December 4, 2002

In this issue

AT THE HEIGHT of the dot-com boom, the San Francisco Rent Board was getting between 100 and 200 eviction filings a month – and those were the legal, reported cases. By any account, thousands and thousands of San Franciscans were forced from their homes, driven away by richer people.

Then there were the commercial evictions. Hundreds of small businesses and community institutions got forced out. Artists lost studio space. Musicians lost rehearsal space. San Francisco was well on its way to becoming an all-rich, all-white city.

What did Mayor Willie Brown do to help? Nothing – in fact, he helped create the problem by allowing developers to run loose and crazy all over the city, by cutting deals with everyone who waved campaign money in his face, and by opposing any controls on new high-tech office space or tight rules requiring office developers to pay for new affordable housing.

We called it the "economic cleansing of San Francisco." It remains Brown's enduring legacy: when San Francisco most needed mayoral leadership to preserve its quality of life and diversity of population, he sided squarely with the people who cared nothing for this city and saw it purely as a place from which to extract money.

Brown should be held accountable for that, and to a significant extent, he has been: the mayor's power has waned tremendously. Two years ago, the voters elected a majority of supervisors who openly opposed the mayor's policies, and since then, the mayor's ability to control land-use policy through the city Planning Commission and Board of Appeals has been reduced. I think it's safe to say that if Brown were running again today, he'd have a hard time beating anyone.

But the people who stood with him all that time have to be held accountable, too. And that's something the voters in District Eight need to remember Dec. 10.

Bevan Dufty, who is facing longtime community activist Eileen Hansen in the supervisorial runoff, was Brown's neighborhood services director during the worst of the boom, and he never said a public word critical of what the mayor was doing to ruin the neighborhoods. Instead, while Hansen was fighting to stop economic cleansing, Dufty worked hard for the mayor's reelection (against Tom Ammiano). He was, in other words, clearly and unequivocally on the wrong side of the battle to take back San Francisco – and that means he is unqualified to be supervisor today.