Most of San Francisco’s mayoral race has centered on five candidates: Mayor London Breed, Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, former District 2 Supervisor and caretaker mayor Mark Farrell, and Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie.
Barring a truly cataclysmic event, one of those five will win. They have the most name recognition, decades of political experience between them, sophisticated teams of campaigners, and gobs of cash. Together, the candidates or the PACs supporting them have raised $22.9 million — the other eight candidates in the race have just shy of $144,000.
But it costs only $7,020 to run for mayor, and that has brought out a cohort of underdogs, striving for votes.
Five of them got that chance on Saturday morning in the Mission, during a Latino-focused debate at Gray Area on Mission Street. The forum’s organizers, the San Francisco Latino Parity and Equity Coalition, invited all 13 declared candidates in a bid for namesake parity and equity, though they balanced that with a degree of pragmatism — while the nine candidates who accepted the offer all got a chance to speak, they were separated into two buckets: Breed, Peskin, Safaí, and Lurie first, and everyone else second. (Farrell did not respond to the invitation.)
When the underdogs took the stage a little after 11 a.m., following the first four’s hour-long session and after the news cameras and half the audience had left, they got the same set of questions from moderator Chris Iglesias, the CEO of the Oakland-based Unity Council.
Some of them understood the assignment. Others, less so.
Dylan Hirsch-Shell, an ex-Tesla engineer who has poured $105,000 of his own money into his race, started off in Spanish. “Hola, buenos días, soy de Los Ángeles, pero no hablo español,” he said — I’m from Los Angeles, but I don’t speak Spanish. “I studied it in high school but don’t really remember much.”
He then went on and secured the most conventional position of the five, albeit a utopian one. In his opening statement, Hirsch-Shell spoke about universal basic income for all San Franciscans, saying he would institute a “guaranteed minimum income of $50,000” and “universal social housing” to provide “beautiful homes for everybody of every income level, with no hoops to jump through.”
The price tag, according to his website, would be $10.2 billion — about two-thirds of the city’s current annual budget — for the universal income, paid for by a slew of tax changes. For the social housing: another $1 billion annually, paid for with government bonds.
Hirsch-Shell’s was the most ambitious proposal, and his campaign website is the most built-out of the five, featuring tidy graphics with fleshed-out plans, akin to white papers.
On the other hand, Ellen Lee Zhou, the Republican candidate, had little overarching vision. She wore a red MAGA-like hat and, among other things, attacked transgender people, spoke about instituting “militia” law, and endorsed “traditional mom, traditional dad” households. “No more transgenderism in public school,” she said, to loud boos from the room. “In fact, pull your kids out of public school.”
Zhou is a staple at mayoral events, often standing outside venues with a bullhorn in hand and surrounded by a handful of supporters, castigating the Democratic candidates as “racist” because there is no major Chinese contender.
Across several election cycles, she has run unsuccessfully for mayor. In 2019, she hosted a rally backing then-President Donald Trump’s “Build the wall!” plan — a rally attended by four. On Saturday, however, she leaned on her immigrant bona fides, frequently pointing out that she, like many in the audience, had come to the country from elsewhere.
Keith Freedman tried to do the same, though he botched an initial bond with the audience by endorsing deportations of fentanyl dealers by the end of his time.
“Like everyone in this room, we are the minorities in this race,” Freedman started off, saying he was thankful to have the opportunity to make his pitch. “I moved here as a young gay person, leaving a place that I didn’t feel comfortable being — and I think many people in the room have felt the same way.”
But later, in a question about the city’s sanctuary ordinance, Freedman criticized the “migrant drug dealers who are coming here breaking our laws,” to scattered boos and some incredulous laughs in the largely Latino audience. “We shouldn’t be protecting people who are selling drugs to our children,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what we meant by sanctuary city, to offer sanctuary to criminals.”
Several applauded loudly after he spoke, and Freedman’s position is more mainstream than many in the Mission crowd may have liked: District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Breed’s appointee, has worked with federal law enforcement on drug crackdowns that have resulted in accused dealers being deported. On Monday, public defenders rallied to protest Jenkins’ cooperation with the feds after a jury acquitted a Honduran man charged by Jenkins; the jury found he was trafficked and coerced into dealing.
On housing and rent control, several of the candidates pointed to homeownership as a means of making it work in San Francisco and seemed more interested in bringing down the cost of buying in rather than bolstering tenants rights.
“If you live or work in San Francisco and make under $200,000, the government will give you up to half a million for a down payment on a home,” said Shahram Shariati, a transportation engineer at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Shariati made use of such subsidized programs — which in San Francisco have been plagued with problems, do not provide much in the way of equity for the homeowner, and help a middling number of residents — to buy a below-market-rate unit.
Elected officials, he said, “keep talking about rent control” but should double down on homeownership programs instead. “I got a brand new condo. So this is way better than rent control.”
Nelson Mei, the fifth candidate and a Salesforce developer, was the most unassuming and inoffensive of the group. He seldom laid out specific proposals, though he did say he would “improve the public safety,” “address the homelessness issue,” and “revitalize the economy” if elected.
“I believe our city deserves more than just empty promises. Our city needs a problem-solver like me who works with real change to benefit all of you,” he said in his introductory remarks. “I’m here because I believe San Francisco really needs someone that’s outside, not a politician.”
After about an hour, the five second-tier candidates started wrapping up, repeating their platforms and emphasizing that they stood apart from the “career politicians and the billionaire moguls” on stage prior, as Shariati put it.
“What you’ll find is that the five of us, we weren’t attacking each other like the previous group of people, because we don’t have wealthy benefactors to whom we’re beholden,” said Freedman, the first to close out. “We’re all beholden to the people in this room.”
When it was Zhou’s turn, she stood up, mic in hand, and offered a prayer: “I thank Jesus mighty name in here. I ask you for protection for all the people in this room. I ask you to open heaven for San Francisco. Your name will be glorified, the family will be transformed, and people will have affordable housing, because you will help people to repent and come back to you, and I pray this in Jesus name.”
“No vaccine, no job,” she said, wrapping up and saying she was fired for failing to “agree with the lie” of the Covid-19 vaccine. “It’s illegal. It’s unconstitutional.”
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