The NIMBY Tyrant of Telegraph Hill
Colombo Building battle leads Aaron Peskin to political office and full-time height fight — Part 2 of a four-part series
In 1991, Rodel Rodis was appointed to a vacancy on the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) board and was elected to the post in 1992, becoming the first Filipino elected to public office in city history. After winning reelection in 1996, Rodis was elected CCSF board president in 1998. In an April 3, 2014, article for Philippine news site Inquirer.net, Rodis wrote that CCSF had won a $10 million bond measure in the 2007 citywide elections and needed the money to secure its Chinatown campus and another site in the Mission District. With only a slim window of time to make the purchases before losing their option, the only thing necessary to secure the money was for the Board of Supervisors to approve the transfer, a normally routine procedure. Prior to that, however, the board’s Budget and Finance Committee had to endorse the resolution, and that committee was headed by Supervisor Leland Yee.
Rodis wrote that during a conference call, Yee said he would only approve the resolution if CCSF agreed to pay $150,000 in attorney’s fees for his friend Aaron Peskin’s group Friends of the Colombo Building, accrued when they filed that nuisance suit funded by the owner of the Montgomery-Washington Tower against CCSF. Despite the fact the Montgomery-Washington Towers’ owner had already obtained height concessions via his lawsuit with Friends of the Colombo Building, he was now using his relationship with Peskin and Peskin’s friend Yee to force CCSF to pay Peskin’s legal fees.
“Yee had us over a barrel. If we said no and denounced him, we would lose the option to purchase the buildings, so we very reluctantly agreed to his extortion,” Rodis said.
After his article appeared, Rodis maintained that Yee’s chief of staff prepared a response that was “a personal attack against him” and appeared under the name of a Daly City candidate endorsed by Yee. It also later appeared “under the name of Yee’s pal, Aaron Peskin.” According to Rodis, the response was published in Filipino community newspapers “even though it did not refute any of the facts I outlined in my article.”
With campaign contributions from supporters including the Montgomery-Washington Towers’ owner, Yee easily won election to the State Assembly in 2004 and reelection in 2006.
At the beginning of Yee’s second term in 2007, CCSF secured a site to build the CCSF Chinatown campus on the other side of the Colombo Building, but this time Justice Enterprises, operators of the San Francisco Chinatown Hilton Hotel (formerly the Holiday Inn), opposed plans to build a 17-story structure with 42 classrooms to accommodate 7,000 students. Like Harold Moose — who owned the hotel when it was the Holiday Inn and opposed the first CCSF campus at the Colombo Building site — Justice Enterprises wanted the building limited to seven stories so the views from the 31-story Hilton would not be obstructed. (Justice Investors also contributed a reported $40,000 to Yee’s campaign.)
On March 26, 2014, Yee was arrested at his San Francisco home by the FBI on seven federal felony charges related to public corruption and gun trafficking charges in connection with the infamous Shrimp Boy case, specifically with attempting to facilitate the purchase of automatic firearms and shoulder-launched missiles to smuggle into the United States. Six of the seven charges were for “scheming to deprive his constituents of his honest services,” violations of a 1988 federal law prohibiting the exchange of political contributions for specific benefits. For Rodis and others who felt blackmailed by Yee and Peskin over the construction of two CCSF Chinatown campuses, where beneficiaries of their lawsuits and legislation like the owners of the Montgomery-Washington Towers’ and the Hilton Hotel made generous contributions to Yee’s political campaigns, it was poetic justice. (Yee served five years in federal prison and was released in 2020.)
Colombo Building fight launches Peskin’s political career
Fresh from his Colombo Building win and with his Telegraph Hill Dwellers gaining momentum as “neighborhood preservationists,” Peskin decided to run for District 3 supervisor on a City Hall outsider platform willing to take on then-mayor Willie Brown’s capitalistic machine. His 2000 campaign even distributed “Annoy Willie” buttons (a campaign promise he kept).
