SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco Mayor London Breed spent the weekend making her closing arguments to voters, telling them she is battle-tested after leading the city through the pandemic and is ready for another term.
Breed, San Francisco’s first female black mayor, is in the political fight of her life. She has 12 rivals who believe they can do a better job than she can in a city that is one of the least affordable and most unequal places in the country.
Billionaires from the tech industry call San Francisco home. So do drug addicts, the mentally ill, and hundreds of homeless people living under dirty tarps on the streets.
The city, under Breed’s leadership, has seen its reputation in tatters over the past several years as it struggled with violent crime, personal property theft, and open-air drug dens that have made residents feel unsafe. She inherited some of those problems from the previous administration, but Breed’s failure to fix any of them has been a big blow to her administration.
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Polls have consistently shown that most voters do not approve of her job performance or the progressive agenda that has played out while she has been in charge.
Though there are 13 candidates total in the high-stakes contest, four are realistically in the running to unseat Breed in a bid that could reshape the liberal city’s political landscape.
The candidates include Daniel Lurie, nonprofit group founder and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune; Mark Farrell, former interim mayor; Aaron Peskin, Board of Supervisors president; and Supervisor Ahsha Safai.
Lurie has seen a boost in popularity over the past month, something that has clearly gotten under Breed’s skin. She has spent the last few weeks of her campaign hammering him over his lack of experience and warning voters that he is not ready to take the helm of California’s fourth-largest city.
“This is not a place for on-the-job training,” Breed said. “This is a serious city with a serious responsibility. We’re on the rise, and I hope that voters see it.”
Lurie, who has no experience running local government, has pushed back on the mayor’s criticism, saying the city needs less, not more, of Breed.
“She’s had six years and she’s failed, so her experience is doing the city no favors,” Lurie told the Washington Examiner. “The people of San Francisco are desperate for change.”
Residents have also expressed frustration and confusion about the future of their once-thriving metropolis. They aren’t buying Breed’s counterpunch that things are getting better when they experience the harsh reality of daily life in San Francisco themselves.
“Things have not gotten better under the mayor, no matter what she says,” Malcolm Belkacem told the Washington Examiner. Belkacem, who lost his job and was forced to live out of his car for six months, faulted Breed for failing to get San Francisco on track sooner.
“There has been no comeback,” he said. “We aren’t any better. She thinks she got us through COVID? The world went through COVID. Look at San Diego. Look at LA. Look at Canada. They are better off. Not here. Here we have people doing drugs on the sidewalk. Here we have people sleeping on the street.”
Belkacem, whose family is from Algeria, said he contemplated going back because his options in San Francisco had dried up. “If she is reelected, that’s my only choice,” he said. “I guess I am going back.”
But others say Breed is the only candidate on the ticket that they can relate to and the only one they trust to fight for them.
“If you want to be a politician, you have to agree to take on all of the problems of the city,” resident Shirley Moore told the Washington Examiner.
Moore moved from Tennessee to San Francisco in 1967 and said Breed had been the only candidate willing to reach out to residents in disenfranchised pockets of the city.
“If you’re a VIP and you earn a certain amount of money, then you get the city services you need, the ones you require,” Moore said. “The rest of us are on our own.”
Moore believes Lurie, Farrell, Peskin, and Safai won’t represent her community or fight for its needs because they haven’t experienced the same hardships.
Moore lived in the Sunset District, a neighborhood located in the southwest quadrant of San Francisco, for 20 years before moving to Candlestick Point, a part of the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, in 1992. Bayview is physically isolated and has historically lacked access to goods and services found in other San Francisco neighborhoods.
“In Sunset, life was quite different,” Moore told the Washington Examiner. “My husband dragged me kicking and screaming from the Sunset because I knew the equities were different. Nobody cared about that sector. The public works, the city services were so negligent that I had to call the mayor’s office to have them tow all of the old abandoned cars down the street and a porta-potty.”
Moore fears that if Breed isn’t elected, the new mayor will go back to using Bayview as “a dumping ground.”
“When you provide services to just one part of the city on your status, that is not serving the community,” she said. “That is serving people by status. This mayor has done more and understands the problem. The others aren’t going to do anything to solve these problems. All they are going to do is pay back their loyal contributors and do things for them, but the problems in this city that we care about … they aren’t going to do anything about them, and we are going to go back to being ignored.”
Breed has leaned into her identity and life story to set her apart from the top three contenders, all white men, who are gunning for her job. She said her own experience of suffering from poverty, family members battling drug addiction and mental illness, and growing up with neighborhood crime sets her apart. She’s also a renter in a field that includes men who own multiple million-dollar homes. One is even a landlord.
“You are coming to save the day because you know better than the person who lived in it?” she said about her opponents appealing to lower-income residents and minorities. “That’s the thing that really is offensive.”
Her rivals have pushed back on her assumptions and said just because she’s had struggles in her life doesn’t make her uniquely fit to lead the city.
They’ve also pointed to a series of issues that they say show character flaws, including the recent resignation of her friend Sheryl Davis, who stepped down from the city’s Human Rights Commission after approving $1.5 million for a nonprofit group run by her boyfriend. The funds were part of the mayor’s signature Dream Keeper Initiative, which she created to support black communities in the city.
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In 2021, Breed also agreed to pay nearly $23,000 to the San Francisco Ethics Commission to settle several “significant” ethics violations.
The city’s ethics commission had found that she committed multiple violations involving the misuse of her title as mayor for personal gain, abused San Francisco laws on accepting gifts, and even asked a former governor to release her brother from prison early. She also allowed the former head of public works, who was caught up in a corruption scandal, to pay her car repair bill.
