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Four Asian Pacific Americans are among nine candidates vying to represent San Francisco’s only majority-APA supervisorial district. The result could be a symbolic step backward for APA political empowerment.

By Andrew Chow
AsianWeek Staff Writer  

Despite living in the “most Asian” of America’s 20 largest cities, San Francisco voters this fall may leave the city’s Board of Supervisors without Asian Pacific American representation for the first time in 16 years.

Though new census figures show the city’s population to be 32.6 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, just four APAs have filed to run for election to the Board, according to the city’s Department of Elections. Another 20 non-APAs have also filed to run for supervisor, a job that currently pays about $37,500 a year.

Though the four APA candidates have risen to the challenge of taking over Yee’s seat, a lack of APA voter participation and the crowded field of candidates may work against electing another APA to represent District 4, said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee (CAVEC), which has offices in Chinatown and in the Sunset district.

“The Chinese [American] candidates, all four of them, are splitting the [Chinese American] vote,” Lee said, citing poll numbers that have yet to be released. “If all four of them stay in the race, it becomes more unlikely that a Chinese American will actually get elected.”

A new CAVEC-commissioned poll shows Chinese American voters in District 4 are split nearly equally between the four APA candidates, Lee said. With the likelihood of a runoff election to decide the District 4 race, “the question is if you’ll get a Chinese American candidate in the runoff, with four in the race,” he said.

Voter registration and turnout will also affect the outcome in District 4, as APAs there comprise only about one-third of the voting population, according to CAVEC statistics.

The prospect of having a Board of Supervisors without an APA representative has raised eyebrows in the city’s APA communities. AsianWeek reported in May that the influential Chinese Six Companies had hoped to whittle down the number of APA candidates in the District 4 race. No one has yet bowed out.

Acknowledging APA Voices

Considering the city’s diversity, having no APAs on the Board of Supervisors would be “like losing ground,” said Patty Wada, regional director of the Japanese American Citizens League in San Francisco.

“Given the demographics of the city … it’s important to have people who are sensitive and know the issues of the Asian community,” Wada said.

Though Wada noted several current non-APA supervisors are keen to those concerns, “Clearly, having an Asian American there who understands the needs of the community adds a different dimension,” she said.

If the Board is left without APA representation, “I definitely think that voice will be lost,” Wada said. “Other people can be sensitive, but [APA issues] might not always be in their mind.”

The Board, without APA representation for well over 100 years until the appointment of Supervisor Gordon Lau in 1977, has often played an important role in determining the outcome of key APA issues in San Francisco. Supervisors played a role in delaying the controversial evictions of elderly Filipino and Chinese men from the International Hotel in 1977. More recently, it was APA Supervisor Yee who spoke on behalf of Chinese American parents who were upset over the school district’s policy of assigning students to attend various city high schools.

The importance of seeing APA faces on the Board is not lost on the city’s general populace. In the CAVEC poll, 41 percent of respondents felt there was “too little” Asian representation on the Board. (The survey also showed that 30 percent of city voters felt there was “just enough” APA representation on the board.)

Among APA respondents, however, 60 percent felt there was “too little” representation in a city that is nearly one-third APA.

“Contrary to the popular belief that the Asian community doesn’t care about Asian representation, our polls show clearly that of the issues we polled on, the No. 1 issue was seeing more Asian Americans on the Board of Supervisors,” Lee said. “That’s very telling [about] what the community wants.”

But it’s not always what the community has received when it comes to political empowerment. Though APAs have a storied history in San Francisco, some observers say it’s APAs in other locales — such as Gov. Gary Locke in Washington state and other rising political stars in Minnesota, Arizona, Texas and New York — who have played more integral roles in APA empowerment nationwide.

Still, throughout most of the United States, the potential to elect APA candidates is virtually nonexistent, said Glenn Magpantay, a staff attorney with the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York City.

“You all even have the ability to have someone elected. That is not the reality in some parts of the country,” Magpantay said. “The reality is that we can’t even get Asian Americans to read the ballot [which is not translated into Asian languages in other states]. You all are lucky in California.”

But it’ll take more than luck for an APA to win in the Sunset district, where APAs first outnumbered non-APAs less than a decade ago, Lee said.