After winning the election, one of Peskin’s first official acts as a supervisor was designating the Colombo Building as a landmark. Fellow supervisors Gavin Newsom and Chris Daly supported and sponsored the resolution. The designation was confirmed and signed by Mayor Brown on Aug. 23, 2002. This was just the beginning of Peskin’s height hatred.
In 2005, he was the sole sponsor to repeal previous planning zoning which decreased the building heights from 200 feet to 65 feet in the Jackson Square neighborhood — more specifically, for Block 195 where the Colombo Building is located, height restrictions went from 200 feet to 40 feet. Newsom returned the ordinance unsigned on July 1, 2005, and it quietly took effect. Another ordinance disallowed the institutional use of ground floors in the neighborhood, and again, on block 195 specifically, which appeared to indicate Peskin’s preference for keeping out classrooms or similar uses.
In all of these cases, Block 195 was called out, clearly indicating that Peskin’s legislation and its timing was driven by recent or potential development plans. Most notably, for each of these new ordinances, Peskin was the sole sponsor.
Despite targeted pushback from Peskin, on Oct. 24, 2005, CCSF announced its intention to build a new campus on Lots 9 and10 that would consolidate all its Chinatown area classes into one location. The campus would have 83,325 assignable square feet of space, 18 classrooms, 24 laboratories, a multipurpose room, a student center, a culinary program, a library, and administration and faculty offices.
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, noted that before the EIR process got underway, “two separate actions taken by the project’s opponents foreshadowed the upcoming clash between the educational needs and interests of the Chinatown-North Beach community and the interests of environmentalists and corporate downtown.” On Oct. 13, 2006, Bob McCarthy, a well-connected lawyer best known for representing big development interests in downtown San Francisco and for his political fundraising prowess, sent a letter on behalf of the Hilton Hotel to CCSF, requesting “access to and copies of all records available as public records” pertaining to the development, review, and consideration of the new campus plan, a preemptive strike to let CCSF know they could file lawsuits and delay the project for years.
Despite the fact the Montgomery-Washington Towers’ owner had already obtained height concessions via his lawsuit with Friends of the Colombo Building, he was now using his relationship with Peskin and Peskin’s friend Yee to force CCSF to pay Peskin’s legal fees.
On Dec. 20, just two months after McCarthy’s letter, Peskin published a statement in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, described even then by Wang as “the mouthpiece of radical environmentalists and various ‘progressive’ and counterculture causes in San Francisco since the 1960s,” in which he sharply criticized CCSF for violating the 65-foot limit for the block — which earlier he had stealthily enacted into city ordinance — and for presenting the community with “a 17-story, 238-foot glass monstrosity.” At the heart of their objection, Wang insisted, was the fact the height of the second proposed Chinatown campus would block city views for Hilton Hotel guests and homeowners in the mostly white and well-to-do enclave ruled by Peskin’s Telegraph Hill Dwellers.
Over the next two years, Peskin and other opponents collided at hearings during the EIR process, at planning commission hearings, at design review committee meetings, at monthly meetings of the CCSF Board of Trustees, and further delayed progress by filing four separate lawsuits. “The opposition lineup could not be more impressive and powerful,” Wang wrote. At the core of the formidable coalition was the convergence of two major groups: the downtown corporate interests represented by the Hilton Hotel, Justice Enterprises, and the Montgomery-Washington Tower; and “the liberal antigrowth, anti-high-rise environmentalists and preservationists represented by Peskin and his wife Nancy Shanahan, both of the Telegraph Hill Dwellers and the Friends of the Colombo Building, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian …”
Conspicuously missing throughout the public debates over the merits and benefits for the project in the 2007 EIR process and the 2008 design deliberation were leading Chinatown planning and housing stakeholders, Wang wrote, such as, the Chinatown Community Development Center, Asian Neighborhood Design, Asian Law Caucus, and Chinese Chamber of Commerce, “all of which received funds, directly or indirectly, from the city for various housing, economic, and community development projects and had close ties with Peskin, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.”
