Months later, Williams announced his candidacy for city attorney. And not long ago Williams received the endorsement of several of the supervisors who helped lead San Francisco's progressive revolution of 2000.
And that's when my distress began, and when I began haunting Williams' campaign appearances. And I now know that Williams believes his opponents are corrupted by campaign contributions. He says he will take the politics out of the office of city attorney, and has told audiences that he has a particular interest in the issue of affordable housing.
Related Content
More About
After a couple of months of listening to this patter, I decided to track down the builders who had attempted to construct a fourplex next to Williams' home. I met Tom McInerny, an athletic 40-year-old from Limerick, on the second floor of a small apartment building he is constructing along Ocean Boulevard, in the Sunset District. After the fourplex proposal was defeated, McInerny, his brother, and his partner, Rory Moore, attempted to sell the Sutter Street cottage they had purchased for the project. But they couldn't attract a buyer who would cover their costs. So they spent months refurbishing the cottage, which, McInerny says, was a "classic tear-down." They finished in 1998 and sold the house that August, just as the market began picking up, for a profit, after three years, of $11,000 for each partner.
McInerny recalls being impressed with Williams' verve during the battle before the Board of Appeals, and in court.
McInerny had offered to promise Williams that he would not obstruct the growth of some trees that extended from Williams' yard into the property next door. He offered to build Williams a skylight. And, toward the end, he offered him $15,000 not to oppose the project, then upped the ante to $20,000. Williams had wanted $90,000, a demand he ultimately dropped to $45,000. McInerny told me he'd saved an answering machine tape that contained a message from Williams summarizing the attorney's side of the negotiations. I asked McInerny to share it with me.
"Hi Tom, it's Steve Williams," a voice on the tape said. "I wanted to get back to you today, which is Wednesday about 2:30 or so. And, uh, I realize after our conversation last night we're headed to court on this thing, but, um, um, because your offer was sort of "take it or leave it,' I never got to give my counterdemand, which is something I intended to do. I didn't want you guys to think I was stuck on, uh, 90 or being unreasonable in the thing, so my counterdemand was, I was going to drop it down; I was going to cut it in half. You guys came up five, I was going to come down 45 and, and make a demand for 45, plus an easement for the, the trees, which we could agree to later. So there it is. I guess I'll talk to you later."
Later, I played the tape for Williams.
"I'm sure those guys are bitter with me; they felt like they got a raw deal. The fact that he saved the tape for you shows you something, doesn't it?" Williams said. "The thrust is going to be that I was out for myself. But the fact is, I ended up enforcing the law."
Which is nothing remarkable. Wasn't it V.I. Lenin who said bourgeois revolutionaries have often mistaken the conditions of their own liberation as the universal demands of mankind? But in an epoch when the country is threatened by ubiquitous wartime jingoism, San Francisco should be able to muster people better than that to fill its important public positions.
