10.2.00
District 4: Sunset surprises
By Betsey Culp
If you don’t live in the Sunset, you’re likely to
dismiss it.
“Wholesome,” pronounces the Examiner’s Ilene Lelchuk,
“the most westerly, most foggy, most conservative part of San Francisco.”
“There are few places in San Francisco that could be termed unpleasant,”
Deborah Bosley and Jamie Jensen add in “The Real Guide,” but neighborhoods
like the Sunset can certainly be described as monotonous — clean, quiet
streets, spread out across a large area, and leading eventually to Ocean
Beach, the largest and least arresting stretch of San Francisco’s
shoreline.”
But if you’re a resident of the rectangle
that stretches from 19th Avenue to the Pacific, and from
Lincoln to Sloat, you probably hold a very different opinion. Maybe it’s
the light, clear and all-illuminating as it reflects off the ocean. Maybe
it’s the unpretentious stucco houses standing side by side along street
after street. In any case, Sunset people tend to be passionate about where
they live. One native son of the western fringes described his return home
after visiting his parents in Palm Springs: “As the taxi entered the
Sunset, I rolled down the window and eagerly began to scoop in the fog.”
This is not to say that all of District 4
is the same. It’s a place of vignettes: A young blond scraping down his
surfboard on the sidewalk in front of his house in Ocean Beach. Four
generations celebrating the 90th birthday of the mater familias
at an Italian restaurant on Taraval, presenting her with a bright red
blanket — to take to ’Niners games. The handsome scion of an old San
Francisco family hopping on his bike at 27th Avenue and
pedaling like a madman, dodging cars and yelling at drivers, all the way
to his job at SF General. A trio of Chinese American teenagers bent over
the engine of an old Chevrolet.
The pooh-pooh-ers are right. Compared to
the eastern shores of the city, the Sunset is quiet — a good place to
raise kids. And indeed, 20 percent of the residents are under the age of
30. At the same time, its voters tend to be older than the citywide
population, more religious and slightly more affluent. About 58 percent of
them own their own homes, compared to 45 percent citywide. Not
surprisingly, they tend to vote for conservative candidates and issues.
But…
In the case of the Sunset, there are many
but’s to roil the political waters. Most obvious is its ethnic
composition: some 45 percent of all residents are Asian. Most — one third
of all residents — are Chinese American, compared to 18 percent for the
city as a whole. But while 71 percent of the Caucasian residents go
marching off to their neighborhood polling place, only 16 percent of these
Asians are likely to vote. Or were likely to vote in the past. Imagine the
pundits’ consternation if an issue managed to jump-start these
stay-at-homes.
It’s possible that such an issue will
arise this fall. Like most people who live on the other side of the peaks,
District 4 residents tend to feel slighted by City Hall. They worry, for
example, that their children’s needs are going unserved because their
parks and schools need TLC. They know that the attention they seek has
been going to other, more insistent parts of town. A case in point is the
recent proposal to build a 43-unit affordable housing project for teachers
on the Parkside Elementary School playground. Housing on a playground!
Neighbors complain that they had met with school district officials for
three years, making plans to rebuild the school, with no inkling that the
housing project was in the offing. Supervisor and candidate Leland Yee has
plunged into the brouhaha: “According to a Park and Rec survey, the
Sunset/Parkside has the least amount of space available for children to
play. We need to preserve open space.”
In this district of single-family homes
and precisely laid-out streets, housing is tight and traffic is
troublesome, just as they are elsewhere. If any of the seven candidates
can convince the residents that he can bring home their bacon, he’ll be a
shoo-in. And if he’s Asian, and particularly Chinese, he might even entice
non-voters to emerge from their tunnel-entranced homes.
Voting statistics from the past few
years’ elections label this a conservative district, but the Sunset has a
history of innovation that suggests it was actually ahead of its time.
Take the rows and rows of uniform houses
that inspire so much derision. The brainchildren of a developer named
Henry Doelger, they popped up like mushrooms beginning in the 1920s,
obscuring the sand dunes that once extended the beach far inland. On the
Western Neighborhoods website (http://www.outsidelands.org/),
Steve LaBounty quotes a “romantic newspaperman” who watched the growth
process: “There was only one way to sell homes out in the Sunset District
of San Francisco in those days; you hammered a few nails along with the
carpenters and when a prospective buyer came along, off came the
coveralls, and presto, instant real estate salesman.” In the 1930s and
1940s Doelger and his brother Frank became early Joe O’Donoghues of sorts,
often churning out two houses a day. (After World War II Henry moved on to
Daly City, where he created the Westlake subdivision.)
But the comparison with O’Donoghue ends
with speed of construction. Doelger houses, which originally sold for
about $5,000, were built with ordinary families in mind. Framed in
redwood, they were built to last. Constructed cookie-cutter style to cut
costs, they found variety in a catalogue of trim from English Cottage to
Modernistic. Architects Sally and John Woodbridge add that plans for the
subdivision called for underground utilities and nearby commercial strips
with enticements for merchants.
In the 1960s the Sunset led a fight that
turned city transit on its head just as the Doelgers had revolutionized
moderate-priced housing. As automobiles surged onto San Francisco’s
streets following World War II, state planners projected a network of
freeways linking the bridges and major parts of the city. A key link would
have paralleled 19th Avenue. In a heated campaign that
resembled later neighborhood opposition to the Central Freeway, residents
said no, no way, never, not at all, forcing the Board of Supervisors to
back out of the program. Instead of an elevated concrete thoroughfare that
would have blocked sunlight and divided the neighborhood, the western side
of the city is served by a broad, sometimes clogged esplanade lined with
homes. San Franciscans ever since have opted for less efficient but more
human-scaled road systems.
This November in the Sunset, there won’t
be the kinds of fireworks that greet some of the races in other parts of
the city. The roster is a rather subdued lot. Farthest left stands
designer and cabinetmaker Jeff Rogers, a relative newcomer to San
Francisco politics. Consultant John Shanley, once on the staff of State
Senator Quentin Kopp, stands for protecting homeowners and neighborhoods
from outside incursion, either by developers or by the city. Darryl Honda,
“unbought and unbossed,” is running on experience derived from owning one
of the city’s “most customer-friendly video stores.” Vietnamese immigrant
Vu-Duc Vuong has long been active in local and national affairs; he’s a
professor of social work at SF State and founder of the Center for
Southeast Asian Refugee Resettlement.
In what may be an odd display of ethnic
fence-sitting, Our Mayor has endorsed two candidates, Arab-American small
businessman Ron Dudum and Chinese-American small businessman Tom Hsieh.
Dudum told the Bay Guardian, “If you’re going to get anything done in this
city, you’ve got to work with Willie Brown.” Hsieh speaks of restoring a
voice to the Sunset, of ensuring delivery of the Sunset’s “fair share of
services.”
Incumbent Leland Yee is the carpetbagger,
having moved to 24th Avenue about a year ago rather than
challenge Mark Leno in District 8. He’s been endorsed by former mayor
Frank Jordan and DA Terence Hallinan, but his positions on the Board of
Supervisors have always been too independent to align him consistently
with Tom Ammiano. Nor would such a liaison serve him well in this
district.
Instead, Yee is riding through this
election like a mild-mannered Lone Ranger, joining forces with no faction.
It’s likely that he’ll win. And if he does, he may be part of another
Sunset innovation, for occasionally, in districts here and there
throughout the city, faint rumblings are rising of new alliances that are
neighborhood-centered and issue-linked, something more akin to the
grassroots Neighborhoods Alliance for Political Awareness than the
conventional progressive/moderate paths of the past.
