For Jane Kim, now’s the time to talk about cleaner streets The progressive supervisor, whose successes include generating affordable housing, takes pragmatic approach to run for mayor

For Jane Kim, now’s the time to talk about cleaner streets The progressive supervisor, whose successes include generating affordable housing, takes pragmatic approach to run for mayor

When you’re a city supervisor, a candidate for mayor and a progressive crafting “big, bold ideas,” it’s sometimes hard to find time for lunch.

So when The Chronicle asked Supervisor Jane Kim to take us to her favorite place in San Francisco, she selected a spot where she could also squeeze in a meal: Turtle Tower, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Tenderloin that she’s been frequenting for more than a decade.

While answering questions, she drank a Thai iced tea and ate beef pho, Vietnamese noodle soup.

“I’m a little OCD about how I eat pho,” she explained between careful twirls of the noodles around her bright green chopsticks. “I put the beef in the fish sauce, and then I make every spoonful individually. It’s a little embarrassing.”

We asked Kim and the other three main contenders for mayor to take us to their favorite San Francisco location to get a sense of who they are off the campaign trail. Last week, we told you about former state Sen. Mark Leno’s relaxed, thoughtful visit to the AIDS Memorial Grove, where his late partner’s name is etched in stone.

Kim doesn’t do relaxed.

In the hour we were at Turtle Tower, the 40-year-old found time to hand out Lunar New Year’s greeting cards with her photo and campaign website to her fellow diners. She endorsed a candidate for Superior Court judge who brought paperwork to her table for her signature at the appointed meeting time. And she toured the kitchen with owner Stephen Pham, peering into the huge pots of broth he had simmering on the stove.

Busy. Quick. Determined. To the point.

That’s Kim, who on June 5 hopes to be elected San Francisco’s first female Asian American mayor and the first progressive to sit in Room 200 in more than a quarter-century.

Kim has been representing District Six, which includes the Tenderloin, South of Market and Mission Bay, on the Board of Supervisors since 2011. Before that, she was a civil rights attorney who served on the school board.

Initially dismissed as a second-tier candidate behind Supervisor London Breed and former state Sen. Mark Leno in the mayor’s race, Kim has posted a surprisingly strong showing in recent polls and at debates.

While Breed and Leno’s backers squabble over everything from taking super PAC money to whether it was fair that Breed was ousted as acting mayor by the supervisors in January, Kim has stayed quietly above the fray, picking up key progressive endorsements like the Service Employees International Union, the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters and the San Francisco Berniecrats, fans of Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont who endorsed Kim in her failed bid against Scott Wiener for the state Senate.

Kim is a pavement pounder and is spending a lot of time in neighborhoods all over the city, astutely — or disingenuously, depending on your point of view — telling voters what they want to hear.

For example, her main policy platform, San Francisco Loves Clean Streets, is a new one for her, and she tells voters constantly about how she’s disgusted by the city’s grime. She wants to employ homeless people to clean the streets, double the number of “pit stop” public bathrooms and double the number of street cleaners.

Asked in our podcast, “On San Francisco,” what she would do immediately after being inaugurated, Kim said, “Clean our streets. ... I want this to be a city that we’re all proud to live in, and I don’t think anyone should have to step over feces or needles on their way to work or to school with their children.”

Sounds great. But plenty of residents of District Six wonder why she didn’t push this issue until running for mayor. They’ve been stepping over feces and needles for years.

“She doesn’t respond to any emails,” said Aman Jabbi, a 52-year-old entrepreneur who has lived in SoMa since 1999 and says the conditions on the streets have gotten slum-like during Kim’s tenure.

“The sidewalks are filled with junkies, with homeless people, with drug dealers,” he continued. “She’s only in it for her political career. She’s not there to fully serve the people.”

Rebecca Peacock, a 24-year-old receptionist who has lived in SoMa for a year, said she’s seen piles of syringes and bloody napkins outside her apartment building and constantly looks at the ground when she’s walking to avoid stepping in human waste. Peacock, co-organizer for the New SOMA Coalition, which pushes for more housing and transit, said Kim will not get her vote.

“I feel like she is kind of willing to follow whatever political winds are blowing,” Peacock said. “With her as mayor, there’s no telling what we’ll get.”

But former Supervisor John Avalos, who has endorsed Kim, said these assessments aren’t fair. Kim was a champion of expanding the “pit stop” program and looks at the issue of homelessness holistically, rather than pushing the easy but ineffective clearing of tent encampments, he said.

Kim has called on the campaign trail to move homeless shelters under the control of the Department of Public Health to emphasize treatment and to expand medical respite centers — neither of which is a quick fix, but could help homeless people and improve the quality of life for everybody in the long term.

“No elected official wants to see tent encampments in San Francisco, but we also think people should be treated humanely, and that is Jane’s main point,” Avalos said.

The issue of dirty streets is more nuts-and-bolts than some of Kim’s previous big ideas. She’s proposed taxes on robots, taxes on CEO pay and city-funded, free birth control, none of which came to fruition.