Wang asserted, as did Rodis, that opponents used “political, professional, procedural, and legal means either to compel the college to grant more concessions or to kill the project by causing the college to miss the deadline or to precipitate a budget short fall for the construction of the campus.” Politicians including Yee, Peskin, and Fiona Ma (who failed her way up from District 4 supervisor to incumbent California treasurer) showed what Wang described as their deep hypocrisy, “selling themselves as liberals on topics like the environment, gay rights, and rent control, and as fiscal conservatives on bureaucracy, waste, and corruption” (oh, the irony). Yet on the matter of the CCSF Chinatown campus, Wang said, they had zero concern about “the excessive waste of public funds caused by their delay stratagems and generous transfers of public funds to opponents of the project by reaching deeper and deeper into what they must consider a bottomless pit in the CCSF treasury.” Worst of all, Wang concluded, “they were indifferent and hostile to the needs of immigrants and working-class Chinese.”
No apologies from Peskin on his NIMBY ways
When I interviewed Peskin for The Marina Times during his 2015 campaign to regain his former supervisor seat, he painted himself as a sensibly cautious pro-housing advocate, whether he was in or out of political office. For example, in 2013, when Simon Snellgrove, founder and principal of Pacific Waterfront Partners, said he had the votes on the Board of Supervisors to push through a multimillion-dollar condo project at 8 Washington, Citizen Peskin spearheaded an effort to get it on the ballot by collecting 33,000 signatures in less than a month. Nicknamed by Peskin and other opponents as “the wall on the waterfront,” the condominiums wouldn’t actually even be on the waterfront — in fact, several buildings near the site were significantly taller, and a barricade of pier buildings already blocked the view. Still, Peskin managed to add another entry in his height-hating résumé as voters overwhelmingly rejected the project by a wide margin. A bit politically naïve at the time, I must confess that I believed the negative campaign mailers and voted against it.
“If you want to do rezoning, you do planning,” Peskin told me in 2015 over lunch at a Russian Hill cafe. “You do real planning. You say, ‘Our city is at a crossroads and it’s time to change height limits in this area of town in order to build the kind of housing or office or retail that we want to have,’ and you do it comprehensively. You don’t do it site-specific because you are connected and have friends, so you get your one particular piece of land changed. That’s not planning, that’s politics. That’s spot zoning … Do you want to have a public conversation about whether we should change waterfront height limits? O.K., let’s have that conversation. Remember, the top of the Embarcadero Freeway was 84 feet — in the case of 8 Washington, they were proposing 136 feet.”
Peskin’s record, however, shows he is more of a “yes in your backyard” kind of guy, helping to pave the road for new housing in Dogpatch, Hunters Point, Parkmerced, and South of Market, while in his own district few new units have been built. So why is Peskin so protective of his little patch of paradise? Perhaps because running the domineering Telegraph Hill Dwellers with his wife Nancy Shanahan combined with his nearly two decades as District 3 supervisor have helped him amass a fortune in real estate — sometimes employing legal but less than ethical means.
Part 3 Preview: Aaron Peskin and his wife, Nancy Shanahan, have a direct line to the planning department through their neighborhood group, the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, where their word is enough to put the brakes on development in the name of “historic preservation.” One person who has known Peskin for decades calls him “toxic,” while another says, “They call Aaron a NIMBY, which stands for ‘not in my backyard,’ but he’s more like, ‘I’m going to buy your [expletive] backyard!’” One woman says the Dwellers bullied her out of a home renovation and made her life such a living hell that she gave up $50,000 worth of architectural plans and moved out of state. “Then Aaron bought my house and used some of my plans himself,” she told me in a phone interview. And, thanks to all the complaints Peskin and his wife filed in the name of preservation, he was able to purchase that house at a steep discount.
Where is Batman? We need him now.