District 5 Supervisor. This is an archived page. Dean Preston is no longer a member of the Board of Supervisors. A proud and outspoken member of the Democratic Socialists of America , Preston was widely considered the most left-wing member of the Board of Supervisors.
During his time in public life, Preston has routinely opposed much-needing housing development and fought common-sense public safety measures. Preston's other priorities include public transit, imposing restrictions on landlords, and defunding the police. Preston has routinely blocked, opposed, or delayed new home construction, including both market-rate developments and subsidized units.
As a rule of thumb, he supports housing only if it is built by government, controlled by government, and subject to rent control. He will oppose other housing, although his stated reasons for opposition change depending on the project. For example, Preston has opposed homebuilding on subjective aesthetic grounds, claiming a project was too big and too modern for his " intimate, historic neighborhood.
He delayed upzoning a transit-rich area in his district to conduct a "race and equity study" that never happened. And he fought the construction of new subsidized, affordable homes by opposing UCSF's plan to build workforce housing by arguing both that the proposal wasn't big enough didn't include enough housing and that it was so big that it would have an undue impact on the area.
Along with opposing individual homebuilding projects, Preston also opposes structural changes to local and state law that would make it easier to build new homes. For example, he campaigned against a ballot initiative to speed up affordable housing production and opposed a state bill designed to build more homes in transit-rich neighborhoods. After the city failed to meet state housing targets—in part because of his obstruction—Preston called efforts to impose state-level oversight on San Francisco's housing crisis " absurd.
