S.F. Sense of Pride an Issue as Agnos Fights for His Job : Election: Voters believe the city is in decline. Mayor says he’s blamed for problems beyond his control.

Mayor Art Agnos, who won in a landslide and survived an earthquake, is now in deep trouble. San Francisco is a city in decline, many voters believe, and they are blaming the liberal former social worker who promised four years ago to cure the city’s ills.

Homeless people and panhandlers populate the sidewalks. Litter and graffiti are commonplace. Businesses flee to the suburbs to escape high taxes. Major freeway routes, destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, remain closed. From the financial district to the Sunset, dissatisfaction is widespread.

“San Francisco is a city that is slipping, slipping, slipping,” said County Assessor Richard Hongisto, a native San Franciscan and a candidate for mayor. “It is getting dirtier. Crime is going up. We are enjoying life here less and less.”

All told, 10 candidates are challenging Agnos in the Nov. 5 election for the leadership of California’s fourth-largest city. Typical of San Francisco’s wacky politics, there are two socialists in the race but only one Republican. None of those three are given any chance of winning--the top five contenders are all Democrats.

Nevertheless, things have come to such a pass in this liberal city that one of the strongest candidates is the former police chief, Frank Jordan, a conservative by San Francisco standards who calls for shipping the homeless off to a work farm.

Another forceful contender is Supervisor Angela Alioto, the daughter of former Mayor Joseph L. Alioto who has used her family name and personal wealth to transform her fledging political career into a formidable candidacy.

Both major challengers are striving to appeal to the native pride of San Franciscans, who all seem to believe in their hearts that their city is one of the finest in the world. Both Jordan and Alioto hope their campaigns will hark back to an era when life was simpler, the streets were cleaner and poverty was not an everyday sight.

So far in the campaign, Agnos has been on the defensive, accused of closing himself off at City Hall, wasting taxpayers’ money on a bloated bureaucracy and being too nice to the thousands of homeless people who inhabit the city’s sidewalks, alleys and parks.

Agnos, then a state assemblyman, won election four years ago with 70% of the vote, but public opinion polls now find his popularity has slipped so much that 70% of the electorate say they would not vote for him.

The 53-year-old mayor earned considerable respect two years ago with his handling of the disastrous earthquake, but his standing has since eroded in the face of the city’s general economic decline and growing resentment of the seemingly ubiquitous homeless.

Agnos charmed the city’s voters with a warm and friendly style in his first campaign for mayor, but since taking office has displayed a side that is abrasive, aloof and arrogant.

“Art’s biggest problem comes from the fact that he wanted so much to be able to solve the problems of the city that he over-promised,” said Assemblyman John Burton (D-San Francisco), an Agnos backer. “He laid out these ambitious programs. It was more, maybe, errors of the heart in trying to do so much.”

Voters rejected Agnos’ proposal in 1989 to build a downtown stadium for the San Francisco Giants, who now plan to leave the city. He won some friends by leading the way for demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway, an eyesore damaged in the earthquake. But his fiscal management--including hiring seven deputy mayors at salaries of $94,000 each--earned him widespread criticism.

Agnos blames many of the city’s problems on circumstances beyond his control--a national recession, state and federal cutbacks in urban aid, California’s five-year drought and the earthquake that destroyed dozens of homes and shut down three freeways.

But in an attempt at contrition, the mayor admitted last week in the campaign’s first televised debate that, at times, he had erred.

“Not every program, not every policy that I’ve proposed has worked right,” Agnos said. “I’ve certainly made my share of mistakes. But when I make them, I try to fix them. I need to do better and I can do better.”

In this city that boasts more than 200 demonstrations a year and declared itself a sanctuary for anyone who opposed the Persian Gulf War, the liberal Agnos has become the candidate of the center with two major challengers from the left and two from the right.

Former Police Chief Jordan, 56, and Supervisor Tom Hsieh, a 59-year-old Beijing-born architect, are vying with each other for the business vote and the support of San Francisco’s more conservative residents.

Alioto, 41, a San Francisco supervisor for less than three years, is competing for the city’s large liberal vote with Hongisto, 54, a former San Francisco sheriff and supervisor who has long espoused leftist causes.

Hongisto, a well-spoken politician, has prepared detailed plans for reforming city government but is lagging far behind in the polls. Hsieh (pronounced Shay) also is given little chance of winning, hampered by lack of support among the Chinatown Establishment and a heavy accent that he acknowledges makes it hard for some voters to understand him.

