Reaching out to a new generation

The second-term city councilor brushes aside the skeptics, suggesting they ignore Boston’s fast-changing demographics at their peril. More and more Bostonians not only grew up somewhere else, he says, but about 30 percent were, like himself, born in another country.

What this means, Yoon asserts, is that influence is waning for those who have long dominated Boston politics, or, as he describes them, “the ones who will have the long memories and look back wistfully.’’

“I know this will be kind of the knock against me in certain quarters,’’ Yoon said during an interview in his City Hall office. “But to say that I don’t understand Boston politics means that basically half of the city doesn’t understand Boston politics.’’

Underpinning Yoon’s candidacy is a belief that a new generation of Bostonians yearns for more pristine, responsive politics, and a government that embraces openness and innovation. But the candidate is disdainful of the personal relationships that often drive the political process and ambivalent about acquiring power. One of his proposals, in fact, would reduce the authority of the office he seeks.

As Yoon knows well, those Boston residents with the long memories, as he refers to them, are the city’s more traditional voters. They are less likely to support newcomers of Yoon’s ilk, and they have had outsized influence in mayoral elections, when turnout is almost always much lighter than in state or national elections.

Shaking hands recently with patrons at Gyro King, a sandwich shop in Grove Hall, Yoon was candid about what it will take for him to survive the Sept. 22 preliminary election, when the four-candidate field - 16-year-incumbent Thomas M. Menino, Yoon, and two other challengers - will be cut to two finalists, who will face off Nov. 3.

“If the vote is big and people turn out who want a new direction, then I’ll do well,’’ Yoon told one customer. “If the vote is small, I’m in big trouble.’’

On a hot weekday morning, Yoon arrives at Foley Senior Residences in Mattapan to find 15 residents assembled, some in wheelchairs, to hear his pitch. There are blue “Yoon for Mayor’’ tote bags, cookies, and punch, compliments of the candidate.

For a candidate running as an antipolitician, Yoon’s act on the stump is conventional, even old school in some of its touches, as when the candidate, in a dark blue suit, settles onto the bench at the upright piano and pounds out “God Bless America’’ on the keys, some of which don’t work. Yoon, who is classically trained, beams as the sing-along flows into “You Are My Sunshine’’ and “Amazing Grace.’’

His stump speech is loaded with the buzzwords of a reformer’s vocabulary - “bottom-up change,’’ “grass roots,’’ “consensus agenda.’’ After a low-profile start, his campaign has been much more visible in recent weeks.

In a city long dominated by pols of Irish and Italian descent, the first Asian-American elected official in Boston history is an exotic presence. Yoon, a boyish-looking 39, uses it to his advantage with his elderly audience.

“As a Korean-American, we were raised always to honor and respect you; that’s part of our culture,’’ he says.

On the campaign trail, Yoon uses his ethnicity as a calling card and a symbol of Boston’s transformation. Indeed, he views his breakthrough election in 2005 to one of four at-large City Council seats as a harbinger. He defeated four Irish-American candidates, including a son of a former mayor, the daughter of another, and the son of a former secretary of state.

“A rare occurrence like that has to say something about what the city is thinking about where we should be going, you know . . . to pass up several legacies who represent Boston political history, to go with the guy with the funny last name,’’ Yoon said.

His sudden emergence in 2005 was a political phenomenon, the elevation of a newcomer, who, for more than a decade, had been a little-known, itinerant do-gooder and activist trying out careers in teaching, affordable housing development, and community organizing. Never tested in a vote-for-one contest, Yoon nonetheless believes his third-place finish was a mandate to upend the status quo.

“That consciousness is something that I carry with me here because it’s out of respect for the mandate that put me in this place,’’ he asserted. “I’m not going to sit here and just say, ‘Well, how do I learn how the system works and be the cog in that wheel of the system?’ ’’

If elected, Yoon has vowed to seek charter changes that would weaken the mayor and strengthen the council. He also proposes, among other changes, to eliminate the Boston Redevelopment Authority, add elected members to the mayorally appointed Boston School Committee, and limit mayors to two four-year terms.

