In S.F. Mayoral Race, It’s Not Really the Economy

In the final week of a tough and nasty reelection campaign, Willie Brown sounds almost plaintive as he pleads with voters to make him the first mayor in 16 years elected to a second term.

“No other city has so many things going on,” Brown told well-heeled homeowners at a recent campaign appearance--one of nearly two dozen he is making every day this week. “People on the outside think this is almost heaven.”

Brown seems stunned to find himself facing a likely runoff--potentially against a write-in candidate--even though the mayor is a national political figure presiding over a city in the midst of a Silicon Valley-fueled economic boom.

But polls show that even as property values soar and unemployment and crime rates fall, San Francisco voters are downright gloomy about the state of the city and disenchanted with their flashy mayor.

Residents fume in traffic jams that constantly clog downtown streets. They curse the notoriously unreliable municipal transportation system. They worry that skyrocketing rents in what is already California’s most expensive city are forcing out both the poor and the middle class. They complain about hordes of homeless people camping on streets and in parks.

“We’re getting increasingly polarized economically--the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,” said attorney Sue Hestor, who campaigned for Brown last time but now plans to vote for one of his challengers.

In a city that cherishes its neighborhoods and often is hostile to big development projects, “economic activity is a double-edged sword,” said Richard DeLeon, chairman of San Francisco State University’s political science department.

“Once the honeymoon was off and people perceived Brown as being cozy with the downtown business elites and organized labor, it rubbed the wrong way,” DeLeon said.

District Attorney Also Fighting to Survive

Voter grumpiness extends beyond the mayoral race to the campaign for district attorney, in which Terence Hallinan, one of the most liberal district attorneys in the nation and a Brown ally, is battling to survive. Hallinan faces a strong challenge from Bill Fazio, a career prosecutor he defeated in a runoff four years ago. Hallinan is in trouble despite a 40% drop in the city’s crime rate in the past four years.

The prosecutor’s approval ratings sagged this month after the San Francisco Chronicle published stories showing that Hallinan has the worst conviction rate of any district attorney in the state. The former supervisor has also been hurt by his public confrontations with judges in cases he has chosen to prosecute himself.

A Chronicle poll of 600 likely voters published Wednesday showed that Fazio had pulled ahead with 29% of the vote to Hallinan’s 20%.

In the mayoral race, opinion polls have consistently shown voters giving the three major mayoral candidates--Brown, former Mayor Frank Jordan and retired political consultant Clint Reilly--higher unfavorable ratings than favorable. They have shown Brown finishing first in the race, but with far less than the 50%-plus-one majority he needs Tuesday to avoid a runoff.

This comes despite the fact that Brown won early support from organized labor and downtown business interests and was publicly embraced by national political figures such as President Clinton and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

Brown’s poor numbers persuaded Board of Supervisors President Tom Ammiano to announce his write-in candidacy two weeks ago. Although he is running an all-volunteer campaign on a shoestring budget, Ammiano catapulted into a statistical three-way tie for second place in the race with Reilly and Jordan, according to a Chronicle poll published this week.

The poll, which had a margin of error of 4 percentage points, showed Brown with 33% of the vote, Jordan 14%, and Reilly and Ammiano 11% each; 29% of voters said they were undecided.

Some pundits are betting that Ammiano, a gay activist and former stand-up comedian, will place second behind Brown in a race in which no one is expected to capture a majority. Ammiano’s power base extends beyond the city’s well-organized gay community to rank-and-file union members and other left-leaning groups in a city where about 40% of voters define themselves as liberal.

“Our phones are ringing off the hook,” said Hank Wilson, one of the volunteer campaign managers running Ammiano’s race from Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint in the Castro, the city’s gay enclave.

The campaign doesn’t yet have a fax machine, but Wilson said 250 volunteers turned out last weekend to walk precincts and distribute fliers telling voters how to write in Ammiano’s name on ballots.

“People are almost desperate for someone offering constructive alternatives,” Wilson said.