Despite the harsh attacks on Agnos, campaign insiders say he is likely to survive the primary and face either Jordan or Alioto in a Dec. 3 runoff. But Agnos partisans say that once voters have a chance to scrutinize the mayor’s opponents, they will realize he is the best the city has to offer.

“I think he personally was knocked off balance by some of the vitriol and the constant pounding he took for a while,” said Agnos campaign consultant Richie Ross. “Our biggest strength is we haven’t panicked. We will wait until we get into the runoff and then we will make our case aggressively.”

For many San Franciscans, a package of campaign postcards circulated by Jordan captured the mood of the city. The cards resembled the tourist postcards sold around the city, but instead of scenic San Francisco, shots showed a homeless man pushing a shopping cart, a closed library, graffiti in a park, a vandalized car and a wrecked city bus.

“Tourists come to the city and say, ‘My gosh what happened to this beautiful city,’ ” Jordan said. “We see homeless and panhandling almost on every block. We see the dirty streets, the litter, the graffiti.”

The mild-mannered, retired career policeman is far from a Dirty Harry-style cop, nor does he play the combative role of Los Angeles police chief Daryl F. Gates. Jordan spent much of his 33-year career in community relations and says, “I’m proudest of the fact that I humanized the Police Department in San Francisco.”

He goes to great lengths to show he is “sensitive and compassionate,” a phrase he uses frequently. Jordan tells how, as chief, he was inspecting the crime-ridden Tenderloin area one night when he was accosted by three men. Rather than risk using his weapon, he drove off for assistance and the trio escaped.

“Am I really solving a problem by stepping out there as a macho chief of police and saying, ‘I’m going to take charge of this and shoot somebody?’ Is that the best answer? I don’t think so,” he said.

In an effort to broaden his appeal, Jordan this week joined a demonstration protesting Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of legislation banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians. Some demonstrators, however, did not look kindly on Jordan’s arrival, pushing and shoving him until police rescued the former chief and escorted him from the scene.

On the campaign trail, Jordan complains that Agnos’ policies have encouraged the homeless to flock to San Francisco. In particular, he singles out the mayor’s tolerance of a two-year encampment of the homeless across the street from City Hall.

In a plan aimed at discouraging transients from coming to San Francisco, the former chief has proposed sending the homeless to a work farm outside the city where they could get help and grow vegetables.

Jordan also calls for strict identity checks on all homeless people who come to the city and apply for aid--including fingerprinting if necessary. He argues that the city should know if any of the homeless are eligible for federal aid for veterans or if they have a criminal record.

Alioto entered the race in August after first backing Agnos’ reelection. Playing on the same theme of the city’s decline, she has quickly garnered wide support, including endorsements by the Sierra Club and the Police Officers’ Assn. The police endorsement went to Alioto instead of onetime chief Jordan because of disputes he had with labor while he headed the force. Alioto promised to support a plan to raise pay and consult with police on the next chief.

A fiery, energetic campaigner, Alioto mostly offers a stylistic alternative to the other liberals, Agnos and Hongisto--two career politicians with whom she fundamentally agrees on the issues.

After siding with Agnos while on the Board of Supervisors, Alioto has carved out an independent position on the campaign’s major issue: the homeless. Criticizing the mayor’s program of building large homeless shelters, Alioto advocates increasing city funds for smaller board-and-care homes scattered around the city.

Her presence in the race has generated the campaign’s biggest controversy. Her critics have accused Alioto of trading on the name of her father, the city’s popular mayor from 1968 to 1976. Foes point out that it took her five tries to pass the State Bar exam. And she has shown a penchant for making embarrassing misstatements, such as: “We have 8-year-old drug dealers and I’m out talking to them every day.”

In recent weeks, Alioto has also been dogged by questions about her personal finances. One local newspaper questioned salary advances from her father’s law firm that she spent on an unsuccessful 1986 campaign for the Board of Supervisors. Another paper disclosed that she had borrowed $727,000 against her property and questioned whether she could repay the debt on her $91,000-a-year income as a lawyer and supervisor.

Alioto has dismissed charges of financial irregularities as inaccurate and irrelevant to the campaign. She counters that she would not face such questions if she were a man, and stresses her background as a mother and lawyer.

“Don’t worry about me. I can take care of my finances,” she said during the televised debate. “Absolutely, I am qualified to be mayor of San Francisco. I am the mother of four children, which is quite a job by the way.”

Her father, now a prominent lawyer in town, is one of her biggest boosters but says his influence over his daughter is greatly exaggerated.

“She’s a feisty little gal,” Joseph Alioto said. “Everyone around here thinks I’m some kind of puppet master, which isn’t true. She tells me what she is going to do.”