Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine, and I am joined tonight by Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco

Board of Supervisors, where he represents District 5. Dean Preston is also a member of the Democratic

Socialists of America and was in fact the first Democratic Socialist elected to the San Francisco

Board of Supervisors

in over 40 years. And he is, I believe this has been quantitatively measured, the furthest left

member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Am I right that there's a chart showing this?

There is a chart. And I think when it was published, they thought it was going to be viewed as an insult.

And I was thrilled to see documentation of my first left position.

By a pretty wide margin.

But, you know, people who are not familiar with San Francisco

might think, well, you'd have to be really far left to be on the left in San Francisco.

But as we'll discuss, not necessarily the case. And just to give a little bit more of your

background before you joined the Board of Supervisors, you had a long career as a tenant's rights activist and attorney,

and were part of the leading the initiative to stop the state of California

from getting rid of rent control and have basically made housing your central issue for most of your life, which is why it's kind of interesting

and ironic some of the press that has been coming out recently, which we're going to discuss.

But I want to begin with the housing situation in San Francisco.

My picture as a non-San franciscan, who has not set foot in the city for many years,

is of a place where the rent is too damn high, that is a gentrifying city, a city where

homelessness is out of control and the class divide of the United States

can be really seen in its most brutal form. Is that a caricatured picture of San Francisco

and its housing situation at the moment? How accurate is that? It's pretty accurate.

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