“Moderate” Mayor London Breed and “progressive” Supervisor Aaron Peskin arrive at an Election Night party for Proposition A on March 5.
Since San Francisco’s March 5 primary election, the city’s various flavors of Democrats have waged rhetorical war over which group gets to call itself “progressive.”
By all accounts, the “moderates” won big on election night, when San Franciscans voted to expand police powers, require welfare recipients to undergo drug testing and encourage the school district to return to offering algebra in middle school. Voters also elected a majority of the “moderate” candidates running to govern the San Francisco Democratic Party, a stark change from just four years ago, when “progressives” won nearly every seat.
But “moderate” Democrats such as Mayor London Breed have forcefully disputed the narrative that San Francisco is no longer a “progressive” city. “Building homes and adding treatment beds is progressive!” Breed thundered in her recent State of the City speech. “Wanting good public education and an effective police force … is progressive!”
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This impulse to redefine San Franciscans’ conception of progressivism is understandable, given that many have come to associate it with government incompetence. But the definition is ultimately beside the point. “Moderate” and “progressive” are buzzwords. They are a distraction. And they are increasingly devoid of any useful meaning that would actually help voters distinguish between candidates and their policy platforms.
Perhaps nowhere are the limits of these labels more clear than housing and other development issues — which have become flashpoints in the heated November mayor’s race.
All the declared candidates — Breed, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell, philanthropist and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie and Supervisor Ahsha Safaí — are considered “moderates” of varying degrees. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who’s expected to jump into the race, is viewed as “progressive.”
In San Francisco’s current schema, “moderates” are generally associated with the YIMBY movement, which advocates for building more housing for all income levels in all neighborhoods and streamlining development. “Progressives,” meanwhile, generally view housing developments that aren’t 100% affordable with suspicion, arguing that the city has already built more than its fair share of market-rate housing and that relaxing zoning and development restrictions will only gentrify low-income and historic neighborhoods while lining developers’ pockets.
But this delineation has also become increasingly meaningless.
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Farrell, whose public safety proposals have branded him as perhaps the most moderate candidate, has articulated a housing platform that in some ways is more aligned with Peskin’s than Breed’s. In an interview last week with Mission Local, Farrell described the city’s plan for meeting a state mandate to build 82,000 homes over the next eight years as “absolutely insane,” adding, “I do not believe we need to upzone every single neighborhood in San Francisco” to meet that target.
Yet Farrell also said that he agreed with Breed’s recent veto of a bill authored by Peskin to reinstate density limits in three historic neighborhoods along the northern waterfront. (Peskin partnered with Breed last year on legislation relaxing development restrictions to revive downtown commercial areas post-pandemic. But as controversial proposals rolled in — including one to replace a historic three-story building on the edge of Telegraph Hill with a more than 200-foot-tall tower — Peskin backtracked and proposed reimposing the original zoning restrictions in certain areas.)
The Board of Supervisors, however, corralled enough votes to overturn a Breed veto for the first time. Safaí voted in favor of Peskin’s bill — as did Catherine Stefani, who’s often considered the most moderate supervisor. Safaí described the legislation as “modest in its scope,” adding, “We have to preserve the character and history of our city.” (Lurie declined to comment on how he would have handled Peskin’s bill.)
The moderate-progressive dichotomy similarly breaks down when it comes to transportation and street-use policy, issues in the forefront following the recent horrific West Portal crash that killed a family of four waiting at a bus stop.
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One might associate progressivism with visions of a car-free utopia, where streets are devoted to walkers, bikers and public transit. The moderate vision might be associated more with Farrell’s proposal to reopen Market Street to cars, which he says could help rejuvenate businesses reeling from a lack of foot traffic.
Yet legislation sponsored by Breed, a purported moderate, to make a stretch of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park permanently car-free was opposed by several so-called progressives, including Peskin and Supervisor Connie Chan. (San Franciscans voted in 2022 to keep JFK Drive car-free.)
What these contradictions and caveats make clear is that it doesn’t ultimately matter whether a candidate is considered moderate, progressive, conservative or liberal. As San Francisco State political scientist Jason McDaniel pointed out to me, these terms lack any fixed meaning and are largely defined by the particular group of political elites leading that particular faction at that particular point in time.
What matters are candidates’ stances on specific issues and the details of their plans to address them. The upside of Californians’ growing discontent with the two major political parties is that voters may be more inclined to ignore party labels and evaluate candidates by the strength of their policy platforms and their commitment to thoughtful, data-informed solutions.
Of course, this discontent could also spiral into something worse. As Mike Madrid, a longtime Republican political strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump organization the Lincoln Project told me, “Because people have less faith in institutions, it’s easier to be anti-institutional than it is to get your hands dirty with governing.”
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Politicians can call themselves whatever they want. But in the end, it’s all just words. The effectiveness of the governing is what matters.
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
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