Voters’ Big “NO” on Propositions B and C

Deep Sixes Waterfront Condo Complex Plan

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly rejected the 8 Washington luxury high-rise towers put forward as Propositions B and C on the November ballot.  Landslide margins of 62%-38% (Prop B) and 67%-33% (Prop C) crushed the proposal.  Despite the big developers and real estate interests spending over $2.4 million on deceptive tv ads and mountains of misleading mailers, this was a monumental reversal for their deceptive campaign.

Thanks are deserved by the more than 1,000 people who generously donated the funds needed to help the NO campaign to compete with the developers’ huge war chest and to get out the opposition   message.  Over 1,000 people volunteered their time and energy and made thousands of phone calls, collected petition signatures, passed out information handouts, sent e-mails, and posted campaign signs.  Thanks are also deserved by the broad coalition of environmental and neighborhood organizations, affordable housing and tenant groups, and community leaders who voiced their opposition despite immense pressure from the “powers that be” downtown and at City Hall.

Most important, it was the voters of San Francisco who saw through the false campaign claims contrived by developer Simon Snellgrove and his promises of “public” parks and affordable housing which were taken up and promoted by Mayor Ed Lee and former mayor Gavin Newsom.  San Francisco voters were not fooled.  This assault on the waterfront height limits did not succeed.  If these measures had succeeded, voters saw a possible precedent for other developments to try to change the height limits along the water; even voters in the west of the city saw the prospect of high- rise development at the ocean.

The fight for San Francisco’s beautiful waterfront and to protect the special city we love is not over – in fact, it has just begun.  The next chapter is the fight to prevent the Warriors basketball billionaires from crowding the waterfront at Piers 30-32 (see page two).  This land is too valuable to the greater public. The voters saw the waterfront land that was at the heart of the Propositions B and C battle as public land that was being bundled into the “private” 8 Washington project.

“Thank you to every one of you for standing together to win an election that nobody said we could win,” said Jon Gollinger, Campaign Director for No Wall on the Waterfront. “But this is San Francisco, we are San Franciscans, and we love our city.”

SFT thanks Jon Gollinger, Aaron Peskin and

the cast of thousands of San Franciscans all over the city!