Sprawling along San Francisco’s western edge, the Sunset District has been one of the city’s sleepiest neighborhoods for decades. No longer.
Sup. Joel Engardio, the Sunset’s representative in City Hall, faces a potential recall over his successful campaign last fall to close the Great Highway to cars and turn it into a park.
San Francisco approved Prop K in November with nearly 55 percent of the vote. But Engardio’s District 4, which encompasses much of the Sunset and the Great Highway itself, went nearly 64 percent against Prop K.
Engardio’s defenders view the recall challenge, which is still collecting signatures to qualify for the ballot, through a lens that takes in more than just cars and traffic.
The city, and the Sunset in particular, are on the cusp of new housing rules that could turn quasi-suburban streets into something closer to – as Engardio himself loves to say – Paris. That is, a denser, more lively, and less car-dependent urban space.
Those new rules are part of a long-term push to redesign San Francisco after decades of refusal to build in neighborhoods like the Sunset. The Planning Department is due to release a new city map, perhaps as soon as next month, showing exactly where rooflines can rise. It will need the Board of Supervisors’ approval.
At a weekend event to support Engardio, Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelman praised his colleague as a pragmatist. He made no mention of housing but emphasized that “I need Joel Engardio on the board.” Also prominent at the rally was state Sen. Scott Wiener, a main instigator of California housing reform.
The Great Highway has become something of a culture war in San Francisco.
state sen. scott wiener
The new map is supposed to prioritize more housing in SF’s “well resourced” western neighborhoods, and the Sunset has more room than any other.
At least some of Engardio’s supporters feel his pro-housing views will help mitigate the Great Highway anger. SF’s Housing Action Coalition cites Engardio as a key ally in building more homes. “This recall is less about broad public sentiment and more about a small but vocal group resisting change,” says spokesperson Brianna Morales. “HAC is working alongside Sup. Engardio to address our housing crisis, and, unfortunately, the recall risks pulling focus away from the real work.”
But District 4 has no small amount of NIMBY resentment as well. A few years ago, opponents of an eight-story, 100 percent affordable residential project near Golden Gate Park fearmongered about low-income people bringing in drugs and crime and called Engardio’s predecessor Gordon Mar, who supported the project, a “communist pedophile.” They lost that fight.
When asked if the recall includes a larger fear of change on issues like housing, Engardio kept his answer nonspecific, saying the recall is wasteful, and that he and his critics agree on important problems like clean streets and homelessness. He told The Frisc he’s confident that street fixes, such as this new stop light at a key intersection, will mollify the angst about parking and traffic woes.
But given the location of his weekend rally, it was hard to avoid housing. Just across the street was one of the most talked-about development sites in the city. The block was once the proposed home of a 50-story tower, which few people took seriously, but the new idea for the site is a 22-story apartment building. While an ardent booster of more height in his ‘hood, 22 stories is too tall for Engardio, which adds more complexity to the political needle he’s trying to thread.
“We stand here not because we agree on every issue 100 percent of the time,” Engardio told supporters Saturday. “We’re here because we have shared values.”
Recall math
On February 1, the Recall Engardio campaign began in earnest. It has until May 22 to gather 9,911 voter signatures, a fifth of the district’s registered voters.
“The big hurdle is getting onto the ballot,” says Joshua Spivak, a UC Berkeley research fellow and author of Recall Elections From Alexander Hamilton To Gavin Newsom. Most efforts never make it past the signature phase, he says, but those that do are likely to prevail: “In California last year there were 24 recall campaigns and 22 of them ended up recalling the candidate.”
Some quick math: About 34,000 District 4 voters cast ballots in November. Nearly two-thirds of those ballots went against Prop K.
In other words, the recall campaign needs fewer than half of the No on K voters to sign their petition. (The Richmond District also voted nearly two-thirds against Prop K, but those voters can’t participate in the recall.)
Engardio’s push to close the Great Highway was an expansion of a COVID-era compromise. In 2020, with San Francisco under a shelter-in-place order, Mayor London Breed closed two miles of the Great Highway from Golden Gate Park to Sloat Boulevard to serve as extra open space. “We were all going mad in our homes and needed an outlet,” says Sunset resident Albert Chow.
But once the city began to reopen, Breed and supervisors struck a Great Highway compromise: open to cars Monday through Friday afternoon, closed on the weekends.
Engardio beat Gordon Mar in 2022 by fewer than 500 votes, a rare defeat of a sitting supervisor. He won in part by emphasizing fears about crime and his support for recalls against former DA Chesa Boudin and three school board members.
“It’s ironic that Joel built his entire campaign for supervisor on supporting recalls, yet now he’s trying to shift his stance when he’s the target,” Mar tells The Frisc. Mar criticizes Engardio’s approach to the highway fight but doesn’t support the recall, a process which he says should be reserved for “misconduct or ethical violations.”
