengeful, bullying boss. We can’t give him the keys to the city.
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.