Will voters go for a different kind of mayor?
SAN FRANCISCO >> Famously liberal San Francisco is irritable these days.
Poll after poll shows its residents aren't confident in the future of their city and don't support their leader, Mayor London Breed. They lament that their downtown isn't coming back after the pandemic as quickly as other cities' cores, that drug overdose numbers continue to skyrocket and that property crime remains a stubborn problem.
But what's not so clear is what kind of mayor they want to fix what's broken.
Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist who served as interim mayor for six months in 2018, believes he has the answer: a firm style of governance that would “massively” increase police ranks, clear all homeless encampments, detain drug overdose victims who survive and return cars to the city's main thoroughfare.
He'll test his platform — which he calls common sense and his detractors will surely label too conservative for San Francisco — on the November ballot. Farrell, the city's 44th mayor, announced Tuesday that he wants to be its 46th one, too.
“I've watched San Francisco crumble over the last five years,” Farrell, 49, said recently over coffee at a downtown cafe. “Public safety has never been a bigger concern. The conditions of our streets have never been worse. Our local economy has collapsed. And we've become the butt of jokes across the country.
“This mayor has completely failed us.”
Maggie Muir, a political consultant for Breed, accused Farrell of spending the pandemic years at his venture capital company instead of helping the city get back on its feet.
“It's easy to run, but it's hard to lead,” Muir said. “Mayor Breed is the one who's had to make the tough decisions, leading the city through the pandemic and its aftermath, while the others were nowhere to be found.”
She said Breed's efforts were beginning to pay off — with downtown starting to come back and crime dropping.
There's no love lost between Farrell and Breed, also 49. In December 2017, when Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack, Breed became acting mayor by virtue of being the president of the Board of Supervisors.
But the majority of her colleagues, wanting to ensure that she would lack the status of the incumbent in the race to fill Lee's seat six months later, voted to make Farrell, then a supervisor representing the wealthy Pacific Heights and Marina neighborhoods, the city's short-term leader. After Breed won the race anyway, Farrell returned to his previous job at Thayer Ventures, a San Francisco company that invests in travel and transportation companies.
If Farrell is successful in ousting Breed again — this time through the action of voters, not of his fellow politicians — it will indicate that San Francisco has moved from the left to much more centrist politics. That trend already has seemed apparent after the recalls of the city's farleft school board members and its district attorney, as well as the elections of some moderate members of the Board of Supervisors.
Breed, also a political moderate by San Francisco standards, has seemed to sense the city's shifting political winds and has tacked to the right herself. She is backing one measure on the March ballot to expand police officers' access to surveillance cameras and drones. She has spearheaded another measure to require that welfare recipients suspected of drug use be screened through a questionnaire and interview process, then enter treatment if deemed necessary by a professional evaluator.
Breed has no challengers yet from her left. But Farrell's platform is the most rightward-leaning — on the narrow, very blue San Francisco political spectrum — of anyone in the race. Every serious contender, including Breed and Farrell, is a Democrat.
Farrell said the plight of San Francisco — slammed in local and national outlets regularly, many residents think unfairly — had hit home for him about a year ago. He said he had awakened one morning to find the dining room window in his home in Jordan Park, a wealthy neighborhood in the northern part of the city, shattered. Someone had entered the home while he; his wife, Liz Farrell; and their three children slept and stole his laptop. No one was caught.
Liz Farrell, who was active in the campaign to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, said she supported her husband's reentering the sometimes nasty world of San Francisco politics because she was tired of hearing so many stories from her friends and neighbors about people smashing their car windows, breaking into their homes and stealing their bicycles.
“You start to think that's how life goes, that that's how you should live, and it's not,” she said.
Mark Farrell said that if he were to be elected, he would fire the police chief, Bill Scott. He also would spare the Police Department from budget cuts and work aggressively to add hundreds of officers to the department.
He said he also would add shelter beds rather than building more permanent housing for homeless people — and require that those in tents move into shelters and seize their tents and belongings if they did not do so.
He said anyone given Narcan, the medicine that can reverse overdoses, at least two times would be detained at San Francisco General Hospital in a mandatory 72-hour hold. State law allows holds for those who pose an imminent danger to themselves or others or who are gravely disabled and unable to care for themselves, though it was not clear whether Farrell's plan would fit that definition. He said he also would create an intake center that always would be staffed and open for homeless people and those addicted to drugs.
He also called for putting cars back on Market Street, a main artery in the city; they were banned from much of it in early 2020. The idea was to turn the road into a European-style promenade, but that hasn't happened, largely because of the pandemic and lack of money.
The other major candidates in the race so far are Supervisor Ahsha Safai and Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who founded the anti-poverty nonprofit group Tipping Point Community.
On Monday, both men said Farrell's entrance into the race reflected broad dissatisfaction with Breed's management of the city.
“She has failed the city,” Safai said. “That's what this speaks to more than anything else.”