October 16, 2002

By A.C. Thompson

We're standing on the grime-encrusted sidewalk at the junction of 16th and Mission Streets – arguably the city's most notoriously drug-plagued territory – and a caffeinated Tom Radulovich wants me to envision the possibilities.

A little café could be shoehorned between the BART station steps and the Wells Fargo branch. The squat one-story building housing Walgreens could be razed and replaced with a taller structure including two floors of much-needed apartment units. A lane of 16th Street would be devoted exclusively to Muni, dramatically quickening the pace of buses on the 22 Fillmore line.

Radulovich, who currently sits on BART's multicounty board, is campaigning for Mark Leno's District Eight seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The optimistic urban visionary is facing two other strong candidates: Eileen Hansen, an AIDS policy expert and consultant to nonprofits, and Bevan Dufty, a former high-level staffer in Mayor Willie Brown's administration.

In a district that encompasses the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park, both Radulovich and Hansen are running against Dufty from the left.

While Dufty is mounting a conservative – by San Francisco standards – campaign tailored to property owners and small-business proprietors, Hansen is positioning herself as the unabashed champion of wage slaves and renters. Radulovich, meanwhile, is taking a more moderate tack, playing up his green credentials and mass-transit expertise and sometimes dodging issues that may not play well in the upper-income brackets. The question is whether either Hansen or Radulovich can win over voters – and whether San Francisco is drifting inexorably toward the right.

"I've heard a lot scary things during this campaign," Radulovich tells me. "There seems to be a retreat from the public good, the commonweal."

• • •

Radulovich, who lives modestly in a flat near Dolores Park on the proceeds of his one-person gardening business, is something of a dark horse. He trails behind his key opponents in fundraising, sitting on $29,000 in donations compared with Dufty's $53,000 and Hansen's $37,000.

Hansen is an out lesbian, while Radulovich and Dufty are both openly gay. Not surprisingly, given that lineup, queer identity hasn't been an issue in the race, though the lack of women on the Board of Supes (there's only one at this point, Sophie Maxwell) has been. Really, the most contentious issue of what's shaping up to be one of the more contentious ballot battles of this election cycle, is homelessness.

Dufty's platform consists largely of touting the Care Not Cash initiative (Proposition N, which would slash welfare benefits to homeless people) and the Home Ownership Program for Everyone (Proposition R, which would make it easier to convert rental units into condos). His campaign literature says nothing about alleviating the epidemic of destitution and human misery – i.e., homelessness. What does play prominently in Dufty's mailers and handouts is "strict accountability for all homeless programs." In debates, the candidate, a smooth, well-scripted public speaker, is quick to stress the "impacts" of panhandlers and cardboard box-dwellers on "tourism and our local economy."

Dufty's fundraising success speaks to the fact that the historically über-liberal Castro, which between the 1970s and early 1990s elected a string of staunchly left-wing supervisors, has become more affluent and more conservative over the past decade. The neighborhood that exploded in 1979 when Dan White received a puny sentence for killing Harvey Milk and then-mayor George Moscone, and later spawned the most militant protests of the AIDS crisis, is now, in large part, yuppie central, a place that often seems more like a NIMBY-crazed suburb than the Castro of old. Ample evidence of the transformation can be found on the letters pages of the Bay Area Reporter, the city's premier queer weekly. One recent missive described homeless people as "inhuman." Another railed against "bums" and clowned Food Not Bombs, an activist group that serves free meals to the shopping cart set.

"People in District Eight and citywide have lost faith in the city's ability to respond to homelessness, and they're seeking a reform," Dufty says. Voters, he argues, want a palpable "change on the streets.

• • •

If Radulovich is the visionary, Hansen, beneath her geeky trapezoid-shaped spectacles and shoulder-padded suit jacket, is a street scrapper. "This race isn't about sexual orientation," Hansen tells me while sitting in her small 14th Street campaign headquarters. "It's about class."

For Hansen, the issues haven't changed a whole lot from 2000, when she took on Leno as part of a slate of grassroots anti-Willie Brown candidates allied with Sup. Tom Ammiano. She lost that race by 712 votes. "I see what's happened in the last two years, and we've lost artists, we've lost nonprofits, we've lost renters," she says. "We can't recapture those people. But we can build the city in such a way that we don't continue to lose the uniqueness of the city. I don't think it's too grandiose to say that this is a battle for the soul of the city."

Of course, what constitutes the soul of San Francisco is open to debate. At an Oct. 9 forum for District Eight candidates, Hansen addressed a group of about 70 voters sitting in a drafty elementary school cafeteria in deep Noe Valley. Nearly immediately she started blasting Mayor Brown and Care Not Cash. The crowd – mostly white, mostly middle-aged or older, and apparently well-heeled – didn't seem particularly receptive.

"I'm not sure my message resonated very well," she admits.

Partial to painting with broad strokes, Hansen occasionally lapses into rhetoric and doesn't always have specifics at her fingertips. Her platform includes a promise to "identify state and federal monies to develop true home-ownership opportunities." I ask her which state and federal funds she has in mind.