A big part of the pro-closure argument was that many commuters who drive between the Richmond District and Daly City via the Great Highway would have to reroute anyway. A key stretch of the road (south of the section affected by Prop K) is closing this year due to erosion. “Without a direct connection to Daly City, commuters will have to turn inland whether this measure wins or loses,” according to the pro-K argument in the city’s voter guide — a statement signed by Engardio and six other board members.
The Recall Engardio campaign did not respond to requests for comment, but on its site, it accuses the supervisor of “catering to a small group while ignoring the voices of the people who elected him” and says, without explaining why, that the recall stands in for something broader: “fighting for every neighborhood in this city.”
(Sen. Wiener, an Engardio supporter, tells The Frisc the Great Highway has become “something of a culture war in San Francisco.”)
Sunset resident Chow, who supports the recall, feels like “Joel has … really betrayed us. I’m hesitant to work with him, even when he reaches out to me. I ask myself, ‘Whose side is he on?’ That’s not something I ever had a problem with before” with other supervisors, Chow adds.
Chow lives in the southern part of the Sunset near the San Francisco Zoo, and he has led the fight against the type of building that he and others see as a neighborhood disaster.
Towering ambitions
Across from the zoo, the garden supply store at 2700 Sloat has been a neighborhood mainstay for more than five decades but will soon close. Developers have had their eye on the site, which fills an entire city block, for years.
Two years ago, a development group led by a convicted fraudster floated plans for a 50-story tower there. Nearly everyone, including pro-housing stalwart Scott Wiener, called it a nonstarter for clearly ignoring basic planning requirements.
But more modest ideas – eight stories, 12 stories – have also met with resistance. (Chow told The Frisc last year that eight stories of 100 percent affordable housing was “too tall.”)
The latest proposal calls for 22 stories and 450 new homes, nearly half of which would be subsidized for low and median income renters. Engardio, who has called for “gentle housing reforms,” called the 50-story tower a farce, and he’s not a fan of 22, either. “They’re only going up to 18 [stories] over at Stonestown,” he tells The Frisc, referring to plans to redevelop the nearby shopping mall. And at 2700 Sloat, even 18 is too high; he prefers something closer to 10.
Opponents of the project say Ocean Beach is in danger of becoming Miami Beach. (Which, oddly enough, is one of the most protected historic neighborhoods in America.) Meanwhile, the Outer Sunset and its post-war single-family home layout is frozen in decades-old amber. Since 2004, it has added just 1,275 new homes, according to Planning Department surveys. In many recent years, it has added zero.
If SF doesn’t change its zoning map with a Board of Supervisors signoff by the end of January 2026, state regulators could deem the city in violation of its own housing plans. Penalties could include loss of state funding or the end of local control of housing policy.
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Planners thought they had a map in place in early 2024, but Mayor Breed, entering an election year, ordered them to shift emphasis from taller buildings along a few transit corridors to more midsize buildings (six to eight stories) across more blocks.
Breed’s vision, which is no guarantee to hold up in the next iteration, fit nicely with Joel Engardio’s signature idea: Paris in the Sunset.
As a commentator with longtime political aspirations — he made three previous runs for supervisor and one for the Democratic Party County Central Committee, all unsuccessful — Engardio for years has promoted what he calls “Dom-i-city,” a Paris in the Sunset that features six-story buildings.
What could a Sunset filled with such buildings look like? In terms of capacity, 73 percent of its nearly 30,000 homes are the single-family variety. Engardio has done some rough math: three single-family lots could fit a six-story building with 15 homes. Could the current neighborhood eventually boom to more than 100,000 homes and double or triple its current 80,000 residents?
There are major caveats. In 2019, 60 percent of Sunset residents owned their own homes, nearly double the citywide number, which makes redevelopment into combined lots far less likely.
Also, the new map isn’t here yet. We don’t know how politics will redraw it. Daniel Lurie, who positioned himself about as pro-housing as Breed, notched his upset victory by appealing to west side voters.
If more housing seems to be an issue that plays in Engardio’s favor – as his supporters seem to believe – then the Lurie administration might not pay too much attention to opponents of more density.
When completed in 1929, the Great Highway cost more than $1 million, about $18.5 million in today’s dollars. SF historian Nicole Meldahl writes that it was meant to draw traffic and business to beachside attractions. It’s become much more: “a mirror for the shifting priorities of the people who control the Outside Lands” with a “long history of competing visions.”
And so it remains today. Joel Engardio certainly has made his vision clear. Within a few months we’ll see if he’s still around to help shape it.
Correction, 2/27/25: Due to an editing error, this story previously misstated SF’s deadline to change its zoning map. The deadline is the end of January 2026, not the end of 2026.