Court nixes suit over SF Supervisor Dean Preston’s housing votes

In an indication of how important housing policy will be in San Francisco’s November election, Supervisor Dean Preston has successfully fought off an attempt by a pro-housing advocate to question his housing record. 

This week, a Superior Court judge dismissed a suit brought by Housing Action Coalition Executive Director Corey Smith that sought to require Preston to remove a line in the official Voter Information Pamphlet that he voted to approve 30,000 new homes, 86 percent affordable, during his tenure. Smith’s suit called those statistics “false and misleading” but Judge Richard Ulmer Jr. found that they were backed up by Preston’s legislative record. 

In a statement after the ruling, Preston said, “I’m proud of that record, and gratified that the court upheld my right to present my record to voters.” 

Preston also called the “smear campaign” a “big distraction” as he faces off against several challengers to remain the Supervisor for District 5, which covers a wide variety of neighborhoods right in the middle of the city, from the Haight to the Tenderloin. 

Shanti Singh, legislative director at the statewide tenant rights organization Tenants Together, echoed the supervisor’s sentiments, saying in a statement that the suit was part of an attempt by real estate interests to “smear Preston’s advocacy for rent control, affordable housing and taxing billionaires.” 

Smith said that the suit was “something I did in a personal capacity” and not as part of his leadership role with HAC. 

“I’ve been working for nearly 10 years on making it easier to build housing and often find myself on the opposite side of Supe. Preston’s policies/votes,” he said in an email. “So when I read about him touting 30 thousand units of housing, I found it disingenuous and wanted to do something about it.” 

With the suit dismissed, he does not plan to move forward with any other attempts to remove the language from the voter guide. He said he was “disappointed in the decision” but thinks “Preston’s votes opposing housing speak for itself.” 

There is a silver lining to the suit, Smith added.  

“Being pro-housing has become politically popular enough that we’re watching politicians change the way they present themselves,” he said.

Candidates are going out of their way to try and position themselves as pro-housing, “even if it’s at odds with their actual record as legislators,” agreed Jane Natoli, organizing director for YIMBY Action in San Francisco. 

“It’s no longer in fashion to just be openly anti-housing, especially for candidates trying to stake their ground as more progressive,” she said.

That trend is not related to District 5 in particular, she added, where the organization has endorsed Bilal Mahmoud. 

“We’re seeing that in races all over where candidates have traditionally been antagonistic to housing,” she explained. 

Natoli said Mahmoud, the co-founder of analytics startup ClearBrain, which was acquired in 2020, believes in building housing for all income levels to alleviate the housing shortage, while Preston only wants to build affordable housing and supports “efforts to raise the costs on market-rate housing to punitive levels to help fund affordable housing.”

In contrast, “Bilal understands that all the added costs, no matter how well-intentioned, make it much more difficult to build any housing of any kind and further contribute to our housing shortage,” Natoli said.

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