The NIMBY Tyrant of Telegraph Hill
How Aaron Peskin stopped a college campus in Chinatown, setting the stage for his political career – Part 1 of a four-part series
Ask any politically knowledgeable person in San Francisco how they feel about Aaron Peskin and the response will likely be black or white. Those who consider themselves YIMBYs — a colloquialism for “yes in my backyard” — will point to Peskin’s nearly 16 years as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors where he wielded his influence (often with a heavy dose of bullying) to prevent “Manhattanization.” Building height. That’s Peskin’s thing. In fact, he’s so well known as a height hater that opponents make jokes about it in relation to his short physical stature, earning him nicknames like “North Beach Napoleon “and “The Tiny Tyrant of Telegraph Hill.” All jokes aside, Peskin is known by nearly everyone as a NIMBY — a colloquialism for “not in my backyard” — making him a hero among fellow NIMBYs who want to keep the city’s landscape the same, and a villain to the city’s growing YIMBY movement, which promotes building dense, tall structures at every income level to solve an undeniable Bay Area housing crisis.
So how did Peskin manage to remain supervisor of District 3, representing Union Square, Chinatown, the Financial District, the Embarcadero Waterfront, Pier 39, and North Beach, for four terms when San Francisco’s term limits allow just two? He exploited a loophole in the City Charter (one I believe should be changed) that says an elected official may only serve two “consecutive“ four-year terms. If you dealt with Peskin like I did when he was a regular ole citizen, though, it may seem like he never left office, wheeling and dealing as a private consultant for District 3 neighborhood groups and businesses (more on that later in this four-part series).
Peskin first represented District 3 from 2001 to 2009, where he was unanimously elected president of the Board of Supervisors in 2004 and was reelected for a second two-year term as president in 2005. In 2015, six years after he termed out, Peskin challenged Mayor Ed Lee’s appointed incumbent Julie Christensen for his old seat and won another four-year term, followed by yet another four-year term, which he is currently serving, which expires in 2024. When the board refused to reelect Shamann Walton as president in 2023, Peskin did his signature snake-like move and fenagled his way back into that seat, too.
On April 4, 2024, Peskin announced his candidacy for mayor, something he once told me that he would never do. “I don’t want to be mayor,” he said in 2018 over lunch at Lers Ros Thai in Hayes Valley. “And besides, I could never compete with London Breed’s war chest.” The current field is crowded and includes three candidates considered more moderate than Peskin — incumbent Breed, Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie, and former District 2 supervisor Mark Farrell, who served as the 44th mayor of San Francisco, voted in by his peers on the Board of Supervisors to serve until voters elected Breed to serve the rest of the late Ed Lee’s second term.
It’s ironic that Peskin announced his mayoral run at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown (a story broken on X by The Voice of San Francisco several days before the event) because it was the site of his first achievement of height hating NIMBYism as an obscure neighborhood activist.
In fall 1997, City College of San Francisco (CCSF) bought the beaux arts-style Colombo Building, located at One Columbus Avenue, for $3.8 million hoping to develop a campus for students in the northeast part of the city, mostly immigrants taking English and citizenship classes. CCSF trustees said the location fit the area’s needs for a transit-accessible campus tucked between Chinatown and North Beach on one side and downtown on the other. But preservationists said it would mean the demolition of a historic building and sued to stop it. Harold Moose of Chelsea Development Co., owner of the Holiday Inn on Washington Street, even made an offer to purchase the building, saying he wanted to preserve the character of the neighborhood while adding a footnote: it would also protect the view for his hotel guests.
“Mr. Moose brings a real, viable alternative,“ one of the petitioners in the lawsuit said at the time. “If City College really has the best interests of the community in mind, they’ll go find another site and save the Colombo Building.” That petitioner was Aaron Peskin, then president of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers neighborhood association, where, along with his wife, Nancy Shanahan, he was gaining a reputation for fighting large-scale projects in the North Beach area.
While mainstream media and left-leaning independent weeklies portrayed Peskin’s battle to preserve the Colombo as purely altruistic, critics said it was really an effort to preserve views for Moose’s hotel guests and Peskin’s wealthy neighbors cloaked in racism.
