Angela Alioto sees SF’s future in its past Former supervisor says her experience and intensity will help her fix problems with homelessness and dirty streets

Angela Alioto sees SF’s future in its past Former supervisor says her experience and intensity will help her fix problems with homelessness and dirty streets

The San Francisco of Angela Alioto’s memories was an incredible place.

When she was growing up in the 1950s, some of her favorite days were spent packing into her father’s white Lincoln Continental with her brothers to head to Fort Point. They’d park close to the edge of the bay, under the Golden Gate Bridge, to listen to Giants baseball games on the radio and watch the waves spray water on the windshield.

The Chronicle asked each of the four major candidates for mayor to take us to their favorite place in San Francisco to get to know what makes them tick as a person, not just a name on the June 5 ballot. Alioto took us to Fort Point, where she surveyed the stunning view and gushed like a woman in love — in love with old-time San Francisco.

“It’s my happy place,” said the 68-year-old former supervisor, who works as a civil rights attorney and has four children and five grandchildren. “What a day — the sun and the water and the bay and the city. It doesn’t get better to me.”

Beautiful? Certainly. But the views from Fort Point, like the entire city itself, are far, far different from the ones of Alioto’s childhood.

Back when her dad drove that Lincoln and her mom drove a black Cadillac with fins, the Golden Gate Bridge towering above was just a quarter-century old. The Transamerica Pyramid didn’t exist, let alone the hulking Salesforce Tower. Alcatraz was still a prison. Tourists took pictures on film, not with smartphones and selfie sticks.

Alioto is nostalgic for those times and talks wistfully of the days when boys bought their girlfriends gardenias at Union Square’s sidewalk flower stands, when street artists were numerous, when kids could ride their bikes all over town without their mothers worrying.

Detractors mutter privately that Alioto sounds like a local version of Donald Trump, longing for a glorified heyday that is overly romanticized and will never return. She might as well wear a red baseball cap reading “Make San Francisco Great Again,” they say.

But it’s not hard to look at today’s San Francisco — with its rampant homelessness, insane real estate prices, filthy streets and obsession with tech startups — and conclude that Alioto’s got a point.

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“Today, what’s missing are coalitions,” Alioto contended, saying she’s the candidate who can bring the city together because she’s been here all her life and knows so many people. “Everybody is fighting. Everybody hates each other, and the city is literally burning.”

Well, not literally, but in some ways, it might as well be.

“Our streets are dirty, crime is out of control, the homeless tents are out of control, and there’s no housing for anybody!” Alioto said adamantly, which is how she says pretty much everything. “There’s such a great San Francisco soul and spirit, and it’s literally screaming to be alive again.”

Again, not literally, but point taken. Alioto is hyperbolic and comes off as a little wacky, but nobody can accuse her of lacking passion. The natural entertainer, who would certainly add some spark to City Hall’s Room 200, can definitely tell a good story.

Like the story about her dad, Joe Alioto, the nationally known attorney who served as mayor from 1968 to 1976, driving the kids down the twisty part of Lombard Street without hitting the brakes. Like the one about meeting and developing a crush on the actor Steve McQueen during the filming of her favorite San Francisco movie, “Bullitt.”

Or like getting married at age 19 in SS Peter and Paul’s Church on Washington Square and having a famous wedding crasher: sculptor Benny Bufano, who, she says, brought a date “my mother claimed was a woman of the street.”

Like renovating the former Pakistani Consulate in Pacific Heights as a home when she was 23 and pregnant with her third child. (She and her husband, Adolfo Veronese, later separated, and he died in 1990.)

Or how she decided to run for mayor for the fourth time. That, she says, was last August when she was driving her sick 18-year-old dog, one of her many treasured animals, including a purebred Arabian horse she keeps in Sonoma, to a veterinary hospital on Potrero Hill.

“I had no idea the tents were block after block after block after block,” she said of that neighborhood’s homeless camps. “It stunned me. That was the first time I said, ‘The only way this is going to get fixed ... is if I throw my hat in the ring and do something about it.’”

That’s where the comparison to Trump crumbles. Not only is Alioto a liberal, but she has actual accomplishments and political experience to back up her big talk.

