Mayor London Breed discusses San Francisco’s woes and what lies ahead

San Francisco has been an outlier among US cities in its inability to recover from pandemic lockdowns. Nearly a third of downtown offices are vacant, the highest percentage of any major city in the country. Shops close on a weekly basis as employees, especially in the technology sector, continue to work from home. On Monday, mall owner Westfield said it was leaving the city’s largest mall, Westfield San Francisco Center.

San Francisco is also experiencing a crisis of homelessness and drug overdoses in certain downtown neighborhoods. When a Whole Foods supermarket close to city hall closed in April after more than 500 emergency calls in 13 months, many saw it as a symbol of the city’s misery.

Mayor London Breed, a lifelong San Franciscan, has spoken to The New York Times twice in the past two months, most recently on Wednesday, about the challenges facing the city. These are edited excerpts from the two interviews.

The official symbol of San Francisco, etched on the city’s flag, is a phoenix rising from the ashes. How do you breathe new life into this city?

Nobody wants to sit in the ashes. I’ve been in this city all my life and I know what it’s capable of. San Francisco reinvents itself again and again. Each time we have become a better city.

Well before the current influx of tech workers, San Francisco was known for art and culture. Do you think San Francisco will ever be affordable for artists and musicians again?

That’s a tough one. If we do our best and get rid of the bureaucracy, we might be able to build 82,000 units in the next eight years. We can’t just remain a city of people who make a lot of money and people who earn next to nothing – and the people in between are squeezed out.

This year, you sponsored legislation that would relax the city’s rules for converting offices into homes. How close is that to reality?

It passed the Supervisory Board yesterday. It seems to have widespread support. Part of what my legislation does is abolish those requirements that make absolutely no sense.

Is bloated the right word to describe the bureaucracy in San Francisco?

It sure blew up. I think that’s the biggest obstacle to the challenges we’re experiencing: bureaucracy. It tells you in five different ways why you can’t do something. Years and years of solving problems that are no longer problems.

Do you somehow feel that you are trying to challenge some principles of liberal ideology, by repealing laws that were meant to protect people, calls to arrest drug users?

I don’t know if I would attribute it to ideology alone. But it’s the mayor’s job to get things done. And no one wants to hear excuses for why you can’t.

San Francisco is a city of compassion. It’s one of the things the city is proud of. You are being called back on your calls to arrest drug users.

My perspective growing up in San Francisco is very different from the perspective of the people who have problems with my approach. I have relationships with many people who experience challenges and are addicted every day. Addiction is a complicated thing. It requires tough love. It requires strength to some degree, not tolerance.

What do you think about this idea of ​​the “doom loop” – that the city is going into a tailspin because of all the intertwined issues it faces?

They predicted that for San Francisco after the dotcom bust. They predicted it for San Francisco during the crack epidemic. You keep seeing stories over and over again. We’ve been counted down before. And there are others who have tried to suggest that because things aren’t moving as fast or the way they think they should, that things are over.

To what extent was the closure of Whole Foods on Market Street symbolic of the problems the city faces on the street—not so much serious crime as petty shoplifting and disorder?

You go to a supermarket and it shouldn’t be an eventful experience. I remember when Safeway first opened in my neighborhood when I was a kid, and they had 6 cent donuts and we loved going to the grocery store on our way to school. It has certainly changed. You now go to the store and constantly see people walking out with stuff in their hands, getting into fights with the staff. And nobody can really do anything. I know there is a certain amount of frustration that definitely comes with that. And to spend all day doing that, I can understand employees saying we’ve had enough.