- Title: Housing crisis and crime define San Francisco's mayoral race
- Date: 5th October 2024
- Summary: SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT - SEPTEMBER 5, 2024) (Reuters) VARIOUS OF SAN FRANCISCO MAYORAL CANDIDATE DANIEL LURIE STANDING AND SPEAKING AT NEIGHBORHOOD FORUM PEOPLE LISTENING TO LURIE SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT - OCTOBER 1, 2024) (Reuters) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DANIEL LURIE, CANDIDATE FOR SAN FRANCISCO MAYOR, SAYING: “This mayor
- Embargoed: 19th October 2024 11:00
- Keywords: Daniel Lurie London Breed SF SF politics San Francisco San Francisco mayoral race
- Location: SAN FRANCISCO AND SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- City: SAN FRANCISCO AND SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
- Country: US
- Topics: North America,Government/Politics,Elections/Voting
- Reuters ID: LVA006856101102024RP1
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: San Francisco's mayoral election this fall gives voters a chance to choose which path they trust to pull their city out of a slump, with concerns about housing and crime dominating the debate.
The northern California city has come to represent the challenges faced by many large U.S. cities that have struggled with an uneven economic recovery and rapidly rising cost of living since the pandemic.
To critics of its leadership, the city has become caught in what they call a doom loop, characterized by street homelessness and open-air drug markets. Downtown recovery has been slow, with many empty storefronts and low street traffic. Among major U.S. cities, San Francisco has the highest office vacancy rates at about 32 percent, according to March 2024 data from real estate company JLL.
Olajuwon Mitchell, 62, who’s been shining shoes in the San Francisco Financial District for 40 years, has watched his business dry up.
“Everything is sky high. And people are so unhappy here. I can just feel it from their body. And I can tell for my business too, because certain people is not going to pay a certain amount for, you know, shoe sometimes when they would do it automatically when the economy is good,” Mitchell said.
Against this backdrop, the famously liberal city has begun a political shift that embraced more moderate policies, including ballot measures passes this year that paved the way for new police surveillance technology and mandatory drug screening for recipients of city public assistance.
Observers widely expect the upcoming mayoral to reflect the growing popularity of the moderate-centrist wing of the local Democratic party, which saw gains in March elections.
Starting with early voting on Oct. 7, voters will choose from 13 candidates in an instant-runoff ranked-choice voting system. Incumbent Mayor London Breed, who has been leading the city since a 2018 special election, has four major opponents, all Democrats. Breed has won the endorsement of the San Francisco Democrats.
An August poll by the San Francisco Chronicle showed Breed in the lead followed by two moderate Democrats, former interim Mayor Mark Farrell and philanthropist and heir to the Levi’s fortune Daniel Lurie. Two progressive-left candidates, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safai, trailed.
The city's crime rates have fallen by 32% year over year, according to the San Francisco police department. Breed said the drop is partly due to measures to increase police resources and better deploy surveillance technologies.
“Using technology differently, surveillance technology, license plate readers, drones, things that we didn't have have access to. And it's allowing us to do more with less. It has been a game changer and a big reason why we are starting to see those numbers drop because people know this technology makes a difference in retail theft, it makes a difference in sideshows and all the other problems that we're running into,” Breed said in an interview.
The city’s crime and public safety have drawn much attention in international and national media, particularly among conservative voices.
Lurie said he supports the new technology measures but that those and other safety policies aren’t enough.
“This mayor lost control of our streets. There is a sense of disorder. There is a sense that you can come to San Francisco and get away with crime. And so, yes, the mayor is now throwing everything against the wall. But for this mayor, it's too little, too late,” he said.
Breed's critics have also taken aim at the slow pace of permitting and building new housing under her administration. The city is running behind on the state mandated housing goals of 82,000 new units between 2023 and 2031. Only around 500 new units were permitted by July according to the US Housing department, triggering a state law to streamline the approval process.
Breed said she wants to focus on underutilized places for new building and stresses that she wants to maintain the fabric of the city. San Francisco is famous for its colorful and quaint Victorian homes.
In a city where the median household income of the 800,000 residents is the highest across big U.S. cities, homelessness remains intractable. The latest point-in-time study showed around 8,000 people in the city are homeless, a figure some homeless advocates say undercounts the population.
Breed’s administration has been active in homeless tent sweeps since a June Supreme Court ruling declared banning encampments constitutional. Breed has said the sweeps are part of a variety of solutions, including increasing shelter capacity and busing homeless people to family or networks outside the city.
But Peskin, one of the two progressive-left candidates, said people are simply being moved from one neighborhood to another.
Lurie, who founded a nonprofit aimed at reducing homelessness, said that Breed hasn't done enough to keep people off the streets.
Lurie's "fix the city" rhetoric aligns with messaging from tech-money funded political action committees. His campaign is by far the best-funded, with contributions including $1 million from his mother and $500,000 from Jan Koum, the founder of messaging app Whatsapp.
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