San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Race heats up for Mar’s seat representing S.F.’s Sunset
Under gray skies on a recent day in San Francisco’s quiet Lakeshore neighborhood, about a dozen people listened intently to Brooke Jenkins, the city’s newly appointed district attorney, as she spoke about her plans to prosecute drug dealers and those who commit hate crimes against Asian Americans.
Jenkins was in friendly territory: Constituents in the city’s District Four, which encompasses Lakeshore and much of the Sunset District, were some of the voters most fervently in favor of recalling Jenkins’ predecessor, Chesa Boudin.
She was being hosted by Joel Engardio, one of two candidates trying to unseat incumbent District Four Supervisor Gordon Mar. By inviting Jenkins, Engardio was reminding his neighbors and supporters that he backed Boudin’s recall but Mar did not — a difference he’s highlighting as his campaign tries to gain traction.
“As supervisor, I would want someone like
Brooke Jenkins to be the district attorney — who is going to focus on prosecuting crime and implementing criminal justice reform, but also ensuring that people feel safe and that victims are not ignored,” Engardio told The Chronicle.
It was a clear example of Engardio trying to channel voter frustration over public safety as he attempts to pull off the difficult feat of ousting an incumbent from office. Engardio is also tapping into voters’ concerns about worsening street conditions as well as worries about struggling small businesses and faltering schools.
More broadly, Engardio and the other District Four challenger, Leanna Louie, are attempting to cast Mar as a progressive out of step with his constituents on the most pressing issues facing the city. He and Louie are in many ways in step with Mayor London Breed, who has at times clashed with the progressive majority on the Board of Supervisors over crime, homelessness, housing and the drug crisis — trying to paint herself as a moderate pragmatist and her foes as ideologues who aren’t focused on solutions.
Although incumbents are often safe in San Francisco supervisor races, and Mar may be no exception to that, he is gearing up for a hard-fought race to keep his seat while his more moderate opponents try to tap into the voter dissatisfaction that became evident in both of the year’s recall elections.
District Four rallied behind both of this year’s recalls amid criticism of Boudin’s public safety policies and the direction of the school board, with the latter facing particularly intense blowback after it ended merit-based
admissions at Lowell High School. Among all 11 supervisorial districts, District Four had the second-highest share of voters who cast ballots in favor of both recalls.
At the same time, the Sunset has become one of the city’s battlegrounds over housing, which was apparent last year when a group of residents resisted plans for an affordable housing development at Irving Street and 26th Avenue. San Francisco planners are also considering allowing taller, denser buildings on the west side as the city searches for ways to meet a state-mandated goal of 82,000 new housing units by 2032.
Mar defends his record on housing, saying he is fighting to ensure that the Sunset allows more homes for seniors, teachers and middle-income families. He supports the affordable housing project at Irving and 26th, for instance, even after a scaled-down compromise he pushed was rejected by the developer.
But he views attention on his recall positions as a distraction from what should be the focus of his
reelection effort: his accomplishments in office.
“Certainly, my opponents are going to try to make the District Four supervisor race about the recalls, but I don’t think voters are going to go for that,” Mar said. “The District Four supervisor race should be about my track record in my first term and whether I’ve followed through on what I campaigned for.”
For example, Mar touted his record on public safety, specifically bringing the police and community groups together to coordinate public safety programs in the Sunset. More recently, he won passage of legislation that requires each city police station to come up with community policing plans, including strategies for foot and bike patrols.
“I’m proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish during my first term,” Mar said.
But his recall positions are being highlighted during the campaign whether he likes it or not.
Louie, Mar’s other challenger, helped found a group called United Peace Collaborative to
Joel Engardio goes door to door in the Sunset in his campaign to unseat Gordon Mar. Both he and Louie portray themselves as the moderates.
Incumbent Supervisor Gordon Mar. battling to keep his seat, greets shoppers at the popular Outer Sunset Farmers’ Market and Mercantile.
combat anti-Asian attacks in Chinatown during the early days of COVID-19. She has known Mar for years, and while she said she supported his first campaign, she began to view him differently while he was in office. “How can you support the school board members and Chesa Boudin?” said Louie, who collected signatures and campaigned for both recalls. “He is just totally out of touch with the people of the Sunset.”
Yet Mar remains formidable, and his opposition to the recalls does not disqualify him in the minds of all voters. Engardio saw that firsthand while he was knocking on doors recently in a residential stretch of the Parkside neighborhood. When Joan Brosnan answered her door, it didn’t take long for her to view Engardio with polite skepticism after asking where he stood on the Boudin recall.
Brosnan, who used to work as a nurse in the Tenderloin, said she admired Boudin’s “out of the box” approach to criminal justice reform and his adoption of progressive policies such as ending cash bail.
“These recalls are baloney,” Brosnan told The Chronicle.
The District Four race has already had some controversies.
This month, someone plastered offensive flyers over signs supporting Mar’s re-election at dozens of Sunset storefronts. It’s not clear who put up the flyers, some of which falsely labeled Mar a “communist pedophile.” Engardio and Louie condemned them.
Additionally, Louie posted a letter on Twitter late Monday responding to what she said was a “completely untrue” accusation from a local Democratic Party official who allegedly accused Louie of having made a racist comment about Black people.
Neither Louie nor Engardio would have been eligible to run for District Four supervisor the last time the seat was on the ballot. Louie lived for many years in the Bayview and moved to the Sunset just last year — timing that’s been criticized by some of her detractors. Louie told The Chronicle she moved to the west side so her son could live closer to his school in the Richmond District.
Engardio hasn’t moved, but his neighborhood near Lowell High School was just shifted into District Four this year when the city’s supervisor districts were redrawn to reflect a decade of population changes.
The district boundary change allowed Engardio to run for election again just two years after his third failed campaign for supervisor in District Seven.
Mar argued that because Engardio and Louie are new to the district, they each have a “lack of real relationships and understanding of the concerns and needs of District Four neighborhoods.”
After losing his last campaign for supervisor in 2020, Engardio helped organize the signaturegathering campaign to place the school board recall on the ballot. He also leads a volunteer community safety group, Stop Crime SF, that started several years ago in response to a notorious wave of car break-ins. The group did not officially take a stance on the district attorney recall — though Engardio supported it personally.
“There’s so much potential and so much to love about our city, but we just keep going down the wrong track, at least at City Hall,” Engardio said.
Engardio and Louie’s strategy for beating Mar goes beyond attacking his record. They want to take advantage of the city’s ranked-choice voting system by asking voters to pick either of them as their first or second choices, hoping to increase the odds of ousting Mar.
The two challengers ran into each other while campaigning recently on 21st Avenue. Louie had just come from a walk through local businesses on Taraval Street, where she said merchants aired concerns about broken windows, vandalism and stolen items.
“These business owners are over it,” Louie said. She said their comments are similar to what she’s been hearing from Sunset seniors.
“They’re all concerned about public safety,” she said.