“We are failing to adapt to a new reality as a city, and it starts here with our city government,’’ Yoon said. “You don’t have to have lived here your entire life to get that.’’

In 2007, Jerry McDermott, then the City Council’s point man on the city budget, met with Yoon as part of the annual ritual of negotiating with Menino’s office over spending plans for the next fiscal year. Under Boston’s ultrastrong-mayor form of government, money for pet programs and projects requires the mayor’s blessing.

“We talked about a lot of things Sam wanted,’’ said McDermott, who gave up his Allston-Brighton district council seat at the end of that year. “I said: ‘If I can get a lot of the things you want in there, will you be with us [and vote for the budget]?’ Sam told me ‘Even if you get 90 or 99 percent in there, I’ll still have to vote against it. The people I serve are the dissenters.’

“I said, ‘Sam, you’re not doing yourself any favors if you want to be effective,’ ’’ McDermott recalled.

Yoon voted against the budget, as he has every year since he joined the council.

After more than 3 1/2 years on the council, Yoon is viewed by many past and present colleagues interviewed by the Globe as intelligent, idealistic, and exasperating, an outsider who often seems content to make his point rather than work to forge compromise. “I think he’s a good-hearted guy, but I don’t think he understands the political business,’’ McDermott said.

“He deserves some credit for trying to look at things with a fresh perspective and challenging the status quo,’’ said Charles C. Yancey, who has often voted with Yoon and is the longest-serving councilor. “But he’s not the first or only one to do it, though he may think he is.’’

Yoon acknowledged that, “in a lot of ways I feel like a stranger in City Hall.’’

“But I don’t think it would be a good thing to be that comfortable doing this . . . I’m kind of thinking out loud; I hope that’s OK,’’ he said, looking at his chief strategist, Jim Spencer, who sat in during two interviews with the Globe.

“You know, I don’t want to sound kind of holier-than-thou,’’ Yoon continued. “Going back to 2004, whenever I was really considering [running for office], it’s this image of politicians that really got in the way.’’

Of his conversation with McDermott two years ago, Yoon said he doesn’t remember his specific words but does recall that the budget process lacked “transparency,’’ a word he uses often.

“What we have too much of is the politicians sitting behind a desk saying, ‘This is what I want, you know, for my district, for my baseball field, for my street,’ and then ‘As long as I can get what I want, sure, you can have my vote,’ ’’ Yoon said.

A year earlier, during budget deliberations, the rookie councilor caused an uproar. After skipping 23 of 28 budget hearings with department heads and instead taking soundings at his own series of budget meetings in the neighborhoods, he mobilized teenagers to pack a council meeting to demand more money for youth programs.

He made a dramatic point, but rankled many of his colleagues, and the budget passed on a 9-to-4 vote without the additional funds he was seeking.

The following year, however, similar tactics succeeded. Yoon objected to Boston Housing Authority plans to replace daytime guards with security cameras at 13 developments for the elderly, and busloads of tenants protested at a council meeting. The BHA abandoned the cost-cutting move. Yoon considers the neighborhood budget hearings in 2006 and the push-back on BHA security changes among his most significant accomplishments as a councilor.

Yoon was born in Seoul as Sang Hyun Yun, and he came to the United States with his parents 10 months later. In his childhood, the family moved from Philadelphia to Jacksonville, Ill., before settling in the Amish country of Lebanon, Pa., where he entered fourth grade.

Yoon’s father, an obstetrician-gynecologist, brought the family to the United States for the educational opportunity it offered his children. All three Yun children took advantage, going on to Ivy League schools and advanced degrees.

Korean was Yoon’s first language, and his parents were deeply involved in a Korean Presbyterian church, which served as the cultural hub for immigrants.

Yoon, who legally changed to the anglicized version of his name when he married 14 years ago, became a naturalized citizen at the age of 10. His younger siblings, brother Sang Joon and sister Mihae, were born in the United States.

“The faith of my parents had a great influence on all of us,’’ said his sister, seven years younger than Sam and now in the final year of a Yale program to receive both a medical degree and a doctorate in cell biology.

