Connie Chan Enters Race For Congress
Published November 20, 2025
The Facts
District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan has entered the race to replace Nancy Pelosi, according to Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, Gabe Greschler, and Josh Koehn at The Standard. Chan is one of the most strident anti-development voices on the Board of Supervisors.
The Context
Pelosi’s retirement creates a rare open seat for San Francisco - she held the seat for 40 years. State Senator Scott Wiener and former AOC chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti are already in the race. Locally, Chan has built her brand as a skeptic of adding new housing on the west side. She has been a vocal critic of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan, pushing carve-outs and exclusions for much of the Richmond and aligning with anti-growth groups trying to block taller, denser buildings along corridors like Geary and Clement.
Chan's district has long failed to do its part on housing, having built just 2 new homes in all of 2024 (28 total new units once ADUs are included in the count), according to SF Planning’s 2024 Housing Inventory. This contrasts with 1,597 net new homes citywide.
About 6,870 children were born in San Francisco in 2024, per preliminary state data summarized by Christian Leonard at the Chronicle. If we very roughly assume the Richmond accounts for about one-eleventh of city births, that suggests on the order of 600 babies born there in a single year versus only a few dozen net new homes. This is a rough estimate, but the scale of the mismatch is clear and we're left wondering where all these children will live as they grow up, when their own neighborhood refuses to make room for them.
The GrowSF Take
Chan’s record on growth would deepen, not solve, San Francisco’s housing crisis. At every major juncture, she has worked to water down or delay upzoning that would legalize more homes in exactly the high-resource, transit-served, family neighborhoods she represents, siding with west-side preservation groups determined to freeze the built environment in place rather than welcome new neighbors. The Standard’s coverage of Family Zoning negotiations underscores how often Chan’s amendments aim to pull land out of the rezoning map.
GrowSF believes San Francisco—and the country—will be better served by pro-housing, pro-growth problem-solvers than by elevating one of City Hall’s most reliable votes against progress.