Breed overcame odds, says city can as well
For Supervisor London Breed, the past four months have been a whirlwind of headline-making news, jolting her from one job to another.
On Dec. 11, she was president of the Board of Supervisors leaning toward a run for mayor in 2019. On Dec. 12, Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack, and Breed was suddenly running San Francisco. On Jan. 23, she suddenly wasn’t.
The supervisors stunned her and pretty much everybody else in the city by booting her from the top job in favor of Supervisor Mark Farrell.
Breed, 43, didn’t have much control over any of it and seemed to be biting her tongue sometimes to project the most professional, measured image possible. Thrust into the spotlight, she avoided the slightest misstep or detouring from the script, as she has been
known to do in the past.
Perhaps that’s why her demeanor upon entering her safe haven, the African American Art & Culture Complex on Fulton Street in the Western Addition, was so striking.
Totally at ease. Totally joyous. Busting out some dance moves. Playfully tossing her hair. Joking (well, half-joking) with our photographer about her best side, the side with the dimple. Drawing a gaggle of African American girls, who look up to her in both stature and achievement.
“Oh, I love London!” exclaimed Jasmin Corley, an 18-year-old City College student who was in a dance class that afternoon. “She’s so inspirational. When she talks, it’s like the whole room stops.”
We asked each of the four major candidates for mayor in the June 5 election to take us to their favorite place in San Francisco to get a sense of what they’re like as real people, not just politicians. It’s easy to see why Breed chose this spot, which is just blocks from City Hall but a world away from its infighting, nastiness and snailpace bureaucracy.
In 2002, at the request of then-Mayor Willie Brown, Breed took the job as executive director at the arts center, which is owned by the city but privately managed. She had worked on Brown’s re-election campaign in 1999 and was hired after that at the Treasure Island Development Authority, first as an office manager and then as a development specialist working on lease negotiations.
Breed ran the center until taking office as the supervisor representing District Five, which includes the Western Addition and the Haight, in 2013. She’s widely credited with giving the center new energy and turning it into a neighborhood hub with an art gallery, live performances, dance classes, a recording studio and a social worker on staff to help struggling kids.
She oversaw a $3 million renovation of the building and recounts, in minute detail and with great pride, every change she made.
“The facade was this really icky green color,” she recalled. “I’m like, ‘This place is an art center!’ The first thing I did was make sure we got the facade painted. The colors out there — the red and the yellow and orange — were the brightest colors I could pick in the rainbow. I wanted people to know this place was alive again.”
She talked about the elevators that work properly now. The windows she put in the stairwell doors to bring in more light. The gorgeous murals just about everywhere you look. She even took me into the women’s restroom to show me the colorful floor tiles.
“It took a lot to get to where it is now,” she said. “It was a labor of love. This place is alive.”
She said that as mayor, she wants to transform San Francisco, but in a much grander way. Breed thinks her hometown, which is very much rough-around-the-edges, could be a beautiful place its residents would be proud of.
“This is exactly what I want San Francisco to be, an amazing place where the bathrooms look great, where the sidewalks look great, where the bus stops look great, where you don’t see glass all over the streets,” she said. “I want San Francisco to be just as beautiful.”
As anybody who’s been following the mayor’s race knows by now, Breed’s childhood in the Plaza East public housing projects near the African American Art & Culture Complex was far from pictureperfect.
She was raised by her grandmother in an apartment with roaches, faulty plumbing and a shower that never worked. She was surrounded by poverty and violence. Her younger sister died of a drug overdose alone in her public housing unit in Potrero Hill in 2006. Her older brother, who was also addicted to drugs, is in prison for robbery and other crimes.
Breed rose above it — and has just kept rising. She graduated from Galileo High School and UC Davis before becoming an intern in Brown’s Office of Housing and Neighborhood Services.
When she challenged Supervisor Christina Olague in November 2012, she was the clear outsider. Breed got herself in trouble — not for the first time or the last — by disputing the idea she was controlled by Brown or anybody else. Even though Brown, now a Chronicle columnist, was backing Olague, Breed’s detractors were calling her “Willie’s girl” on the campaign trail.
“Willie Brown didn’t wipe my ass when I was a baby; my grandmother took care of me,” she told the Fog City Journal, a news site. The rant went on from there, concluding with, “I don’t do what no mother— body tells me to do.”
Her good friend Lee Houskeeper, a press agent in the city, said Breed called him soon after making those comments and told him she’d messed up.
“The district is so radically left, and they hate Willie so much, I said, ‘You just won!’ ” Houskeeper recalled. He was right. He also recalled seeing Breed in the Western Addition campaigning in a sandwich board. It was so unglamorous and so real, he said, he loved her even more.
“The content of her heart, her passion and her commitment are just so refreshing,” he said.
Fast-forward five years and it would be hard to imagine that green politician with no filters and a penchant for homemade campaign materials running the city. But that’s the role Breed found herself in upon Lee’s death — and, by most accounts, she rose to the occasion and conducted herself with aplomb.
