On a hot, quiet Sunday morning in March, I watched with curiosity as a man in an orange traffic vest made his way along my street in Potrero Hill picking up trash. We were the only two people in sight, and as he ambled closer, I recognized him as my former longtime neighbor J.R. Eppler, who is running as a candidate for District 10 Supervisor.
Trash-collecting isn’t most people’s idea of how to spend a Sunday morning, and if Eppler was doing it to gain some attention as a candidate, he was getting none from would-be voters. No one else was around to see or talk to him.
Eppler and I are friendly but not friends. For about a dozen years, he and his family lived two floors above me in a three-unit building. In such an arrangement, you get to know a person, but probably not intimately. In some ways, we knew each other better than either of us would probably prefer. I definitely overheard some family conversations through the light well; I’m sure he heard mine, too.
Almost four years ago, Eppler and his family moved into a home up the hill. His run for the Board of Supervisors gave me an opportunity to catch up as I tagged along with him on the campaign trail, at a political rally, at a debate, and other stops along the way.
Eppler, a small business lawyer, was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He attended Stanford, and taught middle school math in San Bruno for a year before earning law and business degrees at UCLA. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 and has been involved in public service for years, serving as president of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association for a decade. He has served as a commissioner at the Department of Building Inspection, and on the Board of Appeals, and is involved with other advisory committees, task forces, political clubs, and associations. The day I spotted him picking up trash, Eppler was volunteering for the anti-littering group Refuse Refuse.
Since announcing his candidacy in August, 2025, Eppler’s campaign has steadily ramped up. With $100,000 in public campaign matching funds, he rented a small storefront next to The Good Life Grocery on 20th Street as his campaign headquarters. He employs a campaign manager, a field consultant, a general consultant, and a field director hired specifically to communicate with District 10’s Asian Pacific Islander community. He also has an intern — a politics major at the University of San Francisco whom he hopes to start paying soon.
Ten candidates have qualified for the District 10 race, and Eppler is widely viewed as a third place underdog behind Theo Ellington and Dion-Jay “DJ” Brookter.
Ellington has held a sizable cash advantage with a recent infusion of $500,000 from Chris Larsen, the billionaire co-founder of cryptocurrency company Ripple, to a political action committee supporting him. Ellington has also secured endorsements from a long list of establishment organizations and politicians, including the San Francisco Democratic Party, California state Senator Scott Wiener, and former Mayor London Breed.
Brookter has likewise scooped up key endorsements from big names, including some with deep District 10 roots: the district’s current Supervisor Shamann Walton and former Mayor Art Agnos.
“Anyone coming out of the neighborhood lane — you know, not one of the institutional lanes — is going to be running a little bit more uphill,” Eppler told me. In July, he picked up the Sierra Club’s endorsement.
GrowSF, the political group financed by tech executives and venture capitalists, contributed $58,000 to support Ellington and reported a $3,200 expenditure to oppose Eppler.
“I’m honored,” Eppler told me of GrowSF’s resistance to his candidacy. The group objected to Eppler’s appeal of development projects that he determined didn’t include enough family-friendly housing. “If they want to attack my record of fighting for more family-friendly housing, then so be it,” he said.
On a Sunday morning in August, we met at his headquarters, where Eppler was preparing to knock on doors with two volunteers. The tables were stacked with neat piles of pamphlets, door hangers, and a door script that one of the volunteers was reviewing before hitting the streets. Running along the eastern side of San Francisco, District 10 is sandwiched by Potrero Hill to the north; the Dogpatch, Bayview, Hunters Point are in between; Visitacion Valley is to the south. Eppler would need to connect with voters from vastly different neighborhoods and explain to them how he’d serve their needs.
Eppler is passionate about the minutiae of municipal government, but door knocking would be about showing voters his folksy manner. His “analytical side,” as he called it, was there for when “someone has a question about why transit isn’t working, or something like that.
“But you need both,” he explained.