San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim poses for a portrait inside City Hall in San Francisco., on Fri. January 5, 2018. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim poses for a portrait inside City Hall in San Francisco., on Fri. January 5, 2018. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle Image 1 of / 14 Caption Close For Jane Kim, now’s the time to talk about cleaner streets 1 / 14 Back to Gallery

But other big ideas, like free City College and strong-arming the San Francisco Giants into including an eyepopping 40 percent affordable housing in their Mission Rock development, have become reality. She was also a key player in passing the “Twitter tax break” to lure the social media company and other tech firms to Mid-Market.

She’s also pushing a June ballot measure to raise the city’s commercial gross receipts tax to pay for subsidized child care and raise the pay of child care workers.

“I have introduced a ton of ideas, and I have been able to win on a number of them,” she said. “The question that is often asked is, ‘Can progressives lead?’ They have great ideas, they have great vision, and people are generally on board with a more equitable society ... but can they actually run a city?”

And to answer her own question? “I don’t want to just have platitudes and a vision,” she said. “I want to accomplish things.”

It’s issues like free City College and subsidized child care that seem to inspire progressives to back Kim.

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, a national group of Sanders supporters — San Francisco Berniecrats is its local chapter — said Kim earned the group’s endorsement because she’s “been fighting for the rights of people who live on the margins of society for her entire life.”

Kim grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of immigrants from Seoul. Her father worked as an accountant before becoming an attorney, and her mother ran a boutique selling women’s clothing. Kim said she practically grew up in the back room of her mom’s shop.

“I read on a pile of sweaters,” she said. “I always joke that was my after-school program and summer school.”

Curiously, she couldn’t remember the name of the boutique. Or, during our podcast’s fun lightning-round questions, the name of her favorite burrito joint in the city. (“Oh, gosh. I don’t actually know the name of it. It’s on 24th Street,” she said.) Or her favorite movie based in San Francisco. (“I see one movie every year,” she said. “This is a terrible question for me.”)

Or, when I did some fact-checking a few weeks after our interview, the name of the judge she endorsed while we were at Turtle Tower. After I described what he looked like and scoured the ballot, we pieced together that it was Andrew Cheng, who is being challenged by a public defender in June.

But get her started on big policy matters, and the graduate of Stanford (double major in political science and Asian American studies) and UC Berkeley School of Law is clearly wonky and whip-smart.

Her former legislative aide, Sunny Angulo, said Kim has “an attorney’s brain.”

“She’s very analytical, extremely organized,” Angulo said, noting Kim can get excited about environmental impact reports or sole-source contracting.

“She’s an introvert,” Angulo continued. “It’s hard for people to see sometimes the soul that she has, but she has a lot of soul.”

That soul pours out when Kim talks about the importance of a rich, liberal city like San Francisco standing strong against the conservative tide that has swept parts of the country.

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“One of the reasons I’m running for mayor is I believe we can take care of everybody in San Francisco,” she said. “San Francisco has to be that beacon. We have to be the foil to what’s happening in Washington, D.C., and state capitols throughout the country. We have to invest in our citizens again.”

Like paying for their City College. Like paying for their child care. Like providing far more affordable housing.

These kinds of progressive beliefs have shaped Kim for decades. As a high school student, she refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance because she didn’t believe there was truly “liberty and justice for all.” She resumed saying the pledge in 2013 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal recognition of same-sex marriage, was unconstitutional.

She worked at New York City’s Coalition on Homelessness as a teenager and got a job as a community organizer at the Chinatown Community Development Center in San Francisco after graduating from Stanford.

But Kim has struggled to spin her personal story into campaign gold, as Breed has done by talking about how she was raised by her grandmother in public housing and as Leno has done by talking about losing his partner to AIDS. Kim said she fared better in her failed state Senate race against Wiener when it was a hyper-wonky, policy-oriented debate.

“It’s more narrative-oriented,” she said of the mayor’s race. “I don’t think I’ve successfully pivoted in that way.

That struggle might also be because she’s less gregarious and chatty than her competitors. “She is very shy at times,” said Avalos, a longtime friend. “She’s a little guarded.”

But there’s another side to Kim: the downright cool side.

She took up tae kwon do as a teenager and earned her black belt but stopped because of lack of time. She said she tried some jujitsu classes last year, but dropped those because of time constraints, too. She also plays electric bass and used to be a member of a female indie-rock band called Strangely.

In short, Kim is a badass. An overscheduled badass, but a badass nonetheless.

She said she’s been inspired by Asian American girls coming up to her on the campaign trail saying, “My mom has told me I can become an elected official like you.”

“That makes me really excited, but also I don’t want to be a source of pressure, like my parents were to me about becoming a doctor or lawyer,” Kim said, noting her mom and dad weren’t initially supportive of her entering politics. “It took a while, but now they’re fully on board.”

Her dad even has her name on Google Alerts and reads every word written about his impressive daughter. Whether the alert after June 5 means good news for her or bad, he’ll be one of the first to know.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

Online extras

To see a video of Jane Kim: bit.ly/jane-kim-video

To hear an “On San Francisco” podcast interview: bit.ly/jane-kim-podcast