Bilal Mahmood for District 5 Supervisor
Key
😍 Perfect 😃 Great! 😐 Fine or not enough info 🤔 Questionable 😩 Quite bad
The Board of Supervisors are some of the most important elected officials we’ll vote for this November. We’ll be rolling out our endorsements over the next month, so check back here for updates and deep dives into why we’ve selected each of our endorsed candidates.
Why we’re voting for him: San Francisco has a lot of smart, effective people in the city, but too few of them ever switch careers and enter public service. That’s why we’re excited to endorse Bilal Mahmood for District 5 Supervisor. Mahmood is a co-founder of analytics startup ClearBrain and the 13 Fund, a philanthropic foundation that has supported San Francisco’s Asian-American community. He’s a strong climate advocate who has worked with State Assemblymember Matt Haney on climate legislation. He has the right ideas about how to tackle the drug crisis, which is most highly concentrated in his district. And he’s ready to hit the ground running—he was just elected to the Democratic County Central Committee in the March primary election, and it took him all of one meeting to propose a resolution to use public health funds to support hate crime victims. We support Bilal Mahmood for supervisor because his entrepreneurial track record, combined with his results-first policy platform will make him the leader that District 5 has lacked for years.
Political Experience 😃
Experience improving San Francisco at the neighborhood level
Bilal Mahmood has been building up to his run for supervisor by working on neighborhood issues. He was on the board of the Eastern Neighborhoods Democratic Club from 2021 to 2023, and then joined the Board of Directors of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District as Treasurer in 2023. He’s a seasoned campaigner, previously running for State Assembly against Matt Haney and David Campos in 2021, and winning his race for the DCCC earlier this year. In that March 2024 race, Mahmood gained support from environmental groups like Sierra Club and the California League of Conservation Voters. As an added bonus, he worked on small business policy in Obama’s administration as policy analyst in the U.S. Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship following the 2008 financial crisis —he’s got experience working at the highest levels of government.
Past Policy 😐
Policy based on private sector expertise
Mahmood is relatively new to politics, and doesn’t have a lengthy track record of policy to look back on. He’s spent most of his career as an entrepreneur and philanthropist, guiding his startup ClearBrain to an acquisition by international software company Amplitude in 2020. Since then, Mahmood has pivoted to public service, running for state assembly in 2021 and winning a seat on San Francisco’s DCCC in 2024. In each campaign, he’s been consistent in his solutions for San Francisco, particularly when it comes to streamlining the bureaucracy that bogs down government—like cutting red tape that delays new housing and makes first responders less effective. He also understands that climate change is an existential threat, recently starting a climate nonprofit project through SPUR focused on decarbonization, which collaborated with Assemblymember Matt Haney and State Senator Josh Becker on passing building electrification legislation at the state level.
Proposed Policy 😍
Blending proven solutions with new ideas
City Hall needs fresh ideas, and Bilal Mahmood has plenty of them. His platform offers a mix of realistic solutions for longtime problems, and outside-the-box thinking you’d expect from an entrepreneur. Mahmood consistently advocates for solutions that make city government more efficient—he wants to streamline San Francisco’s convoluted permitting process for new housing, and supports turning unused office space downtown into student housing. And he endorses the dual-pronged approach to fix San Francisco’s drug crisis that TogetherSF Action supports, making it easier to hire nurses, fund treatment beds, and get drug users into recovery to reduce demand, while also arresting drug traffickers and fentanyl dealers to cut off drug supply. He also supports implementing the Drug Market Intervention strategy, a solution that’s been effective in other municipalities, to reduce drug overdose deaths in the Tenderloin, the neighborhood where 20 percent of 2023’s 810 drug overdose deaths were concentrated.
Don’t Forget
Bilal Mahmood started young as an entrepreneur—while he was still in college, Mahmood co-founded Gumball Capital, a nonprofit that helped fundraise for microfinance programs (i.e. generally between $25 and $50,000) to support female entrepreneurs in developing countries. We need that kind of ambition at City Hall.
Also Rank: Scotty Jacobs
Why we’re voting for him: We also recommend you rank Scotty Jacobs #2 on your ballot. This is Scotty Jacobs’ first time running for office in San Francisco, but he’s already picked up endorsements from our endorsed mayoral candidate Mark Farrell and Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. That speaks to the strength of his policy proposals, which focus on affordable housing, ending the mental health and drug crises, public safety, and bolstering public transit and education. The 30-year-old marketing professional has deep ties to San Francisco—his great-grandfather immigrated from Russia, and his grandmother and mom were raised in the Sunset. If elected, Scotty Jacobs would be the youngest member of the Board of Supervisors, and while we don’t think he’d make a better supervisor than Bilal Mahmood right now, we look forward to seeing what he’s going to do in the future.
About the Incumbent , Dean Preston
Why you should leave him off your ballot: Dean Preston has served one term as District 5’s Supervisor, and in that time he’s been an uncompromising ideologue who puts his own personal values ahead of San Francisco’s wellbeing. He’s publicly stated that “we [should] not hold up compromise as a value in and of itself,” and that uncompromising nature seems to be his guiding principle for governing. Preston’s “my way or the highway” approach is a major factor behind the gridlock at City Hall in the last four years—he’s been the sole ‘No’ vote against city budgets in three of the last four years, purely on ideological grounds. We’re leaving Dean Preston off our ballot because his policy hasn’t led to better outcomes. We prioritize results and practical leadership, and Preston prioritizes his own ideology over everything else.
Political Experience 😐
An experienced demagogue
Dean Preston was elected as District 5 Supervisor in the special election to replace London Breed in 2019. 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. Prior to his election as supervisor, Preston worked as a tenant’s right’s lawyer, founding the tenant’s rights organization Tenants Together in 2007. Preston is currently the only member of the Democratic Socialists of America on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors—the organization that recently decided not to endorse their most well-known member because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had not proven to be ideologically pure enough.
Past Policy 😩
Doesn’t take public safety seriously
Give Dean Preston credit: he’s consistent. As mentioned previously, Preston has been the only vote against the city budget for the past three years, each year stating that San Francisco’s Police Department was receiving unfair increases to their budget. Of course, San Francisco was dealing with rising crime during those three years, so many felt the budget increases were necessary. But throughout his time as supervisor, Preston has continuously voted for policies that decrease public safety in San Francisco. He voted to strip police staffing minimums from the city charter, and 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, a resolution to support increased penalties for participating in sideshows, and many more. Consistency can be a virtue—we just wish Preston wasn’t so consistently on the wrong side of public safety.
Proposed Policy 😩
Policy that keeps SF one of the most expensive cities in the country
Preston positions himself as a tenant advocate, backing policies that might help renters in the short term, but constrain San Francisco’s housing supply, driving up costs for everyone overall. 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. Prop M ended up passing, but the bill was based on flawed math. Supporters argued that the vacancy tax would apply to about 40,000 units in the city, but a report from the San Francisco Controller’s office later found the tax only applied to about 4,000 total apartments. It’s a prime example of the kind of policy that Preston favors—legislation that sounds good to voters, but doesn’t solve a real problem.
Don’t Forget
Dean Preston has railed against the dangers of artificial intelligence and “fake news” influencing this election. A worthy cause—but it’s pretty funny that Preston has benefitted from this kind of fake news. In 2022, members of San Francisco’s local DSA chapter created the San Francisco Independent Journal, a seemingly legitimate looking online newspaper that used fake author profiles to promote the candidates they backed.
District 5 includes the Tenderloin, Haight-Ashbury, Japan Town and Civic Center.
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.