Pot club in Outer Sunset facing struggle
Shop owner’s influence tested in neighborhood
When a rising Chinese American power broker became a partner in a proposed cannabis dispensary in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset, he knew it would hit resistance.
But David Ho sees himself as the perfect emissary to the mostly older Chinese residents and merchants who are deeply skeptical of the pot trade.
“I’m the working-class, westside Asian American story,” said Ho, who is a coowner of the Barbary Coast medical cannabis dispensary that has applied to open at 2161 Irving St., on a block lined with grocery stores, dry cleaning shops and banks.
It’s fighting two appeals that will go before the Board of Supervisors on Dec. 5, pitting Ho and Barbary Coast’s executive director, Jesse Henry, against persistent neighborhood activists — many of them Chinese Americans — who blocked another Sunset cannabis club application in October.
The supervisors’ vote on whether to approve Barbary Coast’s permit will be a critical test of Ho’s influence at City Hall. Cannabis has created deep divisions on the board, with some members advocating for a robust industry and others asking for zoning laws that would keep dispensaries out of their districts.
A similar fight has engulfed
the Chinese community. Its more conservative leaders successfully lobbied Mayor Ed Lee to call for a marijuana advertising ban on Muni — it was approved by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s board of directors — as well as a 1,000- foot buffer zone between every pot shop and the nearest school or day care facility.
On the other side is the progressive Ho. He was born in Macau but grew up in the Sunset, attended Lincoln High School and spent 15 years as a tenant organizer for the prominent Chinatown Community Development Center. During that time, Ho became a protege of the late Rose Pak, who was instrumental in Lee’s election and a longtime political power in Chinatown.
Ho campaigned for Lee as well as Supervisors Jane Kim and Ahsha Safai and former Supervisor David Chiu.
Ho said he has opposed the more conservative base in the Chinese community on other issues, such as same-sex marriage. He calls the antimarijuana protesters at City Hall “a small minority of very loud opponents.”
“I’m challenging the perception that this is a Chinese issue,” he said. “Cannabis has been used in China for 2,000 years.”
Ho’s enthusiasm for the cannabis business sets him apart from an older Chinatown player, Chinatown Neighborhood Association Chairman Pius Lee, as well as the 155year-old benevolent organization the Chinese Six Companies, which wields political influence in the neighborhood.
Last month, both organizations sent letters to the mayor proposing a 50-dispensary cap in San Francisco. The letters also asked for the Muni advertising ban, the 1,000-foot buffer and a prohibition on smoking inside cannabis stores, which has also been a point of contention at the board.
Pius Lee told The Chronicle that he backed Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s recent call for a dispensary ban in Chinatown.
“Chinatown is too small, and it has too many senior citizens,” he said. “It’s not appropriate to put marijuana businesses there.”
Yet Lee also said he respects Ho’s decision to invest in a cannabis store on the westside.
“Maybe it’s a good future, with good money,” the older businessman said.
While Lee and the other businessmen of Six Companies lean on the mayor, a spirited group of activists has for months held antimarijuana protests outside City Hall, the federal building on Golden Gate Avenue and at Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s office downtown. Lead organizers Ellen Zhou and Teresa Duque helped sink the other Sunset dispensary in October, in collaboration with a right-wing organization called the Pacific Justice Institute, which filed the appeal of the application. For the past few weeks Zhou and Duque have rallied people to chase Ho and his business partners off of Irving Street.
On Friday, Zhou sent an email blast to scores of media outlets and city officials, accusing the supervisors of bringing a dangerous drug trade to the westside, in spite of residents’ misgivings.
“We have immigrants (who) cannot vote,” Zhou wrote. “We have children and minors (who) cannot vote.”
Sunset resident Susanna Chan, who was born in Hong Kong but has lived on San Francisco’s westside for decades, called the Irving Street dispensary a “ridiculous” idea.
“This reminds me of the 1840s, when the British brought opium to China,” Chan said.
Ho brushed those arguments aside, angry that a small group of immigrants — including dozens of monolingual Chinese speakers — had been exploited by a right-wing outfit.
Jesse Henry, who co-founded the first Barbary Coast Dispensary at Sixth and Mission streets, is optimistic that Ho will build trust with residents in the Sunset and quell their anxieties about the Irving Street store.
“He was raised in the city, he’s fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese . ... He’s a great community liaison,” Henry said.
Barbary Coast held 18 community meetings about the dispensary before it went before the Planning Commission in October, Henry said. Ho served as a Chinese translator at those meetings.
When Chinese American partners attempted to open another Sunset district cannabis club in October, that strategy didn’t work so well. Former Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and her husband, Floyd Huen, made news headlines when they turned from politics to pot and tried to open a new branch of the Apothecarium luxury dispensary at 2505 Noriega St.
Huen struggled to defend their dispensary proposal at their hearing before the Board of Supervisors last month, during which opponents equated marijuana use with the opioid epidemic and said it would lure children into a life of addiction. Some called the club a form of gentrification.
“Being a 40-year organizer in the Asian American community, this is the first time I’m on the other side of this many community members,” Huen said at the hearing.
Some in City Hall say Barbary Coast has better chances of success. Quan, who lives in Oakland and did not return phone calls Monday, seemed like an outsider. By contrast, Ho is a westside fixture.
He described himself as steering between two worlds “that aren’t quite converging.”
“I’m trying to help,” he said.