As a supervisor from 1988 to 1996, including two years as board president, she wrote legislation making San Francisco the first city in the country to ban smoking in bars and restaurants. She was an early champion of the needle exchange program, legalizing medical marijuana and turning San Francisco into a sanctuary city to shield undocumented immigrants.

Leslie Katz, who served with Alioto on the board, said Alioto relished coming up with controversial legislation, much of which seemed out there at the time but became standard practice around the country.

“She’s passionate, thoughtful and loves San Francisco,” Katz said. “She’s diligent and worked hard on behalf of her constituents.”

Another former colleague on the board, Susan Leal, said Alioto is “very energetic and very emotive,” but that those aren’t necessarily the qualities most needed to run San Francisco.

“You’re going to need very calm, mature, steady leadership to bring people together,” Leal said.

Mayoral elections are nothing new for Alioto. She ran in 1991, 1995 and 2003. The third time was almost, but not quite, the charm. She narrowly lost a spot in the runoff in which Gavin Newsom beat Matt Gonzalez.

Shortly after taking office, Newsom appointed Alioto to head a council charged with crafting the city’s Ten Year Plan to Abolish Chronic Homelessness.

The plan involved moving the sickest homeless people into permanent supportive housing, getting rid of emergency shelters in favor of additional housing units, and getting newly homeless people immediate help because it’s easiest to get them off the streets.

Ten years later, the city had housed 11,362 homeless single adults and sent an additional 8,086 home to receptive friends or family members through the Homeward Bound program. But by that point, Newsom had left for Sacramento, Mayor Ed Lee had refocused the city’s priorities on wooing tech companies and creating jobs, and real estate costs had skyrocketed, making it even harder to construct more housing units.

Angela Alioto campaigns for mayor in Chinatown in one of her previous bids, in 2003. Angela Alioto campaigns for mayor in Chinatown in one of her previous bids, in 2003. Photo: Chris Stewart / The Chronicle 2003 Photo: Chris Stewart / The Chronicle 2003 Image 1 of / 11 Caption Close Angela Alioto sees SF’s future in its past 1 / 11 Back to Gallery

The homeless population hasn’t budged, and many residents think the problem is worse than ever. The dirty needles, piles of feces and puddles of urine littering the sidewalks, the tent shantytowns that have popped up around the city, and the ranting of mentally ill people can make even the staunchest devotee of life in San Francisco feel depleted.

Alioto says that since she’s had so much success on homelessness, she can help once again by following a plan that is essentially the same as the one she used previously.

She said she’d direct the police chief to prohibit injection drug use on the city’s sidewalks. Instead, injection drug users should be made to accept rehabilitation services.

She’d also personally approach homeless people in tents and move them inside, one at a time. She said the city would see a big difference in a few months.

Philip Mangano, the federal homeless czar under President George W. Bush, worked closely with Newsom and Alioto on their Ten Year Plan. He said Alioto’s Catholic faith and humanitarian approach, combined with her intensity and willingness to embrace national best practices, made her formidable in helping the homeless.

He said Lee’s first term didn’t include a strong focus on homelessness, which contributed to the problem growing so much worse.

“I think in Angela, you have a person who will have her foot to the floor on the issue of homelessness,” Mangano said. “She’s already done that once, and with the full power of the mayoral perch behind her, I think you’ll find a mayor who will get things done. She’s not going to be wasting a minute.”

Alioto said she also wouldn’t waste a minute in reorganizing some departments and putting the heads of several agencies — including the Department of Public Works, the Recreation and Park Department, and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency — on notice that their jobs would be on the line if their staffs’ performance didn’t improve.

“I’m going to get the head of these departments to do what the department is supposed to do,” she said. “Our city will change overnight with that kind of attitude.”

That dig at Muni could stem from the agency board’s refusal to study Alioto’s long-sought plan to close a block of Vallejo Street in North Beach to create a piazza. It’s one more example of the city not moving in the direction she thinks it should.

“I love San Francisco,” she said. “It’s like holding a diamond, and when you hurt that diamond, you’re going to have to respond to me.”