Walk the Bayview with Theo Ellington, and you won’t get far. In fact, it’s almost impossible to get started.
During a recent Friday in the neighborhood, Cuban jazz pianist Chuchito Valdés stopped Ellington, the interim executive director of the Ruth Williams Opera House, for a quick hello.
“How are you, my brother?”
“Living the dream, sir,” Ellington said.
Within moments, a woman swerved her car into the wrong lane to pull up to the sidewalk, swinging open the door as her car continued to lurch.
“Hold on,” she said. “I know your face from the news.”
Through his high-profile work as a lobbyist, community organizer, and nonprofit executive, Ellington, 37, has become somewhat of a celebrity in the Bayview.
That star status could serve him well as he launches his run for District 10 supervisor, representing one of the city’s most overlooked areas and last Black enclaves. Ellington filed paperwork this week to represent the district, which includes a range of economically and racially diverse neighborhoods, from the Bayview and Hunters Point to the Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, Sunnydale, and Visitacion Valley.
After finishing third in the 2018 race in D10, won by Supervisor Shamann Walton, Ellington is more seasoned than he was during his first campaign, at age 29, he says.
“What I was going up against was sort of the machine,” Ellington told The Standard during a drive through the district. “If you looked on paper, I was the kid with potential. Today, I’ve got work experience. I’ve got stability in my family.”
He has spent the years since his loss networking and building his résumé, and he enters the race as a likely frontrunner, with a list of influential endorsements: former D10 supervisor turned state Controller Malia Cohen, state Sen. Scott Wiener, and Supervisors Danny Sauter and Matt Dorsey.
“I supported Shamann in that [2018] race but always liked Theo and respected him, and he has done so much between then and now,” Wiener said. “The city has not always done right by our southeastern neighborhoods, and I’m confident Theo can shift that dynamic.”
Ellington is carving out a lane that parallels the city’s moderate shift on housing and development while respecting persistent concerns on displacement within the district.
“Every block there’s an empty plot of land,” Ellington said of the Bayview. “If you build with intention, if you build with community as a real partner, then it’s not gentrification. It is long-standing residents finally getting the amenities they deserve.”
The D10 race has drawn a crowded field of competitors to replace Walton, who will be termed out after 2026. Ellington will face Board of Appeals commissioner J.R. Eppler, community organizer Jameel Rasheed Patterson, and political outsiders Mike Lin and Pearci Bastiany. DJ Brookter, CEO of the nonprofit Young Community Developers, is also expected to run, and community organizer Cedric Akbar and nonprofit housing director Bill Barnes could join the fray.
Ellington plans to distinguish himself from the group with his vision of leveraging the city’s AI-boom benefits for the district.
“The things that we’re building here can influence the rest of the world,” he said. “This neighborhood should be a part of that global conversation.”
Jim Ross, a Bay Area political consultant, said Ellington is wise to shore up support from the business community and YIMBY groups.
“The question is: Did he expand his base from his last run, when he lost to Shamann, and can he peel off some labor groups?” Ross said. “Most of the new construction is happening in the Bayview, and that’s going to be impacting folks. It’s probably the one district in the city that is changing most radically.”
Building a new vision
A tire shop and a taxi parking lot serve as a welcome to the Bayview when exiting off the I-101. Drive a couple of blocks, and you enter the city’s sprawling manufacturing and distribution zone, where a maze of beige garages and warehouses leaves little room for new businesses or housing.
“I want to get the two-, three-story buildings where we can employ hundreds or thousands of people,” Ellington said, pointing out structures during the drive. “We have to create our own economies here.”
He gives Walton credit for pushing back on expanded shelter operations in the neighborhood, which, along with the Tenderloin and South of Market, bears the brunt of housing many of the city’s homeless. However, he criticized the sitting supervisor, who declined comment, for not focusing on community needs by spurring housing and employment.
