San Francisco tenants who can’t pay their rent due to COVID-related hardship would be protected from eviction for another two months after the city ends its mayoral state of emergency under a new proposal from Supervisor Dean Preston.

Preston is releasing a new report, reviewed by SFGATE, that includes six sites in District 5 the supervisor believes could be converted into "near-term" affordable housing. The sites represent an estimated 1,254 units of affordable housing, listed below.

Twenty-twenty-two was a turbulent year for San Francisco politics, to put it mildly.

Four elections in a row, a pandemic-battered economy, a post-Trump political reckoning and local politicians’ own idiosyncrasies all made for an eventful and exhausting year.

How did the chips fall for SF’s political movers and shakers? Let’s take a look and see how they did.

On Dec. 6, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors temporarily reversed its decision on a policy that would have allowed the San Francisco Police Department to use robots with lethal force, which they had voted on a week prior. Supervisor Dean Preston and Supervisor Hillary Ronen led the charge against this policy and hosted an anti-robot rally outside of City Hall that attracted a hundred or so people one day prior to this most recent vote. Board President Shamann Walton also attended and spoke out against the SFPD being given the ability to deploy lethal robots on its citizenry.

San Francisco will kick off 2023 by removing hundreds of parking spaces across the city that obstruct riders from boarding Muni buses — a process that is planned for completion within 18 months.

The effort follows a policy approved by the Municipal Transportation Agency’s Board of Directors earlier this month that mandates all Muni bus stops have at least 20 feet of space to allow riders to board buses. It came after city supervisors passed a resolution calling for the change.

Supervisor Dean Preston will introduce legislation Tuesday to explicitly ban the mayor, the Board of Supervisors and other officials from requiring their appointees to sign preemptive resignation letters like the ones The Standard uncovered earlier this fall in a controversy critics dubbed “Resignation-Gate.”

“Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one,” Preston said during the hearing. “The obvious answer here is that these resignation letters were designed to exert control over commissioners.”

“I’m feeling very grateful to all the community members and civil rights leaders who spoke up and successfully persuaded the board of supervisors to change course here,” Dean Preston, a supervisor who opposed the deadly robot policy in the first vote, said in an interview.

SF Supervisor Dean Preston, who worked as an eviction defense attorney before he was elected to the Board of Supervisors, is putting that hat back on and calling for a hearing into the numbers and process of evictions involving formerly homeless people in city-funded supportive housing.

Protesters gathered outside City Hall Monday morning to let officials know "the fight against SFPD's killer robots doesn't end here."

“If this Board of Supervisors adopts a policy that gives the green light to the San Francisco Police Department to use robots to kill people, I would certainly hope that there will be a very active conversation with my office and advocates about the possibility of overturning that kind of decision at the ballot,” Preston said Monday morning at a rally on the steps of City Hall. “But let’s hope we don’t get there.”

Earlier this month, San Francisco residents voted to approve “Proposition M,” a local measure aimed at addressing the housing crisis by levying a tax on landlords of multi-unit buildings who have allowed rooms to sit vacant for an extended period of time. Proposition M’s tax, advocates hope, will disincentivize large landlords from leaving units unfilled, while the revenue it brings in will go towards homelessness prevention and affordable housing.

The Tenderloin Center is slated to close in less than a month, but a majority of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors agreed Tuesday that keeping it open until a replacement is ready would be better than not having it at all.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston introduced a resolution Tuesday calling on the state to turn the parking lot at a California Department of Motor Vehicles field office in the city into a 100% affordable housing site.

Amid persistent concerns about city contracting practices and corruption, San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston proposed Tuesday that the board’s budget and legislative analyst audit how certain departments dish out lucrative contracts for public works projects.

Prop M in San Francisco is a proposed tax aimed at property owners who leave available rental units vacant for more than six months.

Preston said the lack of objectivity and transparency around the use of the letters made the practice ripe for abuse. He argued that Breed would have required all her appointees to sign the letters if she only intended to use them in extreme cases, as Elsbernd stated, such as when a commissioner abandoned their post or behaved inappropriately.

When community advocates are organized, and a district supervisor works with them, the result can be good news, even in difficult circumstances.

On Tuesday, San Francisco Supervisors Dean Preston and Hillary Ronen introduced legislation that would would decriminalize use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms and other entheogenic plants such as mescaline.

This November you will vote on which November will be the time you vote on who will be San Francisco's mayor, as the Board of Supervisors approves Sup. Dean Preston’s ballot measure to move the SF mayoral election to presidential election years.