Dean Preston

Dean E. Preston (born 1970 (age 46)) is an American attorney and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

As a staff attorney for THC, Preston represented tenants against evictions, particularly tenants facing eviction due to California’s Ellis Act, a law passed in 1985 which allows landlords to evict all tenants in a building and take the building out of the housing market.

Preston was a co-owner of the bar and nightclub Cafe du Nord in the Castro District of San Francisco.

Preston attended Horace Mann School which he graduated from in 1987.

Preston attended Bowdoin College, where he met his future wife, Jenckyn Goosby.

Preston spent the late 1990s working at public interest firms and clerked for Judge D. Lowell Jensen at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California from 1997 to 1998.

He graduated in 1991 with a major in anthropology and economics.

After graduation, the couple moved to Jenckyn's native San Francisco in 1993, settling down near Alamo Square.

Preston studied law at UC Hastings College of the Law, where he was classmates with Molly McKay.

Preston studied international human rights law, completed an externship at the Hague, and interned for the California Rural Legal Assistance.

Preston ran as a democratic socialist and won the election by a narrow margin, becoming the first democratic socialist elected to the board since Harry Britt stepped down in 1993.

He received his J.D. in 1996.

After law school, Preston worked for the law firm of John Burris, an Oakland-based attorney representing victims in police brutality cases.

He graduated with a J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law and was staff attorney for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic from 2000 to 2008, after which he founded and led Tenants Together, a tenant advocacy organization.

Preston is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Preston was born in New York City.

His father and grandparents were refugees from Nazi Germany during World War II.

Their family owned a co-operative apartment in Greenwich Village.

He joined the non-profit Tenderloin Housing Clinic in 2000 and transitioned to tenant rights law.

In 2008, Preston founded Tenants Together, a coalition of more than 50 local tenant rights organizations in California.

Preston served as Executive Director of the organization which advocated for state legislation and helped form local tenant unions to push for rent control and tenants rights laws in several cities in California.

Preston ran against incumbent London Breed in the 2016 Board of Supervisors election for District 5 but lost 48% to 52%.

In July 2018, Preston, a member of the San Francisco chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), became a candidate for the 2019 District 5 Supervisor election, to fill the vacancy left when Breed became mayor.

Shortly after, Breed appointed Vallie Brown to the fill the position, and Brown ran as an incumbent.

Preston authored San Francisco's 2018 Proposition F, which directs the city to establish a universal right to counsel for tenants facing eviction.

The proposition was approved in June 2018 by a vote of 55%.

After joining the Board of Supervisors, Preston continued to advocate for the program that provides legal representation to tenants in eviction court for the duration of their cases.

In November 2019, Preston won a special election to finish Mayor London Breed's term on the Board of Supervisors.

Preston was sworn in on December 16, 2019.

He was re-elected in the November 2020 election.

Born and having grown up in New York City, Preston graduated from Bowdoin College with a degree in anthropology and economics before moving to San Francisco.

Preston ran as an incumbent in the November 2020 election, with Brown campaigning for her former seat.

He won against Brown 55% to 45%.

By August 2020, the program was already underfunded by $4 million when the Mayor Breed announced an additional $1 million cut to the program in her proposed budget.

Preston and other supervisors rejected the budget cuts and instead approved a $750,000 increase.

In April 2020, Preston introduced an ordinance to permanently bar eviction of tenants for failure to pay rent because of issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The measure, which passed the Board of Supervisors in June 2020 by a vote of 10 to 1, not only barred evictions but also prohibited fees, penalties, interest and other charges incurred due to the pandemic.

A group of associations representing landlords in San Francisco filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court challenging the ordinance but the court upheld the eviction prohibition in August 2020.

Preston again introduced legislation to extend eviction protections in May 2021 as the state-wide eviction moratorium in effect at the time was due to expire.

The Board of Supervisors passed Preston's eviction protection legislation in June 2021 to extend the moratorium until the end of 2021, but the state legislature a week later passed its own extension to September 2021, cutting short San Francisco's local measure by three months.