Eppler is 47, sunny, and jaunty. Out of about two dozen homes I watched him visit during our walk along Connecticut Street, he interacted with just a few constituents and left his merch on unanswered doors.
The side of the hill we were walking offers a stunning view of the Bay. The streets were still and quiet, the Sunday peace undisturbed by any hint of weekday hustle.
Stepping up to one house, we were greeted by a giant, barking dog that attacked the door with a ferocity that was jarring. Though the dog was contained, I was shaken. It felt like a situation where neither Eppler’s folksy side or his wonky one would come in handy.
“That happens,” Eppler shrugged, moving on.
Scary dogs may be the least of Eppler’s problems if he beats his better funded competitors and becomes a supervisor. “Anyone who runs for political office — running and serving — it’s a grueling thing, increasingly in a toxic environment,” former District 5 supervisor Dean Preston told me later at a rally I attended with Eppler. “People have different reasons for doing it.”
I asked Eppler why, given the steep battle, he wanted to run for office at all. He told me about his mom, who gained a reputation as the “crazy lady” for her tireless fight for a barrier between their home and a freeway constructed 30 feet away.
“Where I grew up in Oklahoma City, we didn’t have neighborhood groups. We didn't have folks who tried to make the neighborhood a better place,” he said. “And so why am I running? Because that’s what I want to do. I want to do that type of work full time.”
For the record, his mother lost her battle and the freeway was constructed.
Early last week, at a debate with Ellington and Brookter, Eppler attempted to convert voters who packed the Potrero Hill Neighborhood House. Under the rules of the debate, the audience was asked to hold applause until after all three candidates answered each question. At one point, Eppler, dressed in a grey lawyerly suit with a blue tie, spoke about falsified radiation test results at a shipyard in Hunter’s Point. The fraud pointed to a deeper problem, Eppler told the audience.
“The real problem is that the residents of District 10 have been asked for generations to accept conditions that wouldn’t last more than a month and a half north of Market Street, and you need a supervisor who will fix that,” Eppler told the audience, drawing a spontaneous, unsanctioned applause. The Potrero Hill crowd was whiter and older than much of the district, and Eppler’s response was clearly a nod to its minority residents.
“These are our neighbors,” Eppler continued. “These are the people that need to have safe drinking water, safe housing, safer air, dirt that’s not toxic. Why we continue to accept this is beyond me.”
At the end of the debate, when moderator Joe Eskenazi asked each candidate to sum up their campaigns, Eppler told the story about his mother that he had shared with me.
This time, however, he added an anecdote about how a private equity merger in Oklahoma City cost his father, a grocer, his union benefits, forcing him to work at another grocery store without worker protections.
“He started working 65-hour weeks, you know, in his 50s and 60s, without overtime,” Eppler told the crowd, which grew silent as he spoke. “I had to go in and do work for him when I was in high school, so he could take a vacation. The system had failed.”
Eppler tied this to his fight for District 10, highlighting a public bus line that was rerouted out of the district, which he helped retrieve and improve upon, and his role renovating Esprit and Jackson parks. He touted his stance on affordable housing that GrowSF objected to. This time, the crowd observed the no-applause rule as it was Ellington’s turn to make his closing argument. Despite their silence, it felt like Eppler had made his case.
On another door-knocking excursion, this time on Missouri street, Eppler managed to engage some neighbors in conversation. One man heard Eppler out even as he tried to quiet his three barking chihuahuas.
“It seems like there’s three pretty decent candidates, and I’m trying to figure out what makes everybody different,” the man told Eppler.
Eppler pounced on the opening, distinguishing himself as the candidate working “on behalf of the neighborhood for more than a decade.” He again cited the restored bus line and a few other points I’d heard him use as examples before.
The man listened patiently, and complimented Eppler on his “great work.” He thanked the candidate and wished him a good day.
As we walked away, I noted that the guy seemed like an informed voter, that he’d identified the three front-runners. What did that tell Eppler as he doggedly continued his campaign?
“It tells me that I need to knock on more doors,” he said as he set off to do just that.