Bounded by the Pacific Ocean to the west, Golden Gate Park to the north, Highway 1 (19th Avenue) to the east and Sloat Boulevard to the south, District 4 forms nearly a perfect square — representing some of San Francisco’s more “middle-of-the-road” neighborhoods.

Poet Maya Angelou cited the “dwelled-in-looking dwellings of the Sunset District” in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But before the turn of the 20th century, city residents referred to the area by various names including “the Outlands,” “Carville” (named for an encampment of streetcars near Ocean Beach) and “the Great Sand Waste.” The area was more romantically dubbed “Sunset City” for the Midwinter’s Fair in 1894.

The idea of living in the fog-enshrouded Sunset district caught on after the 1906 earthquake and completion of the Twin Peaks tunnel. Beginning in the 1930s, contractor Henry Doelger built hundreds of two-story stucco homes — with a garage on the first floor and living quarters above — that dictated the architectural style of the district.

Successive waves of immigrants have moved into the Sunset’s middle class, including German and Irish Americans. APAs began arriving during the late 1950s and early 1960s, many from Chinatown and the heavily APA Richmond district. Russian immigrants have also recently settled in the neighborhood.

But the needs of Sunset residents have largely been overshadowed by the district’s more affluent — and vocal — homeowners, said Dawn Stueckle, director of Sunset Youth Services, a nonprofit organization that also runs a food pantry serving more than 200 Sunset households each weekend.

In 1997, Stueckle called for a “sensitizing of the white population to the needs and culture of the Asian population” in the neighborhood’s Sunset Beacon newspaper.

“Everyone has this image that everyone in the Sunset is fine — which is completely untrue,” said Stueckle, who moved to the Sunset a decade ago with her husband. The couple, trained as youth ministers, opened Sunset Youth Services to assist low-income youth and families.

“There are lots of senior citizens out here who bought their houses back in the ’40s or ’50s, when they could buy a house for $5,000. Now they’re sitting in a house worth $500,000, but they don’t have enough money to buy food and pay utilities because they’re on restricted income,” Stueckle said. “There’s also a lot of immigrants that live several families to one house and are struggling to budget out their money.”

Those groups often are too burdened to show up at meetings or fight for every little issue, Stueckle said. Still, instead of issues, Stueckle said she’s seen more “backbiting” in what’s turned out to be a “nasty” race for District 4 supervisor.

“I think it’s prime for this kind of stuff because it has been ignored for so long and not taken seriously for so long,” Stueckle said, adding, “I would love to have a supervisor that actually cared about the neighborhood, that was actually concerned about the people and not their political career.”

Ethnicity, Stueckle said, would not play a role in her decision.

Ethnicity will likely play at least a symbolic role in the District 4 race. For example, non-APA candidate Ron Dudum, if elected, would become the city’s first supervisor of Palestinian descent. “That’s significant, post-9-11 … and will bring another level of diversity to the Board,” said Lee of CAVEC.

As for the Sunset’s APA populations, more than half of whom are not native-born, many may need more time to understand the political system, Lee said.

“Education is the key to voter turnout,” he said, especially with 20 proposed measures on the Nov. 5 ballot. Lee is looking particulary to the city’s Asian-language media to provide insight and analysis preceding the election.

Lee also hopes that time-constrained APAs will make more use of Permanent Absentee Ballots — an important effort, as nearly one-third of APA voters opt to vote absentee, he said.

The APA community also needs to get back to “grassroots” organizing, Lee said, “as opposed to relying on the Democratic or Republican Party to turn out voters.” While party mobilization once helped in reaching APA communities, “our community is much more diverse today. We need to recognize that, particularly with new immigrants.”

And if no APA candidate wins in District 4 this fall, it may sound the call to re-examine the benefits of district versus citywide elections, Lee said. “At that point, everything’s on the table.”

But for Stueckle, one issue is utmost in her mind: “I am hoping whoever gets elected will actually realize there are other voices out here. We’re not just one or two ethnic groups — there are a lot of ethnicities that need to be cared about.”

Reach Andrew Chow at achow@asianweek.com.