While November 4th was generally a good night for progressives locally, the rejection of Proposition B, the affordable housing budget set-aside, came as something of a surprise. Eight Supervisors put B on the ballot after passing a $28 million housing supplemental in May 2007, only to have Mayor Newsom refuse to spend the money. Originally slated for the November 2007 mayoral elections, Prop B was postponed a year in an attempt to take advantage of a more progressive electorate voting in the presidential election.

Supervisor Chris Daly, who was chiefly responsible for putting the measure on the ballot, said he was shocked when he saw the results on election night. Polls had apparently shown the measure far ahead, but those were taken prior to the collapse of financial giants Lehman Brothers and AIG on September 15 which signaled the beginning of the financial crisis.

The No on B campaign didn't really begin until three weeks before the election and consisted mainly of mailers and banner ads on SFGate. However, Daly said that the "no" campaign was not any more significant than the "yes" campaign and that it was the financial crisis that did in the measure.

Former District 9 candidate Eric Quezada said that while Chris Daly's leadership role was important to the measure, he thought having Daly's name attached may have cost B some votes. However, Daly didn't seem to hurt the progressive supervisors who were elected in Districts 1, 3, and 11 -- despite a coordinated Downtown effort to link these candidates to Daly.

Quezada also blamed the crowded ballot which spread progressives very thin. Labor, for example, had other priorities in passing Proposition A (the hospital bond), the revenue measures and getting progressive supervisors elected in the swing districts. He even cited his own campaign as an obstacle, saying that because many of the people working on his campaign and Prop B were one and the same, each campaign took some energy out of the other.

Supervisor Bevan Dufty split with the Mayor to support Prop B, and said that he took some heat for doing so. Dufty said he spoke up for B at every chance he could, including at the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club. The club ended up taking no position on the measure in their endorsements. Despite District 8's historically progressive tilt on ballot measures, the district has an understandable recent loyalty to Mayor Newsom and it rejected Prop B.

Dufty said he experienced a number of constituents who told him that while they voted Yes on A (hospital bond), they voted no on everything angry at the size of the ballot this election season. He also blamed the messaging from PG&E's extravagant No on H campaign which framed that issue as a Mayor v. Board fight. Dufty said there might have been some bleeding over of that messaging into voters minds on Prop B.

Dufty said that even though he took a lot of heat for his support of Prop B from groups such as Plan C and the Mayor's office, he's not finished yet and is going to sit down with some of the affordable housing groups involved in the measure. He believes that more centrist support is needed for affordable housing to move forward in the city, but didn't want to elaborate on specific ways to make that happen.

Much of the measure's support came from the obviously progressive districts 5 and 9. District 6 approved the measure significantly, with help from work by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Center. In District 11, where Coleman Advocates was running a field campaign, the measure came out slightly ahead. Coleman's executive director N'Tanya Lee said that the result was five to ten points better than housing measures have traditionally fared in the district.

Newly elected District 11 supervisor John Avalos said that while Coleman's field campaign was strong, the measure needed that kind of voter contact effort city wide. But the resources weren't there. Mailers and literature was dropped citywide, but only the Excelsior had face-to-face voter contact. Avalos, a long time affordable housing ally, said that when Newsom refused to spend the $28 million supplemental, "he took our money and we need to get it back."

With Prop B only losing by five percent, or roughly 16,000 votes, it's reasonable to believe that the measure was doomed by voters who connected the financial crisis to the city's budget problems and were swayed by the no campaign's messaging that its passage would force cuts to other government services. Another contested measure on the ballot involving funding was Proposition L, the Community Justice Center, which went down in an even larger defeat than Prop B.

But this argument assumes that we were simply unlucky, and nothing different needs to be done next time. And while it's true that labor had other priorities this election, did they really have an incentive to support the measure in the first place?

Quezada said that it's during an economic downturn, when the real estate market is down that affordable housing booms can happen. And he said that this is an ideal time for acquiring properties for affordable housing development. He said that a couple of private developers have even approached non-profits recently.

We know affordable housing isn't going to go on the backburner, but the Board will be playing defense from the get-go dealing with budget cuts. With the Mayor's gubernatorial hopes severely curtailed, will he put more focus on working with the Board? Not likely, but with the progressive sweep of the swing districts, we know the Board will be able to compete to get affordable housing money back on the table.