The dimly lit El Rio bar quieted to a lull as people of all ages spilled out onto the patio adorned with warm bulb lights on diagonal strings.
Jackie Fielder, the Indigenous organizer who helped bring the public bank movement to fruition in the City, took the stage to an excited and vocal crowd. The ecstatic crowd was there in support of Fielder’s campaign for District 9 Supervisor. Current Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who has already endorsed Fielder, will term out in November 2024.
“The priorities I’m focused on are affordable housing, community safety that’s actually effective, economic recovery, expanding mental health services, better public schools and treatment for addiction,” Fielder said of her potential platform in an interview with El Tecolote after the launch event.
El Rio was a fitting location as she announced her previous candidacy, a run for state senate in 2021, at the same location. While that campaign fell short, it also helped Fielder build the momentum needed to sustain a grassroots candidate in a city like San Francisco. Fielder outlined the differences between the two campaigns, highlighting how this run affects constituents in a more direct way.
“This is very different, in that it is on specific neighborhood issues and deep in the weeds on how policy actually affects people’s lives in a city that has massive wealth inequality and multiple crises,” she said.
Despite the differences, Fielder remains committed to the values that brought her to politics in the first place.
“I still have the same values, I believe housing is a human right, healthcare is a human right. I believe no city with 73 billionaires should have 2,300 homeless SFUSD students. I think that the problems are complex and some of the solutions are simple, but they’ve been heavily politicized,” she said.
Fielder aims to break through that politicization, that stigmatization, that subjugation with the grassroots power of the hundreds of San Franciscans who support her. Fielder’s speech on the El Rio patio Tuesday evening eloquently walked the crowd through her upbringing in Southern California, her families’ tribulations, her time at Stanford in which she received two degrees in four years and her time on the front lines fighting against the development of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The return from the snowy plains of the Standing Rock Reservation brought her life into new focus. She returned from the experience with an unwavering dedication to justice and a determination to make working people’s lives more equitable. It was a call for her to get more involved.
And she did just that.
She and other volunteers founded the San Francisco Public Bank Coalition in 2017 which, after a series of task forces and legislative hurdles, successfully helped pass the monumental legislative achievement of getting a public municipal bank greenlit in the country’s tech capital.
“We need a public bank for small businesses, affordable housing financing and of course renewable energy projects,” Fielder told El Tecolote.
It’s difficult to overstate the potential this presents for the workers of San Francisco, for whom the City’s $13 billion annual budget has never been available. It would allow small businesses to thrive without being subject to predatory lending tactics. It would allow people to keep their houses in the face of financial hardship. It would move the City away from the detrimental fossil fuel and defense investments of companies like CitiBank and Wells Fargo.
Fielder looked at other cities in the country for a model of how to handle San Francisco’s crises in a way that doesn’t criminalize or stigmatize underserved populations.
“One example is Houston, which figured out how to reduce their homelessness population by a significant percentage by adopting a housing first model,” she said.
Houston is a particularly glaring example as the city housed in a deep red state reduced its homeless population by 64 percent over the past 12 years, and 17 percent in the past year alone.
San Francisco is an influential stop on the state and national Democratic highway. There’s money in these hills and every Democrat knows how tough it is to get elected without some of it.
That money, and its influence on the City’s politics, is one of the key sticking points of Fielder’s campaign, as she rejects big donors and Wall Street money. Despite how difficult it may be, she’s ready for the challenge.
“I’ve never been someone to back down from something because it’s hard.”