Even though San Francisco voters handed Democratic Mayor London Breed a huge defeat in November, she insists she’s going out a champion.
“No matter what the results said, I’m still a winner,” Breed said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times this week. “The fact that I have come out of the most problematic circumstances of San Francisco to be mayor, and I’m here, and I have been able to serve, it is an absolute privilege.”
It’s a peculiar take from the mayor who spent the past six years pitching progressive ideas, only to do a 180-degree turn in the final months of the election and embrace a tough-on-crime and homelessness stance.
For voters, it was too little, too late.
Billionaire heir Daniel Lurie defeated Breed and a crowded field of rivals last month to win the San Francisco mayoral race, earning his first term leading California’s fourth-largest city.
Lurie was able to tap into voter disillusionment over brazen retail theft, crime, open-air drug dens, and homeless encampments that made residents fearful and businesses flee. San Francisco also became a verbal punching bag for conservative pundits and President-elect Donald Trump.
The election was a sobering moment for Breed, a local who was raised in poverty by her grandmother in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. Breed made history in June 2018 when she won a special election as the city’s first black female mayor after the death of Mayor Ed Lee. Her time in office was undoubtedly difficult and marred by scandal.
“I had to deal with crisis after crisis after crisis,” she said.
Breed was tasked with getting the city through the COVID-19 pandemic, dealing with a surge of drug overdose deaths, rampant homelessness, untreated mental illness, the racial justice protests of 2020, a rise in retail theft, and the collapse of the downtown area’s economy.
Susie Tompkins Buell, a prominent Democratic donor and Breed supporter, told the newspaper that the mayor deserved more credit for getting the city through tough times.
“I think she handled some serious problems very well, and I think there were new problems, problems we had never experienced before,” Tompkins Buell said.
Breed was one of the first large-city mayors in the country to declare a state of emergency during the pandemic, something that was credited with saving countless lives.
“Nobody knew what to do, and everyone was scared and trying to do the right thing, and be bold and careful at the same time,” Tompkins Buell said. “I know she gave it her all.”
Despite some early wins for Breed, San Franciscans ultimately went in another direction on election night.
Breed believes part of that was due to Lurie’s deep campaign coffers.
“It just was definitely very challenging to run the city, which is the priority, and then try to run a campaign against the kind of financial resources that were coming at me from a lot of different places,” she said.
Lurie comes from one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the city. His mother was married to Peter Haas, an heir to the founder of the Levi’s brand. Haas has since died, and Lurie and his mother are among his primary heirs.
Lurie spent nearly $9 million on his own campaign. His mother threw in another $1 million to an independent expenditure committee backing her son’s bid. Lurie also got big cash infusions from wealthy friends and friendly tech titans.
Breed’s belief she lost the race simply because she was outspent doesn’t necessarily jibe with other people’s account of it.
Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who ran against her for mayor, said Breed’s pivot to conservative policies cost her support from the progressive voters who championed her in the past.
“She had alienated herself from liberal San Francisco along the way,” Peskin said. “And they abandoned her.”
He also said Breed made enemies along the way.
“It was kind of her way or the highway,” he added. “And politics is the business of negotiating a compromise, which she did splendidly during COVID. But that was not everybody’s experience before COVID or after COVID, and that came back and bit her.”
James Taylor, a professor of political science at the University of San Francisco, said Breed’s tenure was marked with problems of her own making, including multiple scandals with city contracts.
The San Francisco Standard reported that the head of the city’s Human Rights Commission funneled more than $1 million in contracts to a nonprofit organization led by a man Breed was living with and that Breed had never disclosed the relationship. That investigation led to questions about mismanaged city funds in the Dream Keeper Initiative, one of Breed’s signature programs. The Dream Keeper Initiative was supposed to inject up to $60 million a year into nonprofit groups and other organizations aimed at helping the city’s black community.
The program was supposed to be a shining example of how the city was giving back to residents. Instead, it became a powerful example of wasteful spending, greed, and corruption.
In the wake of the scandal, Taylor said that many of the city’s black residents felt that the change Breed promised she would usher in was all talk.
“In other words, London Breed’s demise was self-inflicted,” he said. “The way this plane crashed, everything around it was destroyed.”
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As for future plans, Breed said she hasn’t had much time to focus on what she’ll do after Lurie takes over.
“I don’t have no rich mama with money,” she said, laughing. “I got to go make my own money.”