“You gotta have skin in the game,” Ellington said. “I tell people, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ I’m literally building for my family — and for the rest of the families that I want my kids to grow up with.”
He added, “I don’t know if the current supervisor understands how to do that or has the willpower to do it.”
Ellington counts himself lucky to have avoided the trap that has claimed many young Black men in the Bayview. He credits two “centers of gravity”: the homes of his mother, Rose, and his maternal grandfather, Clifton Weaks, whom he calls “the visionary of the family.”
Weaks left Natchez, Mississippi, in the mid-1940s, joining a flock of Black Southerners fleeing the region during the Great Migration. He settled in San Francisco, working as a laborer on construction projects, including upkeep of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“He would always say, ‘You better be smart, because this construction stuff takes a lot out of your body,’” Ellington said.
The third-youngest of 10 cousins who lived in his grandfather’s home on Third and Palou, Ellington managed to avoid the pitfalls of gangs and drugs, thanks mostly to the watchful eye of his mother. But tragedy was never far. In May 2001, Ellington’s 12-year-old cousin DeAndre was fatally shot with a gun that police reported as stolen.
“This was no-man’s-land,” Ellington said. “You didn’t necessarily want to be here. A lot of gun violence, a lot of gang activity. In San Francisco, this was sort of ground zero for all of that.”
His grandfather’s home, and later his mother’s apartment above a liquor store on Third and Newcombe, served as Ellington’s refuge. His mom pushed him into any program she could, and he took to film production while attending Gloria R. Davis Middle School, producing a documentary called “Bus 24.”
The 24 line stops a total of 56 times between the Bayview and posh Pacific Heights, giving passengers a reminder nearly every minute of how different the city can be depending on where you were born within it.
“I realized then that the conditions that we were living in here were not normal,” Ellington said. “That sparked my just drive for making an impact in this community.”
He went on to Ruth Asawa School of the Arts before majoring in political science at Belmont’s Notre Dame de Namur University and earning a master’s degree in urban affairs from the University of San Francisco.
In 2014, Ellington landed a job as the Golden State Warriors’ first public policy director, helping to get community buy-in for the Chase Center in Mission Bay, and he’s gone on to serve as a city commissioner on four boards.
“I loved his maturity and presence, for someone who at the time was in his 20s,” said Linda Parker Pennington, a friend who lives in the district. “I’ve seen him operate at the board meetings and take a lot of heat but deal with it extremely well, and listen with empathy and compassion.”
Ellington understands that the affordability crisis is hurting communities across D10. Addressing the concerns of Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights residents will be just as vital as the Bayview. And while he notes that the scandal-plagued Dream Keeper Initiative did important work to help Black residents, he said that poor management “squandered” the opportunity.
Unlike most San Francisco neighborhoods, the Bayview lacks a full-size grocery store. The neighborhood, which is 34% Black, according to the 2020 U.S. census, is bracketed by a sea of warehouses on the west side and a toxic shipyard to the east.
The struggles are personal for Ellington, who in 2016 bought a condo on Donahue Street in the shipyard in Hunter’s Point before it was revealed that soil testers had falsified records. Radioactive materials were found, and locals contend the shipyard has contributed to higher cancer rates in the neighborhood (opens in new tab).
Ellington served as a commissioner with the city agency that gave approvals on the shipyard development. He said he felt “duped” by the toxic discovery. Ellington received a modest settlement from a case against the developers, while a federal lawsuit against Tetra Tech, which forged soil inspections at the site, led to a separate $97 million settlement in January. More cases are ongoing.
Despite the health concerns, Ellington and his wife, Seray, a registered nurse at UCSF, continue to live in the shipyard with their three boys — a 6-year-old and 3-year-old twins — and they have no intention of moving. San Francisco’s high cost of living is partly to blame, but Ellington also refuses to leave the district he has always called home.
“We’ve been in this rut for so long, at a certain point we have to build the vision for what we want the future of this neighborhood to look like,” he said. “We have to define what that is.”