San Francisco Official Blames City’s Homelessness Disaster on ‘Capitalism’

An elected official in San Francisco blamed capitalism for causing rampant homelessness in his district and questioned the progressive city mayor's policy of arresting drug users.

Dean Preston, a member of the city's Board of Supervisors, represents the Tenderloin district where homeless encampments and open-air drug markets have been spreading. 

“I think what you’re seeing in the Tenderloin is absolutely the result of capitalism and what happens in capitalism to the people at the bottom rungs,” Preston said in an interview for a documentary posted on UK-based UnHerd.

"The biggest driver of why folks are on the street is because they lost their jobs, income or were evicted from their homes, usually for not being able to pay the rent. So you have major landlords literally causing folks to lose their homes, and real estate speculation making it impossible for folks to find an affordable place to live," he said.

Preston, a Democrat elected in 2019 and who started Tenants Together, a nonprofit organization that advocates for tenants' rights, also trashed Mayor London Breed's policy of arresting drug dealers, claiming it "has not made our city any safer. It’s actually made it less safe. It increases overdoses.”

"I don’t think every instance of poverty or addiction or behavioral health issue is a safety threat to someone walking by. I mean, there’s a lot of people who are doing things that are very harmful to themselves on the streets, who aren’t necessarily a safety threat," Preston said. 

Breed and Preston clashed at a Q&A session in June between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors over the policy to arrest people using and dealing drugs on the streets.

Preston stated that Breed's plan would make racial inequity worse and contradicted her own plan to set up “wellness hubs” that would provide safe injection sites for drug users.

“People are dying at truly horrifying rates,” Preston said. 

The exchange ended with Breed calling Preston "another white man who’s talking about Black and brown people as if you’re the savior of those people and you speak for them."

Preston also defended his stance to defund the police in the UnHerd interview. 

“I think we have a very, very bloated police budget. All kinds of waste in the police department. I could cut $100 million out of the department," he said.