Ammiano is one of the city’s most consistently left-leaning politicians, championing such causes as a so-called living wage for city workers, expansion of already tough rent control laws, higher taxes for businesses and protections for domestic partners. His goal is to make it into the Dec. 14 runoff against Brown.

Brown Has Support of Gay Leaders

The mayor has long supported gay rights, Wilson acknowledged, and has the support of many gay leaders in town. But Brown’s critics in the community say they just don’t like his policies. “Gay people have to pay rent, they care about the quality of life,” Wilson said. “The question is: Who is San Francisco going to be developed for? People are asking: Are we in the equation?”

Brown’s opponents have hit him hard for failing to alleviate the city’s chronic homelessness problems. City officials estimate the homeless population at more than 4,000 on any given night, and half of those people are sleeping on the streets.

Even as Brown exults in the economic good times, his detractors say it is getting harder for the middle class to survive in a city where the median price of a home is $370,000, the rental vacancy rate hovers around 1% and a two-bedroom apartment routinely rents for $2,000 a month or more.

“The mayor seems determined to devote the eastern part of the city to yuppies,” said attorney Hestor, speaking of the area south of Market Street, once a bastion of blue-collar industries and the down and out. Today, it is a trendy neighborhood of high-priced lofts, nightclubs and upscale restaurants.

Responding to the criticisms, the normally flamboyant Brown has struck an uncharacteristically humble pose in campaign appearances.

He acknowledges that he was wrong to promise in the last election that he would “fix Muni” [the city transit system] during his first 100 days in office. He says he needs four more years to tackle public transportation woes and the city’s other problems.

“We want to see if we can’t solve traffic and congestion and address affordable housing in a constructive way,” Brown this week told members of the West of Twin Peaks Central Council, representing homeowners who tend to vote more conservatively than much of the city.

It was not the mayor’s natural constituency, but he is fighting hard for votes in every precinct, conceding nothing to the more conservative Jordan and Reilly.

The race already has become the most expensive in the city’s history, with Reilly spending more than $3 million--most of it his own money--and Brown expected to spend at least that by December.

Challengers Lambaste Current Government

The campaign has had a nasty tone almost from the beginning. Reilly has lambasted city government under Brown as the “most corrupt” in his lifetime. Jordan has accused Brown of cronyism. Brown’s campaign has brought up a 20-year-old occurrence of domestic violence in Reilly’s past, saying the incident raises questions about his fitness to hold public office.

Reilly acknowledged a physical altercation with a former girlfriend, which he says occurred when he was struggling with alcoholism, but disputed the Brown campaign’s graphic account of the alleged beating. His poll numbers have sagged, however, since the allegations were made.

Perhaps the greatest measure of voter discontent is Jordan’s second-place position behind Brown in polls. Four years ago, even the one-time police chief’s supporters tended to dismiss him as a failed mayor. Jordan, his critics said, was unable to bridge the city’s many divisions.

Jordan has spent a relative pittance--less than half a million dollars--on his campaign. Most of his efforts have been focused on bashing Brown and Reilly in debates.

On Tuesday, San Francisco voters also will consider 11 ballot measures. Most controversial among them is a $299-million bond measure to rebuild Laguna Honda Hospital, the city-owned long-term-care facility primarily for indigent patients.

The dormitory wards at the hospital, which was founded in 1866, do not meet state and federal regulations for patient privacy.

Unless the facility, which cares for more than 1,000 patients, is rebuilt, it will have to be shut down. The measure must get two-thirds of the vote to pass, because it will raise property taxes for the next 20 years.

Voters also will decide--for the third time in three elections--whether to tear down or rebuild the Central Freeway, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

One ballot measure calls for tearing down the elevated freeway and replacing it with a boulevard. Another calls for rebuilding it.

Yet another measure--bitterly opposed by banks--would ban the practice of banks charging a fee to non-customers when they use one of the banks’ San Francisco ATMs.