Two District Six candidates team up to oppose third, who...

District Six supervisor candidates Sonja Trauss and Christine Johnson are running a joint campaign against school board member Matt Haney, who so far has raised almost as much money than both of them combined.

Their message? Haney represents the status quo that has failed District Six over and over again. But ask Haney, and he’ll say the same thing about the two of them.

“I’m not surprised,” Haney said. “The only way they think they can challenge our coalition is by teaming up.”

Trauss is a housing activist who built the national pro-housing movement dubbed YIMBY, for “Yes in My Backyard.” Johnson is an engineer and a former planning commissioner with 14 years of experience in public finance. Haney is the former president of the San Francisco Board of Education.

Each candidate has the same priorities — cleaning up the streets and building more housing. Their differences have more to do with personality and style.

By running together, Trauss and Johnson are taking advantage of San Francisco’s ranked-choice voting system and asking voters to rank them as their first and second choices on the November ballot. It’s the same tactic Mark Leno and Jane Kim used during the mayor’s race, which put Leno within striking distance of winner, and now mayor, London Breed.

Johnson was the last to enter the race, and Trauss said she wouldn’t have run against her if she had entered sooner.

“I felt that we would just mobilize the YIMBY crowd behind her and do that, and then she didn’t” enter, she said. “Someone had to get into the race to make sure that there was going to be an option for voters who would be pro-housing and keep the concerns of the district on top, no matter what.”

Haney said he is not bothered by the joint campaign against him. He has been endorsed by Sen. Kamala Harris, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and current District Six Supervisor Jane Kim, and he has the sole endorsement from the San Francisco Building and Trades Council.

“Sonja is someone who causes division everywhere she goes, and Christine is someone who has been in and out of City Hall on commissions, and failing to deliver for this community,” he said. “Our residents are in need of something different.”

— Trisha Thadani

Liveable housing: Bathtubs that drain, toilets that flush and vermin-free kitchens aren’t usually the stuff of news conferences starring big-name officials. But considering the longtime conditions of San Francisco’s ramshackle public housing units, they’re unusual and worth celebrating.

That’s why Mayor London Breed , House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and former Congressman and state Democratic Party Chairman John Burton gathered at 430 Turk St. on Tuesday afternoon to hail the newly rehabilitated Sala Burton Manor, an 89-unit supportive housing building for seniors and disabled people. Sala Burton, the late congresswoman, was married to John Burton’s late brother, Phillip, also a congressman.

The project is the latest to be completed under the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which allowed the San Francisco Housing Authority to turn over control of many of its properties to private affordable housing developers if the developers agreed to rehabilitate them and keep the same tenants. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. took over the building in 2015.

Late Mayor Ed Lee started San Francisco’s participation in the RAD program after The Chronicle in 2013 revealed major dysfunction at the Housing Authority, including employee lawsuits against since-fired director Henry Alvarez, allegations that leadership steered contracts to friends and political allies, and a federal inspection that found the agency was one of the two worst in California.

Back then, tenants said their complaints often went unanswered. Elderly people in public housing high-rises regularly got stranded in their units when the elevators broke down, and kitchens and bathrooms were frequently unusable.

“This was the first time anybody asked us what the hell we wanted, and good for them!” said Beverly Saba, a longtime resident of 430 Turk, which now has better accessibility for people in wheelchairs, modernized elevators and renovated plumbing and electrical systems.

Breed, who grew up in the Plaza East public housing projects — known as “OC” for “Outta Control” — said the awful living conditions were all too familiar to her.

“It was definitely an out-of-control experience,” she said. “I know what it feels like to live with the mold, with the broken elevators, with the roaches, with the neglect, with the messed-up pipes, to need to use someone else’s bathroom on a regular basis because yours didn’t work.”

She said she’s committed to ensuring all of the city’s public housing units undergo a similar transformation.

— Heather Knight

Email: cityinsider@sfchronicle.com, tthadani@sfchronicle.com, hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfcityinsider, @TrishaThadani, @hknightSF