Housing crisis, right-wing shift define San Francisco mayoral race By Reuters

By Judith Langowski

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Concerns about housing and crime are dominating San Francisco’s mayoral race, an election that gives voters a chance to choose the path they trust to lead their city out of crisis.

San Francisco has come to represent the challenges facing many large US cities, which have struggled with an uneven economic recovery and rising cost of living since the COVID-19 pandemic.

For critics of his leadership, the city has been caught in what they call a doom loop, characterized by street homelessness and open-air drug markets. Downtown recovery has been slow, with many empty storefronts and little street traffic.

Among major U.S. cities, San Francisco has the highest vacancy rate at about 32 percent, according to March 2024 data from real estate firm JLL.

Against this backdrop, the famously liberal city has begun a political shift, including ballot measures passed this year that introduced new police surveillance technology and mandatory drug testing for the city’s public assistance recipients.

Observers expect the upcoming mayoral race to reflect the growing popularity of the moderate-centrist wing of the local Democratic Party, which made gains in the March election.

“What voters care about right now is not currently the kind of issues that progressives tend to do well,” Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, told Reuters.

Beginning with early voting on Oct. 7, voters will choose from 13 candidates in an instant, ranked-choice voting system. Incumbent Mayor London Breed, who has led the city since a 2018 special election, has four major challengers, all Democrats. Breed won the endorsement of San Francisco Democrats.

An August poll by the San Francisco Chronicle showed Breed in the lead, followed by moderate Democrats, former acting mayor Mark Farrell and philanthropist and heir to the Levi fortune, Daniel Lurie. Two candidates from the progressive left, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safai, lagged behind.

The survey found that the top issues among voters were crime and public safety, ahead of housing affordability and homelessness.

“STARTING TO FEEL BETTER”

A delay in the election may have helped Breed.

A ballot measure passed in 2022 moved San Francisco’s local elections to even-numbered years, in part in hopes that tying them to the presidential election would increase voter turnout.

That meant, rather than running for re-election last November, Breed had an extra 12 months to improve the perception of her leadership.

“By pushing the election back a year, people are starting to feel better about the city,” McDaniel said.

The crime rate is down 32 percent year over year, according to the San Francisco Police Department. The decrease is partly due to increased police resources and better surveillance technologies, Breed said.

“We have the systems. It works as it should,” Breed said in an interview.

Farrell says much more needs to be done. He promised to hire a new police chief within the first 100 days and said in a debate that he would declare a “fentanyl state of emergency” to access more state and federal resources to fight the scourge of the deadly drug .

Breed’s critics have also pointed to the slow pace of new housing permits and construction under her administration.

The city is well behind state-mandated housing goals of adding 82,000 new units between 2023 and 2031. Only about 500 new units had received permits through July, according to the U.S. Department of Housing, triggering a state law to simplify the approval process.

“Many of our policies have made it very difficult to build, more expensive and easier for people to resist housing opportunities when they come to neighborhoods that traditionally aren’t used to building more housing,” Breed acknowledged.

She said she wants to focus on underutilized areas for new construction while maintaining the fabric of the city. San Francisco is famous for its colorful and quaint Victorian houses.

In a city where the median household income of its 800,000-plus residents is the highest among large US cities, homelessness remains intractable. The most recent survey found that about 8,000 people in the city are homeless, a figure some advocates say undercounts the population.

Breed’s administration has used sweepers of homeless tents since a Supreme Court decision in June found the encampment ban constitutional. Breed said the operations are part of a variety of solutions, including increasing shelter capacity and transporting homeless people to families or networks outside the city.

Peskin, one of the progressive left candidates, said people are simply being moved from one neighborhood to another.

Lurie, who founded a nonprofit aimed at reducing poverty, said Breed hasn’t done enough to keep people off the streets.

Lurie has so far outperformed all other candidates, contributing more than $6 million of his own fortune. Contributors to a committee backing his race include Jan Koum, founder of the messaging app WhatsApp, and other tech executives and venture capitalists.

Homelessness is “against the law,” Lurie said, “and it’s not compassionate and it’s not humane to allow people to stay on our streets.”