NEWSLETTER

CHRIS DALY IS THE MAYOR ’S BEST FRIEND

INTERVIEW BY SIGURD KONGSHØJ LARSEN

Photo: Luke Thomas

If San Francisco were a giant, sprawling asshole, Chris Daly would be the inflamed hemorrhoid that just won’t go away. Luckily, the city is a beautiful, outwardly liberal place and he’s spent the past ten years of his life keeping it that way (at least in his mind). As an elected member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Daly has introduced proposals to ban handguns, abolish the office of the police chief, and stop the Blue Angels from flying over the city during Fleet Week. Many of his opponents think he’s just an opportunistic windbag, but his sustained advocacy for the Bay Area’s massive homeless population has been cited by supporters as proof that the man actually gives a shit. That’s a rare thing to find in politics in this day and age, so we phoned him up to get a read on things for ourselves.


VICE: You were a newcomer to San Francisco in ’93, right?
Chris Daly: Correct.

Can you tell us something about how the city has changed in your time there?
Clearly, the city is changing rapidly. Even since I moved here back in the early 90s, the gentrification and displacement, particularly in neighborhoods like the Mission District and South of Market, has been really significant and fast moving. Neighborhoods like the Mission, which has been known for decades as a predominantly working-class Latino community, saw incredible turnover during the dot-com years and the late 90s. In 2001 there were evictions of renters and families from the neighborhood, apartments being converted into condominiums, and the construction of liberal lofts, which weren’t built as artist housing, but as yuppie housing. I think it really changed the dynamic of what may still be, and once was, one of the coolest neighborhoods in the land. Clearly there have been demographic changes, and I think you see neighborhoods that are whiter and a little bit higher up on the economic ladder. They lose a little of their edge. I think that we have a city that is less hospitable to people who are different, even though they have been the foundation of what has historically made San Francisco great.

And you are trying to change that now?
Yeah, I’m trying to hold the levee, basically. If there’s any silver lining in the current economic doom, it’s that the economic pressure and kind of upwardly mobile change in San Francisco has lessened a bit. We’ve seen rents finally start to come down, although they are not coming down as significantly as the land values, but it’s a little bit of breathing room for people to make it in San Francisco with more modest means. Everybody bandies about the word “diversity,” but the progressive camp is doing their best for everyday people. We’re trying to make sure there’s a space carved out in our city for those communities.

How are the homeless folks doing now?
It ’s rough. Hous ing prices are finally better, but the other side of that is the budget problems that everybody’s having. We’re certainly not immune to that. Just this week, the mayor proposed closing one of our homeless-drop-in centers. With the recession, the numbers of homeless people is up, and while across the political spectrum there’s some agreement on doing more to house homeless people, we’re not doing it at a rate where we’re meeting the demand. Homeless services are being cut, so I think it’s going to be like Night of the Living Dead out in the Tenderloin once this budget gets through.

You’ve been known for using some unconventional methods when trying to bring attention to a problem. Tell me about the time you brought a bunch of homeless people to former mayor Willie Brown’s office.
When I was first elected, Mayor Brown liked to issue pronouncements. One of them was that his door was open to all the new supervisors, even though we were somewhat known as the anti– Willie Brown camp. I was meeting with some homeless advocates from the Coalition on Homelessness, which is pretty much the premier homelessadvocacy organization in the city, and they told me they hadn’t been able to get a meeting with Mayor Brown in almost two years. I couldn’t believe it so I said, “I’ll take you in and set up a meeting.” When Willie got there, he pretended like he was surprised, like I had ambushed him with actual homeless advocates in his office. Then he began to berate some of them and a couple of the homeless people we had brought. I didn’t think it was right for the mayor to be browbeating this homeless woman, so I called him on it, and a bit of a verbal altercation ensued, and some profanity was exchanged before he was escorted out by his security detail. Afterward, there was this whole media frenzy about the thing.

Do you remember what he said?
He was denying something that was pretty obviously true and I called him on it. I think I said he was full of shit, and he called me something back and actually got up to come after me, but he was held back. I stood up myself and was yelling at him to bring it on. Have you ever been in a fight? I’m scrappy.

