Autumn Hope Looijen for District 5 Supervisor: the ONLY candidate with a track record of solving SF's problems
DonateNewsletterMeet me
I'm Autumn Hope Looijen (loy-in), and I'm running for Supervisor in District 5.

I'm the only major candidate who supports Prop 36, which brings back court-mandated drug treatment so we can help the Tenderloin.

I also have best track record of getting things done.

I co-founded the school board recall that was thought impossible... but won every neighborhood in the city, catalyzing change nationwide.

I ran the campaign to bring algebra back, and now 8th graders are back in algebra class this fall.

Now I'm going to get things done for our neighborhoods.
‍Our current Supervisor Dean Preston is responsible for the Tenderloin -- but he's failing them.

Instead of protecting the 810 people who died of drug overdoses last year, Dean does not believe in arresting the drug dealers who prey on them. He blames capitalism instead of stepping up to fix the suffering on our streets.

My Fenta-NIL plan is a practical solution to address our drug crisis. Shut down the drug markets, enforce the rules against public drug use, and get users into medication-assisted treatment when they overdose or shoplift or hold the drugs for a dealer. (I'm the only candidate willing to use court-ordered treatment.)
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We need a Supervisor who will focus on practical solutions for the people of San Francisco, and get things done.

Press

Autumn Looijen putting up YES on G signs to bring algebra back.

Priorities

End drug markets
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I will tackle the open drug markets by arresting drug dealers, getting users into treatment, and making our sidewalks drug-free... starting with Little Saigon and kids' pathways to school.

Read my Fenta-NIL plan
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Homelessness
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No one should be forced to sleep on our streets.

Within my first 100 days, I will propose legislation to reform
Prop C to increase funding for interim housing.
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Help our neighborhoods

Keep groceries and pharmacy services in the Fillmore, get the Tenderloin a grocery store again, and support community gathering spaces like Proxy in Hayes Valley.
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Read my plan for Proxy.
Small businesses

Our small businesses are the lifeblood of our neighborhoods, and they are struggling.

Foot traffic is way down. Shoplifting is up. One restaurant owner in the TL was cited for an iron gate that protects her windows -- that had been there for 30 years.  (Cost her $900 and six stamps from city departments to fix it.)

To help them, I support Prop M. It gives small businesses a tax break if they make less than $2 million-- and the city will remove permitting fees for cash registers and candles.

They also need clean safe streets so their customers will come back -- and I'm the ONLY candidate with the police union's endorsement.
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Fillmore Safeway

The Fillmore Safeway is closing in January, leaving the neighborhood with no grocery store, no pharmacy, no bank.

‍Dean's proposed solution -- forcing grocers to stay open -- is bananas.

My solution:
1/ Change the zoning to require a grocery store on that site (and allow housing on top).
2/ Negotiate with the developer to see if they're willing to keep a grocery store space voluntarily.
3/ Relax our rules on chain grocery stores to bring in a grocery store the neighborhood can afford.

Apart from our Supervisor, I am the only candidate who attended the community meetings about the Safeway.
Public Safety
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‍Unsafe conditions forced the Tenderloin's Whole Foods to close (and IKEA may be next).
If we don't fix the crime issues in the TL, we're going to have a heck of a time revitalizing downtown.

This is a drug and mental health crisis, and to address it, we need beat cops working in partnership with social workers and doctors and mental health workers.

Our police are experts at fighting crime, not handling mental health issues.
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We also need more drug treatment beds -- perhaps at Log Cabin Ranch. And we need more mental health beds in community settings like 969 Buena Vista.

Quick policy positions

  • Housing
    We need to streamline our laws and regulations. It takes an average of 740 days to get a building permit here -- but it's only 185 days in San Jose. A lot of the delay is due to the "shadow code" -- the weird reasons SF Planning uses to reject code-compliant projects, that are never written down. This adds uncertainty and feeds corruption. It's time to stop.

    Instead of making builders guess what might be in the "shadow code", we should kick off a public process to write it up as design guidelines -- and then fast-track approval for all projects that meet those guidelines. Clear, consistent rules for everyone.

    We also need more housing for families, and deeply affordable housing.
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    Right now, families that love SF are forced out by high prices. We have fewer families than any other major city, and only 30% of our 3-bedroom units are home to families. It's expensive to find a bigger place to live as your family grows -- especially if you rent. We should fast-track adding more bedrooms to a home. We should prioritize families when we build affordable housing, making 25% of our affordable housing units 2- and 3-bedroom units.  We should distribute family units across the city, and rezone westside corridors to allow multi-unit buildings with character, like we used to do before the 1970s.

    For deeply affordable housing, we should legalize co-housing and micro-units. Boarding houses used to house the working class, and they built community at the same time. We should bring them back. Micro-units house a lot of people in Tokyo and Paris very affordably, and SF residents who want their own space should also have this option available to them.

    We can make these things happen with tax incentives, moving more projects to by-right permitting, offering priority processing to projects with more affordable and family housing, and upzoning to allow more homes.
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  • Corruption and waste
    Track results so we can cut programs that don't work. People left homeless tell me when they look for help, organizations give them lists of resources... but none of them actually help in the end. (They just hand over more lists of resources.)

    Corruption thrives wherever city processes are opaque and complicated. Make it simple, make it transparent, and make sure we're spending every dollar wisely.

    Every dollar we waste is a dollar that we can redirect to help someone.
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Meet Autumn

I grew up in Kirkland, WA, the daughter of a public school teacher. I knocked doors for clean water for two Seattle summers, and cooked gado gado with my Indonesian grandmother, who'd survived internment camps as a young woman in WWII. I edited the Caltech student newspaper and co-authored a book on pranks.

At the dawn of the internet, I worked at Netscape, where we used 30,000 volunteers from all over the world to organize the web. Our open-source data was used for Google's initial crawl, and our project was the inspiration for Wikipedia.

In Dec 2020, I moved to Lower Haight with my partner Siva and our kids.

I launched the school board recall with Siva, and we took our movement from literally zero (we knew about six people in SF) to a landslide that won every neighborhood in the City.

Most recently, I ran a campaign to bring algebra back to middle school. My community worked with the school district, the city, and the people of San Francisco to bring algebra back -- and it worked. This fall, for the first time in a decade, our 8th graders will be learning algebra.

PS -- this is my favorite poem about politics.
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Meet Autumn in person

Instagram
@AutumnLooijen
@autumnlooijen
email
autumn@autumn4sf.com
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Our campaign does not accept money from drug dealers.
Paid for by Looijen for D5 Supervisor 2024 FPPC #1467898
Financial Disclosures are available at sfethics.org.
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