Sam Yoon announces his candidacy.

By Jim O'Sullivan
News Editor

With six weeks left until the preliminary election, at-large City Council candidate Sam Yoon is worried.

"Yeah, I am," Yoon admits, eschewing any of the falsely upbeat tone or empty optimism fronted by less realistic politicians.

"Of course, I'm going to be happy with an eighth-place finish" in September, Yoon says, acknowledging the conventional wisdom that he is one of several "bubble" candidates whose prospects aren't assured either way.

It could be the flagging confidence - or the appealing candor - of a neophyte pol whose wind-gauging skews toward the pragmatic and sober. He even confesses to starting work in his head on the composition of an election night speech.

"I'm campaigning like there is no September 28," Yoon says, noting the depth of this year's council field, a departure from years past, when the battle for a berth in the final eight usually ended in a victory for a few candidates whose candidacy held no November potential.

"That's just a fact," Yoon says, looking hard at his own prospects. "We can't kid ourselves and look past that, and conserve resources."

So Yoon's camp says they will spend prodigiously before the preliminary election, and then worry about the next five-and-a-half weeks as they come. So far, Yoon has been able to surpass fundraising expectations of a first-time contender whose roots in the city, by his own admission, don't match those of other hopefuls. Drawing on support from Asian-Americans across the country, who see in Yoon a pioneer running as the first Asian-American in a Boston race, he has collected over $116,000, which slots him in the field's second tier.

"If we plan well, I'm confident that the money and the support will be there," says Yoon, 35, who has worked as housing director of the Asian Community Development Corporation for the past three years.

He looks weary, leaning forward in a chair in the campaign's Fields Corner headquarters, smack in the middle of another day split between voter-connecting and more fundraising, an activity his campaign discusses almost obsessively. Earlier, he chatted with seniors at the mother lode of municipal elections, the Keystone Apartments on Hallet Street. Later, he'll be at Devlin's pub in Brighton for an event to help the Our Lady of Presentation School.

Yoon has arrived, he says, at the realization that he can peddle himself, at least in Dorchester, as the Dorchester candidate. Sticker candidate Joseph Ureneck lives in Fields Corner, too, around the corner from Yoon's Waldeck St. home, and Althea Garrison lives on Dudley St., but each appeals to a niched demographic: Ureneck to conservatives, and Garrison to African-American conservatives. Yoon is casting his net wider, hoping to haul in progressive, minority, and neighborhood-centric voters.

"There was a kind of gradual recognition," he says, of the potency of being seen as the Dorchester candidate. "Now, that's part of my spiel."

Still, he admits he has had a hard time winning support from veteran political hands. Later, campaign manager Andrew Kain says Yoon's support runs toward "new Boston" type of activists - presumably, comparative newcomers to the political process who are not known for their ability to sway votes. That format, Kain says, has worked for "new types" of candidates. Yoon has said he would pattern his candidacy on Sheriff Andrea Cabral's victorious run last year.

"We're reaching out to the voters, as crazy as that sounds," he says.

Yoon has cultivated a progressive image, and he insists the projection is not the outgrowth of any strategy.

"Believe me, there's no strategy," Yoon shrugs. "It's just who I am. I'm progressive because I've chosen a career path in my life that focuses on meeting different people's needs."

That path stretches back through a childhood in the Midwest and an education at Princeton University and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The son of Korean immigrants, Yoon and his wife, Tina, have a 3-year-old son and a 7-month-old daughter.

And it has brought him to a point on issues facing the council that he thinks positions him well to serve. He favors neighborhood schools, though he says the system isn't ready to administer them equitably, and Yoon suggest census tracts grouped around a broad income spectrum to determine "walk-to" zones. Later, Kain calls and, seeking to clarify, says Yoon's stance is that the benchmark for when the city is ready for neighborhood schools should be pegged to equitable class sizes across the system, then acknowledges, "There are no easy answers."

A housing development specialist in Chinatown, Yoon's judgment of the Boston Redevelopment Authority calls for a more active role for residents in conceptualizing projects, a sentiment he says was echoed in responses he's received to a 42,000-piece campaign questionnaire. If elected, Yoon says, he would plumb for allies within the BRA and City Hall, as well as in neighborhoods.

"It'd be just like a campaign," he says. "We have a goal. We know things have got to be improved because there's been a breakdown between the BRA and the community."

Yoon has spent nearly a year now as a campaigner, and reports no ill effects from not being able to draw on a deep network of contacts steeped in a family's generations spent in Boston. "In fact, it kind of works in my favor. There's a curiosity factor."

The amount of time he feels he must spend fundraising, he says, has jarred him more than anything else.

"In a larger sense, I am surprised at how far I've come. There's no neighborhood, there's no community in this city where we feel like it's not worth our time to be out there," Yoon says.