San Francisco housing advocate Corey Smith filed a lawsuit accusing Supervisor Dean Preston of lying about his housing record in his application to run for reelection this year.
The writ of mandate filed Monday seeks to get the San Francisco Department of Elections to correct what Smith characterizes as misinformation on the city supervisor’s application for reelection.
Preston’s application touts a litany of housing achievements, from saving 20,000 renters from eviction to securing a quarter-billion dollars in rent relief and affordable housing. However, Smith and other critics dispute Preston’s claim that he voted to approve 30,000 new homes in San Francisco, 86% of which are affordable.
“I’m calling bullshit,” said Smith, executive director of Housing Action Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for increasing housing supply in San Francisco. “Because it’s an election year, he is trying to reframe himself and his anti-housing record, which is based entirely on political plans. But I’m actually interested in homes getting built, and he has consistently opposed that.”
Preston faces a potentially tough reelection come November, with two main challengers: entrepreneur Bilal Mahmood and education activist Autumn Looijen. Preston’s Democratic Socialist affiliation has made him a punching bag for figures like Elon Musk, who pledged money to defeat him. On the issue of housing, Preston’s critics have often accused him of blocking or stalling projects.
Smith claims the 30,000 figure is bogus—citing city data showing the number is closer to 14,000—and he is asking the court for a writ of mandate to remove the information from Preston’s candidate statement before it’s printed in voter information pamphlets.
Jen Snyder, a spokesperson for Preston, was not amused by Smith’s lawsuit.
“Sorry, not interested in commenting on a corporate developer lobbyist’s latest media stunt,” she said by text.
Snyder directed those dubious of Preston’s housing record to DeansHousingRecord.com, a website set up by campaign volunteers and staffers from Preston’s office to rebuke the claims made by Dean Preston’s Housing Graveyard, a site set up by David Broockman, a volunteer SF YIMBY volunteer whose work is cited in Smith’s lawsuit.
Smith claimed that 8,250 of the homes Preston cited included temporary shelter-in-place hotel rooms for the homeless during the pandemic along with 10,000 concept homes from Proposition K—a ballot measure passed by voters in 2020—that had yet to be built.
“These are not ‘new homes’ that were ‘approved’ in the sense that a reasonable voter would interpret these terms,” Smith said in the lawsuit. “These were existing hotel rooms which were temporarily leased for shelter during COVID-19.”