Will San Francisco voters choose a different kind of mayor?

Famously liberal San Francisco is irritable these days.

Poll after poll shows that residents lack confidence in the future of their city and do not support their leader, Mayor London Breed. They lament that their downtowns are not returning as quickly as other cities' cores after the pandemic, that drug overdose rates continue to rise and that property crime remains a persistent problem.

But what's not so clear is what kind of mayor they want to fix what's broken.

Mark Farrell, a venture capitalist who served as interim mayor for six months in 2018, believes he has the answer: a tough style of governance that would “massively” increase the ranks of police, clear all homeless encampments, lock up drug overdose victims who surviving and returning cars to the city's main road.

He will test his platform — which he calls common sense and his opponents will no doubt call too conservative for San Francisco — on the November ballot. Mr. Farrell, the city's 44th mayor, plans to announce Tuesday that he also wants to become its 46th mayor.

“I've watched San Francisco crumble over the last five years,” Farrell, 49, said recently over coffee at a downtown cafe. “Public safety has never been such a big issue. Conditions in our streets have never been worse. Our local economy has collapsed. And we've become the butt of jokes across the country.

“This mayor has completely let us down.”

Maggie Muir, a political adviser to Ms. Breed, accused Mr. Farrell of spending the pandemic years at his venture capital firm instead of helping the city get back on its feet.

“It's easy to run, but it's hard to lead,” Ms. Muir said. “Mayor Breed is the one who had to make the tough decisions and lead the city through the pandemic and its aftermath, while the others were nowhere to be seen.”

She said Ms. Breed's efforts were beginning to pay off: downtown began to come back and crime dropped.

There is no love lost between Mr. Farrell and Ms. Breed, also 49. In December 2017, when Mayor Ed Lee died of a heart attack, Ms. Breed became acting mayor as she chaired the Board of Supervisors.

But the majority of her colleagues, wanting to ensure that six months later she would not have the status of the incumbent president in the race to fill Mr. Lee's seat, voted to appoint Mr. Farrell as a supervisor overseeing wealthy neighborhoods Pacific Heights and Marina represented. , the city's short-term leader. After Ms. Breed won the race, Mr. Farrell returned to his previous job at Thayer Ventures, a San Francisco company that invests in travel and transportation companies.

If Mr. Farrell succeeds in ousting Ms. Breed again — this time through the action of voters, not that of his fellow politicians — it will indicate that San Francisco has moved from the left to much more centrist politics. That trend already seemed clear following the recall of far-left members of the school board and the city's district attorney, as well as the elections of several moderate members of the Board of Supervisors.

Ms. Breed, also a political moderate by San Francisco standards, seemed to sense the city's shifting political winds and has herself tacked to the right. She supports measures on the March ballot to expand police officers' access to surveillance cameras and drones and to require welfare recipients to be tested for drug use and to enter treatment if they test positive.

Ms. Breed has no challengers from her left yet. But Mr. Farrell's position is the furthest to the right — on San Francisco's narrow, very blue political spectrum — of anyone in the race. Every serious candidate, including Ms. Breed and Mr. Farrell, is a Democrat.

Mr. Farrell said San Francisco's plight — which is regularly criticized in local and national media, many residents wrongly believe — became clear to him about a year ago. He said he woke up one morning to find the dining room window in his home in Jordan Park, a wealthy neighborhood in the city's north, broken. Someone had entered the house while he, his wife, Liz Farrell, and their three children were sleeping and stole his laptop. The thief was never caught.

Mrs. Farrell, who was active in the campaign to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, said she supported her husband's return to the sometimes nasty world of San Francisco politics because she was tired of hearing so many stories from her friends and neighbors hear about people destroying things. their car windows, break into their houses and steal their bicycles.

“You start thinking that this is how life goes, that this is how you should live, and it's not,” she said.

Mr. Farrell said if elected he would fire the police chief, Bill Scott. He would also cut funding for the police department and work aggressively to add hundreds of officers to the department.

He said he would also add shelter beds instead of building more permanent housing for the homeless — and would require those in tents to move to shelters and confiscate their tents and belongings if they didn't.

He said anyone who receives Narcan, the drug that can reverse overdoses, is held at San Francisco General Hospital at least twice in a mandatory 72-hour waiting period. State law allows people who pose an immediate danger to themselves or others, or who are severely disabled and unable to care for themselves, to participate, although it is not clear whether Mr. Farrell's plan would meet that definition. He said he would also set up a recording center that would be staffed at all times and open to homeless people and people addicted to drugs.

He also called for cars to be reinstated on Market Street, a main artery of the city; in early 2020 they were banned for much of it. The idea was to turn the road into a European-style promenade, but that didn't happen, largely due to the pandemic and lack of funds.

The other leading candidates in the race so far are Supervisor Ahsha Safai and Daniel Lurie, heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point Community.

On Monday, both men said Mr. Farrell's entry into the race reflected widespread dissatisfaction with Ms. Breed's management of the city.

“She has failed the city,” Mr. Safai said. “That's what this speaks to more than anything.”