3 candidates for mayor play up differences
For months, the candidates hoping to become San Francisco’s next mayor have relied more on their personal backstories than their policy positions to separate themselves from one another.
But on Monday evening, at a mayoral forum sponsored by The Chronicle and the City Club of San Francisco, three of the leading contenders for the city’s top job — Supervisor London Breed, Supervisor Jane Kim and former Supervisor Angela Alioto — sought to put some daylight between themselves and their rivals.
Former state Sen. Mark Leno missed Monday’s debate following the death of his father on Friday. Leno was with family in Milwaukee on Monday, but was expected to return to San Francisco and
the campaign trail on Tuesday.
In the event at the City Club in the Financial District, Kim responded first to a question posed to each candidate by Chronicle editorial page editor John Diaz about which policy position the candidates disagreed on the most.
After a moment’s pause, Kim centered on a claim that Alioto has made frequently: that the city’s homeless shelters and Navigation Centers are dead-end options that ought to be abolished in favor of steering people toward long-term housing.
“We have to invest in shelters because we have to get people off our streets immediately,” Kim said. Longer-term options, like permanent supportive housing, were also essential elements of tackling the city’s homelessness crisis, she said, but it takes time to find or build those units.
“We won’t get people off the street quickly if we don’t invest in shelter beds,” Kim said.
In a somewhat ranging and puzzling response, Alioto said she was the sole candidate in the mayor’s race to openly embrace the city’s police force, and called that a key policy difference between her and the other two.
“I’m blown away by the total lack of respect for police officers,” Alioto said, adding that she was “very proud” to accept the endorsement of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, the police department’s union, last week.
She also claimed to be the only candidate willing to support the San Francisco Police Department’s ability to communicate openly with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to thwart terrorists threats.
After citing the experiences living in San Francisco during the Zodiac murders of the late 1960s and other violent crime sprees, she said the SFPD needed all the resources it required to “catch the bad guys before we get blown up.”
Breed corrected Alioto, saying that she was a “big supporter of our officers,” and that, as mayor, she wanted to put “another 200 police officers on the streets.”
Breed said she had no qualms about police cooperation with Homeland Security “for addressing terrorist attacks,” but reiterated her support of San Francisco’s sanctuary city laws.
“I don’t think they should be cooperating with ICE for the purpose of deporting people,” Breed said, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
None of the leading candidates support the SFPD working with ICE on deportation efforts.
After that detour, the topic of SFPD gave rise to what Breed said was one of the biggest differences between herself and Kim, “because she (Kim) believes that police officers don’t prevent crime, and I do,” Breed said, citing her work to build trust between police officers and the Western Addition neighborhood where she grew up.
“We had funerals on a regular basis, and I wanted to make sure that my community was protected,” Breed said. “That’s why I got involved in politics in the first place.”
Kim was quoted as saying that “police officers do not prevent crime” during a contentious debate at the Board of Supervisors in 2015 over an ordinance to establish a policy at the Police Department that tied staffing levels to population levels.
But Kim said her remark was taken out of context.
“I don’t want to be misquoted,” she said, explaining that while “police absolutely address crime,” she does not belive that adding to the Police Department’s ranks alone will cut down on criminality. Education and jobs prevent crime, she said.
Instead, she suggested a more holistic approach to improving communities and cutting down on crime, like investing in after-school programs and public schools.
Kim said she also supported the SFPD’s communication with Homeland Security officials, but recounted fielding troubling complaints from residents in her district that police had been surveilling mosques “without any probably cause and sharing that information with the FBI.”
Surveillance based on religion and ethnicity without any probable cause” is unacceptable, Kim said.
The candidates also quarreled over a state bill that’s become a third rail in San Francisco politics lately: SB827, the very mention of which drew scattered hisses from the audience.
The legislation, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, broadly seeks to grow urban housing supplies by increasing density and building height limits along transit corridors.
While all three candidates Monday night agreed that San Francisco was in desperate need of new housing, they sparred over whether SB827 was the right remedy for the city’s housing shortage.
Breed, who was endorsed by Wiener last week, said she supports the bill. But, she added, she’s been in communication with Wiener’s office, urging the senator to amend the legislation to, among other things, provide greater protections against potential displacement when developers descend on a plot of land.
“I understand that it’s not perfect legislation,” Breed said. “I understand that it is pretty extreme and, in some instances, it goes too far. What it is trying to accomplish is to push the region to build more housing and to build more housing faster” — hence her support of the measure, she said.
Kim, a reliable political rival of Wiener, doesn’t support the bill, saying it would be a bonanza for developers — giving them far more opportunities to build in the city. She said it doesn’t go far enough to extract concessions from them in return, like affordable housing requirements or increased fees.
“You’re enriching the pockets of developers who are already doing extremely well in San Francisco, without asking them to do anything in return for San Francisco,” Kim said.
Alioto, in her customarily fiery rhetoric, said that “if that bill gets anywhere close to passing, it will destroy who we are as a city.” Alioto condemned the bill for giving away too much local control over zoning decisions to the state.
“You do not give away your zoning powers to the state of California,” she said, a line that drew perhaps the loudest applause of the night. “We will lose the soul of San Francisco completely.”