But as soon as she became acting mayor, some supervisors began working to oust her. Supervisors Aaron Peskin and Hillary Ronen, the two who masterminded Breed’s replacement with Farrell, both say they respect her and think she’s a smart, strong woman. But they’re adamant she’s not the right person to lead San Francisco forward and are backing former state Sen. Mark Leno.
Peskin said that minutes after he learned Lee had died,
he saw three men enter an elevator at San Francisco General Hospital to go to the waiting room where other city officials, including Breed, were gathered.
They were Steve Kawa, Lee’s former chief of staff, who had also worked for Brown and Mayor Gavin Newsom; P.J. Johnston, Brown’s former spokesman; and Tony Winnicker, who worked in the Newsom and Lee administrations. Peskin said that two hours later, the three men walked out with Breed to face the bank of cameras and inform the public the mayor had died. Peskin said it’s clear they’ve been advising her ever since.
“As much as I like London Breed, she would be the status quo,” Peskin said. “It’s time for San Francisco to move in a new direction.”
Winnicker, who supports Breed, said every politician has an inner circle of advisers. He said he hasn’t been coaching Breed, but even if others have, endless grooming wouldn’t help if she didn’t have what it takes to be mayor.
“The best advisers and consultants in the world can give you talking points and campaign strategies, but you have to as a candidate have the character and the charisma and the deep belief in yourself to be able to deliver,” he said.
Breed, he says, definitely delivers.
Ronen adamantly disagrees. She gave a now-famous, tearful speech in board chambers just before voting to name Farrell interim mayor and said “white, rich men, billionaires in this city who have steered the policies of the past two mayoral administrations” were supporting Breed, and they had to be shut down.
Ronen said Breed has voted on the wrong side of many pieces of legislation, including opposing an anti-speculator tax on the 2014 ballot, opposing the regulation of buyouts used by landlords to get tenants to move out and voting against a resolution after the police shooting of a young man in Ferguson, Mo., that called out racial bias in police departments. “If you want another eight years of divisiveness and the status quo at City Hall, then you should vote for London,” Ronen said. “I believe that (venture capitalist) Ron Conway and others like him are so enthusiastic about her candidacy because they agree on the issues, and I could not disagree with them more.”
Breed grows visibly angry whenever the insinuation is made that Conway, who was close to Lee, controls her or that she’d be a continuation of the past three mayors.
In an interview for our podcast, “On San Francisco,” she said: “It’s really offensive when people try and imply somehow that there’s this man behind the curtain who is in charge of my person . ... I’ve made decisions on the Board of Supervisors based on the facts, based on my understanding of the issues, and most important, based on my own life experiences.”
When I asked her to describe her relationship with Conway, she got testy and refused, asking why I wasn’t asking her about her relationships with “people in the community,” including victims of gun violence.
“It’s offensive, and it’s sad and it’s pathetic,” she said.
There’s a strong possibility Peskin’s and Ronen’s maneuvering — especially considering they installed Farrell, a wealthy, white venture capitalist with moderate politics — will backfire. Many women and African Americans remain angry that Breed was ejected from the mayor’s office, which resulted in donations and offers of volunteer campaign help pouring in.
“Every day, someone is walking up to me and saying, ‘I am so upset about what they did,’ ” Breed said. “Folks felt really disrespected.”
But she said she’s moved on and is focused on highlighting what she’s done for San Francisco as a supervisor and what she can do as mayor.
“The fact is, I know I’m the best person to do this job,” she said. “It’s not just because I lived in poverty for over 20 years of my life in San Francisco. It has everything to do with the fact that I am a doer, and I don’t let bureaucratic red tape and drama get in the way of real progress.”
She pointed to her securing $2 million to rehabilitate vacant public housing units in 2014 so that 179 homeless families could jump the long waiting list for public housing and move in. She boasted in a public meeting that she broke federal law by doing so, though it doesn’t appear any laws were broken.
“The point is we need someone who’s willing to take risks, who’s willing to be bold, who understands the city,” she said.
Another example of her boldness is her support of safe injection sites, city-sanctioned facilities where injection drug users can legally shoot up. City officials had spent years hemming and hawing over the idea before Breed formed a task force to study the issue — and now the city is set to open the nation’s first centers in July.
Breed has a somewhat thin legislative record, but said she’s determined to move forward on homelessness and care for the mentally ill. Shortly after entering the race for mayor, she proposed moving the responsibility of asking a judge to conserve a mentally ill person from the district attorney’s office to the city attorney’s office to emphasize that mental illness is a public health crisis, not a criminal one.
If she wins, she also wants traditional homeless shelters to allow people to stay inside all day rather than kicking them out early in the morning and imposing curfews at night, something the city has not moved on.
But even the thought of winning — actually winning and becoming the mayor whom no conniving colleagues could depose — still seems like a dream.
“I pinch myself every day because I never thought in a million years that I would be on the Board of Supervisors, let alone running for mayor of San Francisco,” she said. “I just never thought this was possible.”
Rest assured, Supervisor Breed. The circumstances may be unbelievable, but they’re very real indeed.