A 2009 peer-reviewed case study titled, “‘Not in Your Backyard!’: A Community Struggle for the Rights of Immigrant Adult Education in San Francisco’s Chinatown,” by L. Ling-chi Wang, a retired professor of Asian American and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, stated CCSF “underestimated its opponents and failed to enlist community support for the proposed project. Even before the purchase of the Colombo was concluded, the proposed project instantly drew strong opposition not from the ‘Not in My Backyard People’ (NIMBies), but from unexpected outsiders who, in effect, told the Chinese community and CCSF that the proposed campus could ‘not (be built) in your backyard.’” The failure of CCSF to involve the Chinese community for which the campus was to be built, Wang said, “left the trustees and administration politically alone and vulnerable without a viable defense against the legal, financial, and political assaults led by the determined outsiders, NIYBies, driven by greed, self-interest, racism, and political opportunism. The assault proved costly in terms of public money lost and the years of delay in the construction of the new campus in Chinatown.”
It’s ironic that Peskin announced his mayoral run at Portsmouth Square in Chinatown since it was the site of his first achievement of height hating NIMBYism as an obscure neighborhood activist.
According to Wang, CCSF stumbled upon “the two-story, run-down Colombo Building,” in City Block 195 at the northwest corner of Columbus Avenue and Washington Street. It was diagonally across the street from the Transamerica Pyramid, which, at the time, was San Francisco’s most visible downtown landmark, and directly across the street from the Montgomery-Washington Tower, an office and residential high-rise. The Transamerica Pyramid was 853 feet high with 48 floors of office and retail space, and the Montgomery-Washington Tower was 300 feet high with 26 stories of office and luxury residential condos on the top six stories.
That program accelerated land speculation and caused steady encroachment into the Chinatown–Manilatown area throughout the 1960s and 1970s, evicting and demolishing two- and three-story buildings, like the Colombo Building, for single and elderly Chinese and Filipinos, and replacing them with buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid and Montgomery-Washington Tower “with disastrous results for the poor and powerless in the area.” This finally ended at what Wang describes as “the community’s last stand,” the I-Hotel, at the northeast corner of Kearny and Jackson Streets, where for several years “the Chinese and Filipino communities stood solidly behind the heroic but ultimately failed struggle against the historic eviction of nearly two hundred elderly Chinese and Filipino on the night of Aug. 4, 1977, and the I-Hotel’s eventual demolition in September 1979.” Wang said building a Chinatown campus at the Colombo site was “reclaiming a piece of lost territory of Chinatown–Manilatown, an anathema and challenge to corporate and white liberal interests.”
Without input from the community, on April 23, 1998, CCSF published the draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR), based on the plans and designs drawn up by EHDD. At that point it appeared Chinatown would finally get “the branch campus it dreamed of for more than two decades,” but soon after the board of trustees certified the EIR, two external groups, the Friends of Colombo Building and the owners of the Montgomery-Washington Tower, filed a joint lawsuit in the state Superior Court on Aug. 21, 1998, to stop the project. “The former, an unincorporated ad hoc group, was organized by Aaron Peskin, the president of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers …,” Wang said. The two groups challenged the legality of the certified final EIR under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which required the college to take “feasible measures” to avoid or minimize any significant environmental impacts that could result from the project.
Wang said “the NIYBies [‘not in your backyard’] simply did not want these new educational and housing facilities built in Chinatown, even though they had no direct interest in the housing and educational well-being of the community, and the buildings they represented across the street from these projects were almost two times taller than the proposed buildings.”
After a series of “secret negotiations,” Peskin pulled in his friend, a politically ambitious supervisor named Leland Yee.
The Board of Supervisors’ Finance and Labor Committee, led by Yee, held up $23 million in bond money that voters approved in 1997 to pay for capital projects in the CCSF system, “strongly urging” officials to make a good-faith effort to keep the Colombo Building intact before the bond money would be released.
“My position was that I wanted those guys to sit down and come up with a compromise, “ Yee told SFGate at the time. Once an accord was reached, Yee said he was satisfied, but also stressed that “a lot of energy and money could have been saved had City College officials sat down sooner with Peskin and his group.”
Peskin, also satisfied, said the lawsuit would be withdrawn.
Part 2 Preview: Fresh from his Colombo Building win and with his Telegraph Hill Dwellers gaining momentum as neighborhood preservationists, Aaron Peskin runs for supervisor and wins. One of Peskin’s first official acts is designating the Colombo Building as a landmark, but that was just the beginning of Peskin’s height hatred, as he quietly passes legislation to decrease building heights in his district.