"I can't give you specific pots of money," Hansen replies. "What I would want to do is research what is actually there."

Hansen is better at identifying taxpayer money the city is already mishandling, which isn't surprising since she cofounded the People's Budget Collaborative, a group dedicated to ferreting out government waste. As a first step, she says, city leaders might actually read the audits done by the Controller's Office – like the 1996 and 1998 audits of the police department that identified $19 million in waste. Or the 1999 audit of the Department of Parking and Traffic that pinpointed $12.9 million in wasted funds. As a second step, city officials might actually implement at least some of the money-saving recommendations made in the audits.

She's also put forth the idea of drawing up five-year spending plans. "We need to think about what we're doing in three years, what we're doing in five years. We don't budget that way. I've been trying to push this long-range planning for years." It's not a bad thought considering the fiscal idiocy that accompanied the dot-com boom. During the tech gold rush of the late 1990s, the city pulled in unprecedented sums of tax money and saved almost nothing for the economic downturn that had to arrive sooner or later. Now, thanks to this ingenious financial management, city coffers are empty, public services are being slashed, and the outlook for next year is even worse.

"Many, many years ago I said I felt Eileen's politics were impeccable, and I still believe that," says Riva Enteen, program director of the San Francisco chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a group of activist attorneys.

• • •

Rube Warren, BART's primary planner, speaks highly of Radulovich. "Tom's changed the way BART looks at things," Warren says. "If he does get this job, we're going really miss him."

Some of the candidate's ideas are already coming to fruition. As a BART director he was key to securing $7.2 million to renovate the drab, crime-ridden subway plazas at 16th and Mission Streets. The ambitious project, which Radulovich hopes will transform the plazas into places where people actually want to hang out, will bring an elegant arching entryway, trees, new lighting, public art, and open-air vendors to the area. The first phase of the "make-over" is scheduled to reach completion by the end of the year.

This is quintessential Radulovich. He speaks enthusiastically of reinventing the public realm, of "making the experience of walking through the city or taking transit through the city as inviting as possible." And studying dense, academic tomes on urban planning and theory is the guy's idea of relaxation. (Sample literary critique: "I like Ivan Illich's integration of ecology and libertarian socialism. And I like his big ideas, counterposing vernacular and industrial sets of values.")

Just don't call Radulovich a wonk. "I've been tagged as a wonk or technocrat," he tells me, obviously bristling. "He's dressed more like a grad student than a politician, in jeans and an almost ratty short-sleeve shirt; his dark, thinning hair and healthy goatee are cropped close. "I think of myself as an activist. I think of myself as the guy who tried to get the Central Freeway torn down."

Still, get him talking on mass transit, planning, or housing, and he's all nuts and bolts. How do you create more affordable housing? Establish a housing "superfund" that would provide a line of credit to nonprofit developers to secure parcels for cheap housing. Another idea is to tap into state Medi-Cal money to build "assisted housing" for people with disabilities or a history of addiction. Or we could try converting empty office space – there's 3 million square feet of it at the moment, according to Radulovich – into apartments.

On other topics he's less concrete. Like Care Not Cash. Perhaps aware of Prop. N's strong polling numbers, Radulovich has maintained a somewhat ambiguous position on the measure. There's no mention of the proposition on his Web site (www.tomradulovich.com); and at the Noe Valley forum, he skirted the issue.

I ask him why. "I don't want the whole discussion of homelessness to be about Care Not Cash and your position on the measure, because Care Not Cash is so peripheral to the things that I think are really going to help homelessness," he says in an interview. "I didn't want to be just reacting to Care Not Cash."

He's also promised to "eliminate waiting lists for drug and alcohol treatment." In the mid 1990s, Mayor Brown made exactly the same promise, funneled millions of additional dollars into rehab programs ... and scarcely made a dent in the problem. Today if you're strung out and want to get clean, you're going to wait, sometimes as long as a month, to get a bed in a program. How would Radulovich succeed where Willie failed? Well, Radulovich talks about "constancy of purpose" and keeping up funding levels, and beyond that he gets a little vague.

• • •

With two real contenders in District Eight, progressives are feeling torn. Case in point: Sup. Chris Daly is backing Hansen, while his aide, Bill Barnes, has endorsed Radulovich.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition couldn't choose between the two; it endorsed Radulovich and Hansen.

Both candidates have lined up a long string of endorsements, with Hansen getting the support of the Greens, the Tenants Union, and the Labor Council, as well as the blessing of Sups. Tom Ammiano, Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval, among others. Radulovich's endorsement roster includes the Sierra Club, the San Francisco League of Conservation Voters, and Sups. Matt Gonzalez and Aaron Peskin, as well as Sacramento-bound Mark Leno, a more middle-of-the-road politician.

Pollster David Binder doesn't think the split among lefties will propel Dufty to an outright victory. Rather, he expects either Radulovich or Hansen to end up in a runoff with Dufty. This election "is a bellwether," Binder says. "It's moderate S.F. politics versus progressive politics. The city is becoming more divided between the haves and have-nots, and you're starting to see that in District Eight."