The survey, conducted by Mission Local ahead of the race to fill the district's congressional seat, found respondents placing constituent accessibility near the top of their demands. The phrase "don't hide out in Washington" emerged as a recurring sentiment — a signal that the community is skeptical of representatives who campaign hard in the neighborhood and then go quiet once sworn in.

The Mission has reason to calibrate its expectations. The district has watched federal representatives cycle through high-profile policy fights while casework offices go understaffed and town halls go unscheduled. Visibility in Washington and visibility on 24th Street are not the same thing, and the survey respondents appear to know the difference.

Mission Local did not publish a full breakdown of survey methodology or sample size in the fragment available, so the results should be read as community sentiment rather than scientific polling. Still, open-ended responses of this kind often surface priorities that structured surveys miss — and "show up" is a priority that crosses most other divides.

The congressional race to watch here is the one to succeed the incumbent in a district that includes dense, renter-heavy neighborhoods where federal housing policy, immigration enforcement posture, and small-business lending programs land with direct, measurable weight.

What to watch: candidate forums in the Mission over the coming weeks will be the first test of whether contenders have absorbed this feedback or are still running on generic constituent-services language. Watch also for whether any candidate commits to a specific schedule of in-district office hours — that's the kind of concrete promise reporters can actually hold someone to later.