As an adult, Sam became a founder and elder of Bethany Presbyterian Church in Brookline. His brother is a campus minister at Yale.

Yoon went to Princeton, where he majored in philosophy, entered a teacher certification program, and, after taking a year off to practice teach, graduated magna cum laude.

He taught in two urban school districts in New Jersey, then obtained a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School in 1995, the year he married the former Christina “Tina’’ Kim, a daughter of Korean immigrants. They met while she was finishing her doctorate in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She left a career in science and now helps nonprofit organizations raise money.

The couple bought a small house in Arlington, and, in 2003, when Yoon was considering a move into either government or politics in Boston, they moved into a condominium unit in Dorchester’s Melville Park section, where they live with their children, Nathan and Naomi.

Yoon’s career odyssey after the Kennedy School moved away from education into a series of relatively brief stints with community-based nonprofit groups, including three specializing in affordable housing.

Past supervisors and colleagues had similar assessments of Yoon, describing him as earnest, thoughtful, and concerned about others.

“Something was burning deep in him, compelling him to do all he could to help,’’ recalled Jerri Morrison, executive director of the Young Scholars Program in Trenton, N.J., where Yoon volunteered as an after-school tutor in math.

While student teaching at the local high school, Yoon moved into a tough Trenton neighborhood beset by drugs and crime. “He would go into some of the scariest neighborhoods to check on students,’’ Morrison recalled. “Sang was fearless.’’

By his own account, Yoon began to shed his cynicism about government and politics while serving as director of housing at Asian Community Development Corp. in Boston’s Chinatown from 2002 to 2005. In a neighborhood often divided along generational or ideological lines, he played a key role in uniting various factions in a successful fight to reclaim a piece of state land that had been cleared for turnpike construction in the 1960s.

“It sparked Sam’s conversion on government,’’ said Jeremy Liu, executive director of the Asian CDC and Yoon’s friend. “It was a very clear moment when he realized that government can be a catalyst for positive change.’’

As executive director of the Chinese Progressive Association in Chinatown, Lydia Lowe said she observed a growth in Yoon’s political skills since, while working at the Asian CDC, he once lectured her about her aggressive organizing tactics.

“Before, I saw him as someone who wanted to please everybody and be on all sides,’’ Lowe said. “But he has impressed me by his willingness to stand on certain principles.’’

For all his expressions of ambivalence about politics, Yoon may be positioned to stay in the game regardless of the outcome of his mayoral candidacy. As one of a relatively small number of Asian-American elected officials in the country, he has achieved a measure of national stature.

Yoon was named to the rules committee of last year’s Democratic National Convention and campaigned in at least four states for Obama’s presidential candidacy.

At the urging of a campaign contact, Yoon said, he filed a résumé with Obama’s transition team. He did not pursue it and decided to run for mayor.

He has struggled to raise local campaign funds but tapped into a national network of contributors in the Korean-American and broader Asian-American communities. In January 2008, he launched the Asian Political Leadership Fund, a political advocacy group known as a 527 for the section of the Internal Revenue Code under which it is organized.

The fund raised about $141,000, nearly all from a trio of Asian-American businessmen in Massachusetts and New Jersey. The 527 spent about $30,000 on newspaper ads promoting Obama in Korean-language newspapers in Pennsylvania and Virginia and Asian-American candidates in Texas and Minnesota, and it maintains a website that features Yoon prominently.

Politics does not come naturally to him, Yoon said, and he describes his role almost in terms of noblesse oblige.

“That is the burden and challenge of leadership,’’ he said. “That’s what’s paradoxical about this. It really isn’t about you in the end, and yet, of course, I’m the one who has to get my picture taken; my life story is the one that gets told.

“Does that make me feel good? Of course it does,’’ Yoon said. “But is that the reason I go out and do this? . . . No.’’

“You have to realize that you, as a person, stand for something that’s important to a lot of people and to the Asian community,’’ he said. “I am somebody, you know, who a lot of younger Asian-Americans do look up to.’’