In tough reelection, Breed says she's still what San Francisco needs

By Hannah WileyStaff Writer

Oct. 21, 2024 3 AM PT

SAN FRANCISCO — If there’s anything Mayor London Breed has learned in office, it’s that compassion has its limits.

So when she talks about her steady tack right in recent years on issues such as retail crime and homelessness, she’s direct and unapologetic. Sitting at the helm of one of America’s most celebrated cities and trying to keep that city on course, she said, has opened her eyes to some hard truths. Among them: That without guardrails, there are people who will take advantage of San Francisco’s generous spirit and behave in ways that drag the city down.

“We’ve gone too far in just letting people get away with things,” Breed said. “And as a result, people have been getting away with things.”

Breed, 50, made history six years ago when she became the city’s first Black female mayor. She was president of the powerful Board of Supervisors when then-Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack in December 2017. She won a special election to fill his seat the following June and was elected to a full term in 2019.

She’s now fighting to keep her seat in November against four other high-profile Democrats, three of them wealthy white men. This time, her greatest political threat isn’t coming from the left. Instead, the challengers with the most traction are two fellow moderates who’ve criticized Breed for not doing enough to rid the city of the tent encampments and open drug dealing pervasive in certain neighborhoods or to speed its recovery from the economic malaise still lingering from pandemic-related shutdowns.

Breed reflected on her tenure during a lengthy sit-down interview with The Times last month outside a café at the Transamerica Pyramid. The iconic building reopened in September after an extensive renovation that some see as as a symbol of downtown’s nascent comeback.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, left, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass laugh together at a San Francisco coffee house.

Breed has never been a bleeding-heart progressive, despite San Francisco’s liberal reputation. But the Breed of six years ago was more open to experimenting with a progressive reformist agenda when it came to solving intractable issues such as addiction and poverty. That included promoting “safe injection” sites — essentially sanctioned, supervised illicit drug use — to counter the staggering toll fentanyl was taking on the city’s homeless population, and encouraging police to form better relationships with residents in marginalized communities.

In the last two years, by contrast, she has become a leading voice in a statewide movement to crack down on homeless people and addicts who refuse shelter or treatment. And she successfully championed two local ballot measures that bolster police surveillance powers and require drug screening and treatment for people receiving county welfare benefits who are suspected of drug use.

Although some people dismiss her policy shifts as a calculated political ploy, Breed said her decisions are about personal growth, fueled by what she sees as a lack of accountability that has allowed social problems to fester.

“San Francisco has never abandoned its values of compassion and second chances,” said Breed, wearing one of her signature suits, this one a bold cerulean blue. “But I think that before the pandemic, we were headed in a direction with criminal justice reform, police reforms, and it went too far. And when I say it went too far, if you commit a crime, you have to be held accountable somehow.”

Born into poverty in the Western Addition, at the time one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods, Breed doesn’t shy from political combat. She was raised by her grandmother, lost a sister to a drug overdose and has a brother who is serving time in prison for robbery and other charges. Throughout her career, she has fought and won against critics who doubted her.

“London will fight back. She’ll snap. She’ll show you she’s from Plaza East projects,” said James Taylor, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco and author of “Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama.”

“She’ll go street on you in a second. That’s why the men who are running against her have to be careful.”

Mayor London Breed laughs as she addresses the annual Women In Construction Expo in San Francisco.

Breed’s evolution started with the COVID pandemic.

She was celebrated, initially, for her decisive response when she became the nation’s first big city mayor to declare a coronavirus state of emergency, followed soon after by a citywide lockdown. The move is credited with saving thousands of lives and keeping San Francisco’s death rate relatively low.

But a year later, she was on the defensive.

The combination of remote office work and prolonged restaurant and bar closures decimated downtown street life. And parents fumed as city schools remained closed for months longer than public schools in most districts in the nation.

Homeless tents line a littered street in San Francisco.

Sprawling homeless encampments took root in portions of the city once lively with workers and tourists, spilling trash and needles onto the sidewalks. People overdosed in the streets, unattended. Videos of smash-and-grab retail crimes and auto theft went viral, giving ample opportunity for right-wing media pundits to use San Francisco as an urgent warning against electing Democrats.

“People were at home. They couldn’t travel. They couldn’t go on vacation. Their kids were with them all the time. The issues around government and government functioning, that was a real pain point,” said Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party. “Things were broken, and you knew it.”

Breed said she grew tired of seeing videos of people flagrantly grabbing merchandise from Walgreens and Louis Vuitton, as if it were their right, and of hearing from police that they didn’t have the tools they needed to fight crime. She was sick of battling supervisors and community activists who disparaged her tactics as inhumane and short-sighted when she called for giving police more authority to disperse homeless people and arrest drug users.

Her frustrations erupted in 2021, when during a news conference to announce a crackdown on crime in the drug-infested Tenderloin, Breed proclaimed it was time to be “less tolerant of all the bulls— that has destroyed our city.”

