Tech-rooted groups seek to shake up San Francisco politics

SAN FRANCISCO: The tech entrepreneurs who flocked to San Francisco two decades ago bringing jobs and wealth, and also soaring housing prices and gentrification, are becoming a rising political force in a city they say is woefully off track.

They are forming advocacy organizations — among them TogetherSF Action, Abundant SF and Grow SF — to pressure officials to tackle soaring housing costs, public drug dealing and other woes exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.

While the organizations differ in their priorities, they all say a small group of power brokers, many of them progressives, have prevented the city from solving some of its most pressing issues.

The groups are highlighting fissures among Democrats in this liberal stronghold that has struggled to rebound from the pandemic.

“In San Francisco there’s a lot of political ideology that holds people back from working together for the things that they actually agree on,” said Kanishka Cheng, who co-founded TogetherSF Action in 2020 with billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, a former journalist who also started the San Francisco Standard news website and was among the initial investors in Google.

This year, TogetherSF Action is educating people about the city’s drug problem and pushing for an increased police presence to hold dealers accountable, and also for treatment options to get addicted people off the streets.

Like many cities, San Francisco is battling the fentanyl crisis and sees about two deaths a day from overdoses.

Another tech entrepreneur seeking to influence change is Zack Rosen, who is co-founder and CEO of the website platform Pantheon and helped launch YIMBY California, a pro-development group that fights for state-level zoning reforms.

Rosen said he is motivated by his and his wife’s desire to raise their family in San Francisco. He grew frustrated at the lack of affordable housing after workers at a bike shop he owns were displaced, and he wants to cut through the red tape and bureaucracy that have hampered new construction.

Now Rosen, his wife and other couples working in tech are the force behind Abundant SF, which plans to spend millions to back ballot measures and candidates that would create safe, accessible public spaces and increase the housing stock for all income levels.

“There is a lot of complaining on Twitter and not a lot of action,” Rosen said.

“We want to be part of the solution.” Tech has had a huge presence in San Francisco since the early 2000s, when major companies including Google, Twitter and Uber began renting office space downtown as the Silicon Valley expanded north.

But only recently have industry leaders sought to so publicly attempt to influence policy and elections.

Some of them were encouraged last year after their efforts promoting moderate candidates led to ballot-box defeats for multiple progressive officials: A supervisor, three school board members and District Attorney Chesa Boudin.

They range from activists with a track record of influencing city and state policy to higher-profile, brash figures like Elon Musk who turn to social media to criticize officials.

“There is a lot of complaining on Twitter and not a lot of action,” Rosen said. “We want to be part of the solution.”