I bet. Even though you’re not happy about some things in San Francisco, what do you like about it?
There’s a reason why I’m here. It’s an incredible place. Some San Francisco boosters like to bandy about that it’s the best city in the world. It certainly isn’t that, but it probably has the potential to be that based on a rich history of activism. San Francisco is amazing, but that said, it’s undeniable: How can you be the best when your African-American population has been decimated? I think one of the signs of a city that has gone through significant and very debilitating gentrification is that the African-American population is now 5 percent of the city—and that’s in a city that used to have a very large and vibrant African- American population in multiple neighborhoods. Now it’s questionable whether the African-American community of the city is going to survive at all. That sucks.

That does suck. Besides that, what’s your favorite part of it?
I identify with the Mission as my home. I live right on the edge of it, in a part of the city that’s got no name. The Mission District is an incredible neighborhood. Young people who are either socially active or interested in counterculture tend to gravitate to it.

And is that where you get your high fives and handshakes?
Yeah. Sixteenth and North Mission on Sixteenth Street is the area where I do the best in terms of the vote. I’m well received there and it’s where I worked before running for office. I have lived there most of my years in the city.

Where do you get the “Fuck you, Chris Daly” taunts?
I either get them in the wealthy part of my district down by the ballpark where the Giants play and the condos start at a million dollars or out on the left side of the city, which tends to be older San Francisco and much more conservative. The other neighborhood I lived in for a couple of years—and that lies in my district—is the Tenderloin. It is a built-up neighborhood with bigger buildings, made up almost entirely of renters with a really compelling mix of different backgrounds—probably a dozen languages are spoken there. It’s a tough neighborhood—one that has the intersection of a lot of difficult social problems, but it’s also got the spirit of the people and a resilience that, combined with significant architecture, make it a compelling one.

Is it the drug area as well?
Yeah. Well, the North Mission is for heroin and the Tenderloin is for crack. Sixteenth Street probably used to be the most significant heroin-distribution point on the West Coast. Southern Mission seems to be mellower, and the TL a little bit more hemmed up.

So is that where Mayor Newsom picks up his stash of cocaine?
I’ve never technically alleged Mayor Newsom’s cocaine use, but everybody knows it. It’s fun. I represent a lot of folks who have stimulant issues, and I believe each one of them should have the type of access to treatment services the mayor did.

Tell me about the time when you were mayor for the day.
In 2003 I shared the budget, and it was a difficult budget year, but in the end I was able to strike a deal with then-Mayor Brown. Shortly thereafter his chief of staff called me up and said they were thankful that they were able to work constructively on the budget with me. The mayor was going out of town to China, so they wanted me to be acting mayor for a day. The acting mayor in San Francisco has all the powers of the actual mayor while they are acting. So I said “Thank you very much” and got on the phone with the city attorneys, asking them what the acting mayor could do that the mayor could not undo. As it turned out, there were a couple of appointments up on the Public Utilities Commission, which is an agency that deals with most of the Bay Area’s water system and also does the sewers in the city and a power enterprise as well, with a series of dams and hydroelectric power plants, so it’s an important agency for the region. Willie Brown was getting ready to appoint one of the least qualified people that you could imagine—this guy named Andrew.

What was wrong with him?
He’s the son of a political patron of the mayor’s who ended up going to prison. The mommy did, not the son. But the son had absolutely no qualifications, no technical qualifications, no experience with public utilities, no environmental record. He was just a political hack—he did have a rap album.

What? A rap album?
Yeah. Called Rugged N’ Buckwild and his band name was Cquence and I own the album because…

It was pretty good?
It was purchased for me after this all happened and it’s worth a listen. So anyway, I’m acting mayor for the day and they ask me if I want to ride in the mayor’s limousine and I say no, I’ll ride my bike like I do every day. Then they ask me if I want to use his office and I say no, my office is perfectly fine. So I got into my office and had two very strong, environmentally friendly San Franciscans come in, and I appointed them to the Public Utilities Commission. Then I called the mayor’s chief of staff and asked if he wanted to come down to my office to meet his two new commissioners. After that, all hell broke loose. The mayor cut his trip short to deal with the situation at home. In the end I got one of the two commissioners on the PUC.

The Mayor must really like you.
I think there’s a soft spot in Willie Brown’s heart for me till this day.

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