During her sit-down with The Times, Breed said her decision to declare a state of emergency in the Tenderloin stemmed from a visit a week earlier with families and local business owners. One mom told Breed how hard it was to raise her son in the neighborhood. Business owners shared their struggles running their shops amid break-ins and other crime.

“My heart broke,” Breed recalled. “They were tired of living like that. And, more importantly, they were hoping that we could help.”

Her emergency declaration enabled the city to cut through bureaucratic red tape to more quickly move people off the streets and into shelter and services. Separately, she pledged to assign more officers to the neighborhood.

Breed also took her grievances to voters.

In June 2022, voters ousted progressive Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin over frustrations that he was focused more on sentencing reform and addressing the root causes of crime than on actually prosecuting criminals.

Chesa Boudin and his wife wave to news cameras while walking together

Breed didn’t endorse the recall, but she and Boudin had traded barbs in the press over who was to blame for rising crime. After the recall, Breed appointed Brooke Jenkins, a more traditional law-and-order prosecutor who had quit Boudin’s office and worked on the campaign to remove her former boss from office. Five months later, Jenkins was elected to fill the rest of Boudin’s term.

Breed continued her crusade to push San Francisco toward the political center last spring, when voters approved the ballot measures she sponsored to bolster police powers and increase oversight of people receiving county benefits. During the summer, she applauded a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed cities to more aggressively enforce laws against homeless people camping on public property. On the heels of the decision, she has launched an aggressive effort to clear tent encampments, leading to hundreds of arrests.

“Like a good politician, perhaps her best fuel this last year or two has been reading where the electorate is at,” said Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University. “Voters have become fed up with this. There’s just no patience for a more systemic, root-cause kind of approach.”

The question before voters is whether they see Breed’s efforts as too little, too late.

“There’s no mayor that has overseen a steeper decline in our city’s history than London Breed,” said challenger Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist and former supervisor and interim mayor who is running a formidable campaign to replace Breed in November.

“She had her chance. It is time to turn the page on this mayor and all of the City Hall insiders,” said challenger Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit executive and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, who is also considered a front-runner.

Like Breed, both Lurie and Farrell are moderate Democrats by San Francisco standards. And like Breed, they say they want to clear out tent encampments and end rampant drug dealing in the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods. They’ve focused their pitch to voters on revitalizing the economy and reviving downtown.

Both blame Breed for the city’s continued struggles, and they argue she is undeserving of another four years in office.

Voting for Breed, Lurie said in a recent interview, would be like “getting onto a plane with a pilot that you know has crashed the plane over and over again.”

Breed’s supporters stand by her, hailing her as a homegrown champion who has led the city during a period of crisis that included a global pandemic and the insidious rise of fentanyl.

“They’re just going to blame everything on her, because she’s the mayor, and they are going to take whacks on her day and night,” state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) said. “I am 100% confident none of them would have done better than London Breed on these massive issues that go well beyond San Francisco.”

Sen. Scott Wiener poses in the Castro district of San Francisco.

Wiener disagrees with Breed on some of her criminal justice policies, but said she’s the only candidate who will prioritize the construction of thousands of homes in a city desperate for affordable housing.

“She sees the big picture on housing,” Wiener said. “And she’s willing to spend political capital and take heat and take risks.”

Breed also has the support of the San Francisco Democratic Party, whose leader, Tung, recalled another time when Breed took a bold risk: shutting down the city during the pandemic.

“She kept our city safe,” Tung said. “She got people vaccinated.”

Speaking to the Noe Valley Democratic Club at a neighborhood pub last month, Breed listened as members shared their frustrations. One man asked why they should vote for Breed given the city’s problems. Another complained that police didn’t do anything after his home was burglarized.

Breed listened intently as they detailed their grievances. And in her responses, she was candid about mistakes.

“After the pandemic, it’s like, man, crime was out of control,” she said. “I’ll be very honest, we weren’t prepared.”

San Francisco Mayor London Breed listens during a briefing outside City Hall.

She touted her efforts to forge change, and smiled as she talked about enlivening downtown with night markets and music festivals on the waterfront.

As a result, Breed said, crime is receding. Homicides are down 40% compared with last year, according to the Police Department’s crime dashboard, and robberies have fallen 23%. This month, Breed announced 60% fewer tents across the city.

For those who want to see a better day in San Francisco, Breed said, “I am the change.”

The city’s ranked-choice voting system — which allows voters to choose several candidates and rank them in order of preference — makes it difficult to call out a clear leader in the mayoral race. Recent polls show Breed with a slight — but not decisive — advantage.

Still, Breed doesn’t give up easily. She said she’d like to be known as the mayor who guided San Francisco “through unprecedented crisis after crisis” and got the city “out to the other side.”

She is convinced she can get there. She just wants another four years.