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SAN FRANCISCO — Willie Brown, who enjoyed nearly complete control over city affairs during his first five years as mayor, will have to deal with his anti-growth adversaries like never before now that most of his allies were defeated in a runoff election. 

Tuesday’s election transformed the Board of Supervisors from a rubber stamp into an adversarial body, determined to slow the office-space approvals that have forced housing prices to skyrocket while making the city a magnet for dot-com companies. 

The overriding theme of the election was the pace of San Francisco’s growth, and whether the city will retain its quirky, individualistic character or become a homogenous dot-com suburb of Silicon Valley. 

Nine of the 11 board seats were decided Tuesday, and Brown’s allies lost the majority they had held before the election. At least seven of the supervisors elected Tuesday are anti-Brown. 

The new composition will allow the board to look more closely at the direction in which it wants to lead San Francisco, said board President Tom Ammiano, who frequently butts heads with the mayor and ran unsuccessfully against Brown in 1999. 

“I definitely see putting the brakes on,” he said. “It’s not that people don’t want growth, but it was unbridled. We have to have planning with a method, planning with a vision. I see that we have a better shot at that now.” 

Brown spokesman P.J. Johnston, calling the election “problematic” for the mayor, would not say whether he thought the new board would slow dot-com growth in the city – adding that was a matter for the new board members to decide. 

But Johnston said San Francisco’s first district elections did not result in a very representative board. Previously, board members were elected in citywide elections. 

“One thing is clear in that it didn’t serve the diversity of the board very well,” he said. “San Francisco has a larger than 30 percent Chinese-American population and the Asian-American population is even larger, and there’s one Asian member of the board. San Francisco has more than a majority of women residents, but we now have a board with 10 men and one woman. 

“Turnout was less than 30 percent. That’s a rough way to elect the city’s leadership,” Johnston said. “I think it was a tough race for a lot of candidates and those that ran on an anti-incumbent, anti-Willie Brown platform did well with the small number of voters they had to appeal to in this district election process.” 

Ammiano now hopes to revisit zoning and planning issues that did not fare well when Brown had a majority on the board. 

The mayor previously had enough support to make his vetoes stick, but now the board may be able to overturn them. 

“If these numbers hold, it’s pretty bad for the mayor. Expect a lot more vetoes. But with eight votes they can override a veto,” said Frank Gallagher, a political consultant with Solem & Assoc. who helped the mayor defeat a grass-roots growth control measure in Nveomber. 

Matt Gonzalez, a deputy public defender who won his runoff election by defeating Brown ally Juanita Owens, a city college dean, said the election was defined by growth issues. 

“I think a lot of what has emerged in the last couple of years has been a fight over the growth in the city,” said Gonzalez, who expects a slowdown of dot-com growth and a focus on building new housing. 

Overall, Ammiano sees the shift on the board leading to more open discussions at City Hall. 

“People want checks and balances,” he said. “They were feeling totally stifled. A lot of things that should have been debated were not, a lot of things that could have gone differently did not.” 

Still, Brown is a master politician, who dominated state government as California’s longest-serving House speaker and held onto his leadership even when Republicans had a majority. 

“If anybody can work in this kind of situation, it’s Willie Brown. He’s the quintessential dealmaker,” Gallagher said.