In the last three weeks before the election, progressives came from out of the woodwork to save Chris Daly’s re-election. With the Chronicle publishing polls with Daly ten points behind Rob Black, there was a palpable fear among the left that we could lose San Francisco’s most tenant-heavy district to an anti-tenant Supervisor. Activists like Nicole Derse sent out mass e-mails warning that if Rob Black won, “we all may be packing our bags.” By 5:30 a.m. on Election Day, there were 100 volunteers in Daly’s campaign office energized to get out the vote – and 400 more joined in later on that day.

But independent from the official campaign, organized labor worked hand-in-hand with tenant organizers to coordinate a targeted outreach effort to mobilize Daly’s most loyal constituencies – Local 2 conducted phone-banks in Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Chinese, and SEIU organized the residential hotels. In fact, SEIU’s effort to mobilize SRO tenants in District 6 was the most sophisticated, organized and deliberate get-out-the-vote strategy ever conducted for that population. Its resounding success helped secure Daly’s re-election.

District 6 has over 10,000 residents in 300 single-room-occupancy (SRO) Hotels in the Tenderloin, South-of-Market and North Mission neighborhoods. As the housing of last resort for people who fall in and out of homelessness, they are the most marginalized, isolated and often depressed residents of San Francisco. Deeply cynical of politicians, and difficult to reach through conventional means, most elected officials at best ignore this population – or at worst support policies that lead to their displacement. Chris Daly is the first politician in San Francisco to make them his largest priority – and community activists who work day in and day out with this population made an all-out effort during their own spare time to ensure that these tenants made it to the polls.

For SRO tenants, it was clear what the stakes were in this race. In the late 1990’s, if you wanted to visit a tenant in an SRO, the Hotel desk clerk would charge you at least five dollars to get into the building. Used by corrupt managers to get a “cut” on any drug dealing or prostitution activity, this extortionist tactic was perfectly legal before Chris Daly got elected to the Board of Supervisors. One of his first acts in office was to pass the Uniform SRO Visitor Policy – which made visitor fees illegal and guaranteed tenants the right to have visitors.


A running tally sheet on the wall kept track of how many supportive tenants in each Hotel had voted

In the late 1990’s, thousands of SRO tenants were made homeless because of a rash of hotel fires. What could start off with one mentally disabled tenant smoking in his bed could lead to an entire Hotel being shut down for years. On Sixth Street alone, six hotels were burned out at one point. In 2001, Chris Daly passed the law requiring all hotel managers to install a sprinkler system in each residential hotel room – and no hotels have burned down since.

Another common complaint among SRO tenants is that their mail gets stolen – as the Post Office leaves just a bundle in the Hotel lobby. This year, Chris Daly passed legislation that will guarantee a private mailbox for every SRO tenant in San Francisco. Tangible results have come from Chris Daly’s advocacy, and with his possible defeat looming on the horizon, tenant organizers joined forces with labor to engage the community and conduct an unprecedented voter turnout operation.

In past elections, Daly always won big among SRO tenants – but with low voter turnout they never played a decisive part of his victory. Outreach efforts had been made to SRO tenants in prior elections, but it had never been on such a grand and sophisticated scale. With Daly’s loss a legitimate fear, SEIU stepped up to the plate and conducted a get-out-the-vote operation. Labor organizer Robert Haaland used his vacation time to coordinate this effort (along with three SEIU organizers), and four tenant organizers who work at the Tenderloin Housing Clinic and Conard House (and are members of SEIU) took two weeks of unpaid leave from their jobs – with no sick or vacation time accrued – in order to work around the clock for this effort.

It’s difficult to motivate SRO tenants to vote unless you give them a reason – and with Chris Daly, it wasn’t hard to explain why he was a rare politician who needed their support. But with high turnover in the hotels, many residents were unaware of everything he had done for them, as he had not faced the voters in four years. Outreach was absolutely critical, and there was not much time to bump up significant turnout in the residential hotels.

It’s also difficult to have SRO tenants trust campaign workers, unless you are an active part of the community, and seek input from community leaders. “Other get-out-the-vote efforts bring in organizers from elsewhere to walk their precincts,” said organizer Alysabeth Alexander, who had previously worked with ACORN in Ohio. “Here, we had District 6 working to organize District 6, and neighbors talking to neighbors. It was a home-grown, organic process.”

Tenants who lived in the residential hotels were asked to help organizers gain access into their building. While they encountered resistance from many hotel managers, the organizers knew how to use the law to help them – state law gives tenants an unfettered right to talk to their own neighbors about elections, and the SRO Uniform Visitor Policy gives hotel tenants the right to bring in a visitor before 9:00 p.m. If an organizer had a tenant in the building to let them in and escort them through the building as they reached voters, there was nothing that the landlord could do to stop them. “It wasn’t hard to find these tenant contacts,” said Alexander, “because we all have roots in the community and know tenants who live in the Hotels.”

Beyond the organizers, the get-out-the-vote effort relied deeply on the work of unpaid volunteers. T.H.C. employees like myself worked evenings and weekends to do outreach in the SRO’s, and tenants who lived in the hotels took an active leadership role in not only organizing their neighbors – but doing outreach in other buildings as well. Terrie Frye, a long-time Tenderloin tenant who has worked on many progressive campaigns, played an indispensable role crunching numbers in the office to maintain a solid data entry system. Local 2 generously provided two large rooms of office space – while they conducted their own outreach effort to non-English speaking tenants in District 6.

Because this was an independent expenditure, SEIU and the organizers were not allowed to coordinate with the Daly campaign – and special efforts were made to shut off communication. By the morning of Election Day, 1,158 SRO tenants in 84 hotels had been reached and said that they were planning to vote for Chris Daly. Most of these tenants had also been reached a second (or third) time in the last few days to be given their polling place information. Now the challenge was to reach these people again on Election Day – and make sure that they voted. The goal was to get 60% of the identified supporters to vote – or approximately 700 tenants.

On Election Day, thirty volunteers dedicated the whole day to ensure that at least 700 SRO tenants had voted, and were reminded to vote until they did. Over the course of the day at least twenty more people came in to help out on morning or afternoon shifts. Chinese-speaking organizers went into the SRO’s with a heavy East Asian population to do monolingual get-out-the-vote, as they paired up with English-speaking organizers to hit other tenants in the same building. Volunteers called in their numbers as they checked polling locations, as organizers tallied up the number of voted tenants on a massive wall chart in the office.

They didn’t just get 700 SRO tenants to vote for Chris Daly that day. “We stopped counting after we hit the 800 mark,” said Alexander. In other words, a coordinated effort of labor activists, tenant activists, and SRO tenants managed to pull out 70 percent of identified Chris Daly supporters in the hotels to vote. As far as get-out-the-vote campaign operations go, this was unprecedented.

After the polls closed at 8:00 p.m., I checked the early absentee returns online. Early absentee voters are notoriously conservative, and I expected South Beach condo owners who supported Rob Black to vote early in droves. When the numbers came up, Chris Daly was only down by 84 votes. After all the work we did on that day, I knew that we had won. With the election over, we could finally talk to the official campaign. I went to Daly’s victory party at the DNA Lounge to celebrate.

Send feedback to paul@thclinic.org