San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Newest supe takes pragmatic approach
San Francisco has always been a place where newcomers arrive in search of something. A job, acceptance, the excitement of a big city. When Rafael Mandelman arrived here, he was just 11 years old. And he was searching for someone to raise him.
His father had left when he was just a toddler. His mother suffered severe mental health issues and was a “sad, sad character,” Mandelman said, incapable of raising her son.
Thirty-three years later, Mandelman is headed to City Hall as the newest member of the Board of Supervisors, after trouncing Supervisor Jeff Sheehy in Tuesday’s election. He’s determined to make real change in the lives of all those sad, sad characters we see on our sidewalks — the people who remind him of his mother.
“I heard from people throughout the district and throughout the city about their incredible anguish and consternation about the mentally
ill and drug-addicted folks in our public spaces,” said Mandelman, a 44-year-old urban landuse attorney who will represent District Eight — the Castro, Noe Valley, Glen Park and Diamond Heights neighborhoods. “I think it’s a colossal municipal shame.”
Also a colossal municipal shame? That in a city with a new budget of $11 billion, our leaders have lamented the problem for years without doing much about it.
For too long, too many of our politicians have talked about the city’s homeless problem, the mentally ill people we leave to wither on our sidewalks and the openair injection drug use we blithely accept. They’ve complained about the problems and complained about proposed solutions without offering anything better.
San Francisco’s political labels — progressive and moderate — aren’t particularly useful anymore. Instead, we now have two camps: the talkers and the doers. And they don’t break down along political lines. Unfortunately, the doer camp is smaller, but it seems about to grow by one.
“I really want to do something, and if it takes someone who has a little bit of credibility with the progressive community to try to make the case for this, I’m happy to be the person who does that,” Mandelman said.
Former state Sen. Mark Leno, who is waiting like the rest of us to find out whether he’ll be our next mayor as the vote counting drags on, has been a close friend of Mandelman’s for years. He called Mandelman a “rare leader” who isn’t worried about political labels as much as getting work done.
“With regards to those terms of ‘moderate’ and ‘progressive,’ I don’t know that they’re sufficient,” Leno said. “I like to use the word ‘effective.’ What is going to get the job done?”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen, another Mandelman supporter and someone I’d put in the doer camp, said she won’t always agree with the new supervisor but believes he’ll be key in tackling the city’s street misery.
“If we get a group of can-do people together, we can solve this,” she said. “And Rafael is one of those can-do people.”
Our street crisis needs a response that combines humanity and common sense. Mandelman developed both during his unhappy childhood.
His mother, Ellen Mandelman, met his father, Moshe Mandelman, when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley. They married and had Rafael, but divorced by the time he was 3.
Moshe Mandelman grew up in Poland and survived the Holocaust by hiding in attics and basements. He moved to the United States in the 1950s and became somewhat of a free spirit, living all over the world after divorcing his wife. He currently splits his time between Hawaii and Thailand.
Mandelman lived with his mother in a little rental house in Laguna Beach. She never worked, and other relatives paid her $500 monthly rent. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder and borderline personality disorder. She suffered psychotic episodes.
“She was on every pharmaceutical concoction known to man,” Mandelman said. “I remember lots of her crying and spending days in bed.”
By the time he was 9, Mandelman often had to walk into town to find food. By the time he was 10, his mom was in and out of the hospital regularly. Then Mandelman was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, on top of the asthma he already had. He stayed sometimes with his halfbrother, who his mother had 14 years before Rafael. Together, Mandelman and his relatives
“If we get a group of can-do people together, we can solve this. And Rafael is one of those can-do people.”
Supervisor Hillary Ronen
decided when he was 11 he should try living with his paternal grandmother in San Francisco.
But she was too elderly to care for a young boy. He lived for a while with the mother of a classmate at his school, Brandeis Hillel Day School, then a foster family, and finally, his English teacher at LickWilmerding High School. She and her husband took him in until he was, remarkably, accepted at Yale.
By that point, his mother was homeless and living in a shelter. Her son went on to Harvard and UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall Law School. Asked how he attended a series of such impressive schools from middle school through law school despite his rough upbringing, Mandelman explained that he was a “studious little kid” who also benefited from “getting a lot of support from people who stepped up” including classmates’ families and school staff.
“I did well enough on the tests, and frankly, the story was one that colleges were interested in,” he said. Mandelman ran for supervisor in 2010, but lost to now-state Sen. Scott Wiener. He has long served on the City College Board of Trustees and is credited with helping save the school from losing its accreditation a few years ago.
He has long been a committed member of the city’s progressive wing, but he doesn’t particularly sound like it when he talks about solutions to the city’s street misery. He sounds middle-of-the-road — by San Francisco standards anyway — and downright practical.
He supports Wiener’s proposal to strengthen the state’s conservatorship program for the mentally ill and give counties more control over their own approaches. Mandelman also supports more psych beds and more subacute treatment facilities for people well enough to leave psychiatric wards but who need additional care.
He works the door once a month at a church breakfast program for the poor and said that a few months ago, a man approached, “ripping his clothes off, screaming and making a ton of noise.” He called the police, who calmed the man down and let him go on his way.
“I’m sure within an hour, he was back up at it again losing his mind,” Mandelman said, adding that in these cases, the city needs to insist that the person stay in a sobering center until he has come down from whatever he was on or receive mental health treatment.
He wants to build far more affordable housing. He was tepidly supportive of Mayor Mark Farrell’s clearing of tent camps in the Mission District, saying that if people refuse help again and again, it’s fair to insist they move along. And asked whether the city should continue to allow blatant injection drug use on our sidewalks, Mandelman laughed.
“No! No!” he replied. “We should have safe injection sites, but it is not tolerable to have the norm of open-air injection drug use.” He supports more drug treatment services, as well as more police foot patrols to order drug users to, in his words, “knock it off ” and issue citations if need be.
Ten years ago, he paid for his mother to move to San Francisco to live at the Jewish Home for the Aged, an assistedliving facility. He visited her regularly until she died last year. Her ashes sit in a box in his closet.
He won’t be sworn in until July. In the meantime, he hopes to take some naps and clean his home, which has suffered from lack of attention during the grueling campaign.
And then it’s time to work. Mandelman can’t wait.