Maxwell’s Housing Agenda Sacrifices Tenants

San Francisco Supervisor Sophie Maxwell will be easily re-elected on November 7. Maxwell pledged in 2001 to help preserve the city’s economic and racial diversity, but has increasingly moved to undermine this goal. She has promoted upscale development in the low-income African-American neighborhoods of Bayview and Hunters Point, and last week endorsed Lennar’s breaking its agreement to build 400 rental units at the Hunters Point Shipyard. Maxwell is also urging her colleagues to kill Angelo Sangiacomo’s proposed 1900 rental unit project at Trinity Plaza, seeking to rewrite an agreement to rebuild 360 units of rent-controlled housing on the site. In the upper middle-class, predominately white enclave of Potrero Hill, Maxwell has sought to sharply restrict housing development, helping to ensure that neither market rate nor affordable units get built. Maxwell’s agenda appears to be running counter to someone who speaks powerfully of the need to keep working- class people in San Francisco.