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   against school closures and the decision to get rid of the admissions   
   test for Lowell. Asian students have traditionally been overrepresented   
   at Lowell; getting in is one of the best ways for high-achieving poor   
   and middle-class kids in San Francisco to rise up the economic ladder.   
      
   Many people from his community agreed with him. They began gathering   
   signatures and raising money for a campaign to recall Collins, López,   
   and another progressive board member, Faauuga Moliga. Siva Raj, one of   
   the recall organizers, told me that roughly half of those volunteering   
   for the campaign spoke Chinese.   
      
   After the tweets came to light, a member of the board asked Collins to   
   voluntarily step down. But she refused. Instead, she sued five of her   
   fellow members. She also sued the district. She asked for $87 million,   
   citing, among other afflictions, “severe mental, and emotional   
   distress,” “damage to self-image,” and “injury to spiritual solace.”   
      
   Her case was tossed. And in February 2022, San Franciscans voted   
   decisively to remove all three from the board. A landslide 76 percent   
   voted to recall Collins, and the other two were recalled by about 70   
   percent each. They have been replaced by moderates, appointed by the   
   mayor. Collins and López slammed their opponents as agents of white   
   supremacy, but the turnout was diverse, and impressive, especially for a   
   special election: More people voted to recall the board members than had   
   cast votes for them in the first place.   
      
   Boudin’s opponents, likewise, came from all over the city. He liked to   
   say they were funded by elites, and the recall campaign did raise about   
   twice as much money. But wealthy people have donated to the pro-Boudin   
   campaign, too. The racial group that was most likely to say they wanted   
   Boudin recalled? Asian Americans. Their allies included many from the   
   remnants of the city’s middle class, as well as the same sort of   
   swayable liberals who went from voting for Collins to recalling her.   
      
   Now a number of groups are trying to address quality-of-life issues in   
   the city. There is the new California Peace Coalition, which opposes the   
   open-air drug markets, and includes parents of drug users who are at   
   risk of or have died from overdose. There’s Innovate Public Schools and   
   Stop Crime SF, which are self-explanatory. Shine On SF is “reigniting   
   civic pride” by cleaning up the city’s streets. SF.Citi is advocating   
   for the interests of tech workers.   
      
   For a long time, says Michelle Tandler, a start-up founder who   
   documented downtown’s collapse on Twitter, “San Francisco progressives   
   and Democrats were so focused on Trump that they weren’t paying   
   attention.” Suddenly, they’re paying attention.   
      
   And Mayor Breed is responding. She was elected during the Trump   
   administration, like Boudin and the school board, and her approval   
   numbers are also faltering. But she’s in a different mold. Breed is a   
   canny politician who knows which way the wind is blowing, and is open to   
   changing course depending on the results.   
      
   Just a few years ago, she had proudly embraced the “defund the police”   
   movement; no longer. This spring, after the city’s gay-pride parade   
   banned police officers from marching in uniform, Breed announced that   
   out of solidarity, she wouldn’t march either.   
      
   I took a stroll with her back in February. She had just given a press   
   conference on anti-Asian hate crimes outside a senior center in   
   Chinatown. As in places like New York, the city had seen a spike in the   
   reporting of hate crimes against Asians. People were scared. Breed grew   
   up in the city’s projects and knows residents who have had family   
   members shot and killed recently. “I know a lot of people who supported   
   Chesa because there was a strong push for criminal justice,” she told   
   me. “I don’t think people believed that it meant that justice would not   
   occur.” She added, “That’s not justice reform, if everyone who commits   
   the crime is getting off for the crime.” Now she’ll have a chance to   
   replace him.   
      
   As we talked, we walked through Chinatown, then up past the $7 million   
   homes of Russian Hill and down into North Beach. The bay lay ahead; the   
   cable-car drivers waved to the mayor; the city’s problems seemed far   
   off. But Breed was angry, disappointed with the progressive faction and   
   how it had let the city down. A few months earlier, Breed had announced   
   a new approach to crime, starting with the Tenderloin, whose streets and   
   sidewalks are full of fentanyl’s chaos. She declared it to be in a state   
   of emergency and approved three months of funding for increased law   
   enforcement there.   
      
   The order was mostly symbolic—the drug problem isn’t limited to a few   
   bad blocks. Often a sweep of the homeless just means pushing the tents   
   and dealers down the road. And anyone who lives in San Francisco knows   
   the Tenderloin has been an emergency for years. But it allowed the mayor   
   to trot out some new rhetoric: “What I’m proposing today and what I will   
   be proposing in the future will make a lot of people uncomfortable, and   
   I don’t care.” It was time, she said, to be “less tolerant of all the   
   bullshit that has destroyed our city.”   
      
   My hometown isn’t turning red on any electoral maps. But the shift is   
   real. The farm at 770 Woolsey? The developer finally has approval to   
   turn it into housing. If progressives have overplayed their hand, gotten   
   a little decadent in culture-war wins and stirring slogans, without the   
   good government to back them all up, San Francisco is showing the way   
   toward an internal reformation.   
      
   Before the school-board vote, the last local recall in San Francisco was   
   in 1983. There has not been this level of conflict at farmers’ markets,   
   where dueling signature-gatherers face off across from the   
   organic-dog-treat kiosk, in almost 40 years. This is, in part, because   
   until recently many San Franciscans were afraid. If a tech worker   
   complained, they were reviled. If an aging hippie complained, they were   
   a racist old nut. It was easier to blame all of our issues on   
   outsiders—those Silicon Valley interlopers who came in and ruined the   
   city. The drugs, the homelessness, the crime—blame the Google employees   
   who skewed the city’s condo market and brought in their artisanal   
   chocolates, their scooters, their trendy barbers. If not for them and   
   the inequality they created, San Francisco would still be good.   
      
   There’s some truth to that: You cannot tell the story of the housing   
   crunch without the tech boom. But people started looking at City Hall,   
   and at the school board. They realized there were no tech bros there.   
   The fentanyl epidemic and the pandemic cracked something. With the city   
   locked down endlessly, with people dying in the streets, with schools   
   closed, it was slowly becoming okay to say Maybe this is ridiculous.   
   Maybe this isn’t working.   
      
   Of course, it’ll take more than a couple of recall votes to save San   
   Francisco. When I asked Breed about the new center for addicts in the   
   plaza—the creation of which she supported—she seemed a little   
   uncomfortable and soon after wanted to wrap up our interview. She said   
   something vague about how not all change can happen at once.   
      
   NIMBYism and fentanyl are as much a part of the San Francisco landscape   
   now as the bridge and the fog. And the school board is still   
   school-boarding. At the end of May, it announced that the district would   
   no longer use the word chief in any job titles, out of respect for   
   Native Americans (despite the fact that the word actually comes from the   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)