TThe race to represent District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors features four challengers against incumbent Dean Preston.

Bilal Mahmood, Autumn Looijen, Allen Jones and Scotty Jacobs are trying to deny Preston a second term representing the district, which includes the Fillmore District, Civic Center, Haight-Ashbury and the Tenderloin.

Preston has a slight edge over Mahmood as he receives the most dollars raised for the campaign. As of Wednesday, Preston had raised about $581,000, including about $250,000 in public funds.

Preston, a former small business owner and tenant advocate, credits his accomplishments with recruiting community ambassadors across the city, authoring the 2022 Proposition M that authorized a tax on vacant housing units, and helping develop a program to provide tenant advocates for everyone struggling with eviction, his ballot statement said.

His campaign website lists his priorities for the new term as creating a public bank to finance affordable housing and building more affordable housing in the Tenderloin and other neighborhoods.

Preston was endorsed by Speaker Emeritus of the House Nancy Pelosi, State Assemblymember Phil Ting and the California Nurses Association, among others.

A political action committee opposing Preston's reelection, the Coalition to Grow San Francisco, had raised nearly $300,000 as of Wednesday.

Bilal Mahmood

Mahmood, a former policy analyst in the Obama administration and founder of several nonprofits, has raised about $492,000, including $255,000 in public matching funds.

Mahmood's campaign priorities include speeding up the affordable housing permitting process through the use of technology, reducing fees and the number of permits required for housing construction, and coordinating city agencies to target both fentanyl dealers and strategies to provide housing for homeless residents, according to its campaign website.

His supporters include Mayor London Breed, State Senator Scott Wiener and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.

Scotty Jacobs

Jacobs is the former director of brand development at Kinder's, a company that makes barbecue sauce and other food products. At 30, he praises his youth as one of his assets. He has raised about $222,000, of which about $154,000 came from public funds.

Jacobs supports a so-called “2+2 plan” that would exempt small businesses from taxes for their first two years of operation or with sales of less than $2 million. He supports a fare increase for the Muni bus service to shore up its finances and would refer undocumented people accused of selling drugs to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He was endorsed by mayoral candidate Mark Farrell and the Raoul Wallenberg Jewish Democratic Club. The nonprofits TogetherSF Action and Housing Action Coalition recommended him as their second choice in ranked-choice voting.

Autumn Looijen

Looijen is a community organizer who helped lead to the recall of three San Francisco Unified School District board members in 2022. It has raised around $150,000, including $112,000 in public funds.

Looijen supports sending more police officers on foot patrols in the Tenderloin in collaboration with mental health experts, approving bunkhouses and microapartments, and clarifying the written approval process for housing construction so fewer applications are rejected for unspecified reasons.

She was endorsed by the San Francisco Police Officers Association.

Allen Jones

Jones describes himself on his campaign website as “the Republican that Republicans hate and Democrats tolerate.” He is a former electrical draftsman, someone who creates plans and diagrams for electrical wiring.

He did not report raising money for his campaign, according to the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

According to his website, he lists his campaign priorities as clearing urban sidewalks, reforming prison and juvenile justice systems, and increasing awareness of services for seniors and the disabled.