In a Chronicle poll this summer of more than 800 likely San Francisco voters, about one third said the most important issue in the mayoral race was crime and public safety. Housing was a strong second at 25 percent.
Violent crime is at a 60-year low in SF. Safety is an issue clouded by perception. Housing is not.
Despite losing 8 percent of its population during the pandemic, SF is as expensive as ever.
The five main mayoral candidates agree: the city needs more housing. But they differ over what kind, how much to build, and where to build it.
Mayor London Breed and Sup. Aaron Peskin have extensive records to review. The other three – former supervisor and interim mayor Mark Farrell, Levi Strauss heir and nonprofit founder Daniel Lurie, and Sup. Ahsha Safaí – have less to run on.
Based on their public statements, platforms, and more, here’s where each candidate stands on housing. We present them in alphabetical order by last name.
London Breed
Breed was Board of Supervisors president when Mayor Ed Lee died in 2017. She was elected in 2018 to serve out the rest of Lee’s term, then won reelection in 2019.
That’s nearly six years of incumbency. If she wins this race, she’ll serve until January 2029.
Breed has forcefully aligned herself with the YIMBY movement, which advocates for a lot more housing at all income levels. She declared at a 2023 YIMBY gathering that state Sen. “Scott Wiener walks on water,” while SF YIMBY has described her as the candidate of “housing abundance.”
Production: But the results of her enthusiasm have been mixed. In 2018, Breed set a target to “create at least 5,000 new units per year,” renewing a pledge originally made by Lee. From her first full year through 2023, SF didn’t hit this target. The closest was 4,850 completed homes in 2019. Overall, she has overseen production of some 19,400 new homes, about 30 percent of them below market rate.
Breed can blame the pandemic and its fallout for some of that shortfall, as workers staying home, sky-high interest rates, and a cooling tech market killed SF’s boom.
Breed has also blamed housing recalcitrance from the Board of Supervisors, who arguably exert more control over development than she does.
Breed can at least say she’s consistently promoted housing growth and density as goals during lean times and boom years.
Policy: Breed’s campaign points to her “Housing For All” plan as a model for her final term. It has four policy pillars, which the supes have already approved:
* A 2023 rule to let the city fund and start building infrastructure (think sewers) for large-scale developments like the Potrero Power Plant.
* Axing certain Planning Commission hearings for senior and group housing.
* Rolling back density limits along a few commercial streets. (Coauthored by Sup. Myrna Melgar, this is separate from the Planning Department’s citywide upzoning, still in progress.)
* Trimming fees and affordable housing requirements on certain projects.
These advances are mostly incremental improvements. Far more contentious are the major changes San Francisco must enact to have 82,000 new units, more than half of them affordable, on track by 2031 – part of state requirements (spurred in large part by Wiener) that local governments build more housing.
Punishment looms if SF doesn’t meet goals. The state has already forced the city to cut extra red tape early in the cycle.
Zoning: Breed would love to preside over a residential boom. As part of the state-mandated 82,000-home blueprint, known as the Housing Element, Breed ordered planners to revise height limits across the city. Last winter, a map emerged that was supposed to be final.
But in April, Breed revised those orders to keep heights along most corridors to eight stories, down from the 14 to 16 stories in some of those sites (or even higher). She did hedge that planners should still consider taller buildings “on our widest and busiest streets, especially those that have large parcels.”
California regulators say the new map must be in place by 2026.
Breed’s more cautious approach has coincided with the hotly contested mayoral campaign. The risks of flouting state orders for more homes are severe, but some voters still reject the idea of a taller San Francisco almost automatically. Of those 25 percent who called housing the top issue in the race, how many want a lot more, and how many are skeptical? The mayoral results will help sort that out.
Mark Farrell
Farrell, a venture capitalist, was a two-term supervisor from 2010 to 2018. He served as interim mayor for six months after Lee’s death.
Farrell’s campaign literature emphasizes that SF is way behind on state-mandated housing goals. This is correct, but there are two main arguments why this is so: Bureaucracy and red tape, and economic doldrums that make profitable development difficult to “pencil out.” They are not mutually exclusive.
Farrell’s platform posits that less red tape is what developers need as incentive to take on the economic headwinds currently blunting production.
Affordable requirements: Farrell proposes slashing taxes, fees, and the city’s “inclusionary” rules, which require a certain amount of affordable housing in every new development. The required amount moves up and down every few years. Last year, SF supervisors voted to lower it to between 12 and 16 percent, depending on the project, while Farrell is pushing for a flat 10 percent citywide.
(Here’s a deeper dive into how SF’s inclusionary system works.)
SF counts on that system to fund a big chunk of its affordable housing – 28 percent of it since 2019.
But the city is on blast to make way for more than 46,000 affordable units this decade. Farrell says his approach will create more affordable housing in the long run, thanks to sheer volume, than higher inclusionary requirements.
(Farrell’s housing platform references affordable housing only twice, compared with Peskin’s seven and Breed’s 14. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s less focused on affordable housing, but he’s not using the phrase to appeal to voters as much as other candidates.)
Policy: Farrell is also pitching a list of wonky reforms to make the city’s infamously long planning and permitting process faster and less mercurial;. Among them is “form-based density,” which means standardizing the maximum number of homes a developer can fit into a building based on its height and the lot size, then always allowing new projects to build up to that maximum.
That said, Farrell treads more carefully than Breed when it comes to density. The mayor’s Planning Department has explicitly said that richer neighborhoods – like the low-density Sunset, Richmond, and Farrell’s own Marina District – must build their fair share of new homes, especially affordable ones.
Density: Farrell has reserved his “ultra-dense” housing proposals for downtown, Mission Bay, and SoMa. His platform calls for keeping height caps in most other neighborhoods – typically four stories – with the exception of corner lots and “select transit and commercial corridors.” (In a recent debate, however, he seemed to soften his stance on neighborhood density.)
Farrell’s campaign has not clarified how his commercial corridor plan compares to the city’s current plan. In any case, Farrell has worked to distinguish himself as the most market-and-business friendly candidate, and the one most allergic to red tape around housing.
Daniel Lurie
Chair and former CEO of nonprofit Tipping Point Community and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Lurie has never held public office. He has no City Hall experience other than working for Mayor Lee to bring the Super Bowl to the Bay Area in 2016.
Experience: On housing, he regularly touts Tipping Point’s work to develop a South of Market affordable complex at a cost far lower than comparable projects. Because the project bypassed public funding, it also avoided union rules and used prefabricated “modular” construction.
Lurie has called the Bryant Street project a “blueprint for successfully building housing.” In San Francisco, an outpouring of private charitable donations and construction plan that alienates politically powerful labor unions will be a difficult blueprint to replicate.
Reform: Lurie says reform will help. To speed the cumbersome approval process, he wants to set a “shot clock”: a maximum number of days for city agencies to appraise new proposals. Lurie has not specified how long the clock would tick.
Under Breed, SF Planning and the Department of Building Inspection have pledged reforms, but most have been in place for less than two years — too early to measure tangible success.
Lurie has tried to position his political novelty as a strength by hammering on corruption in City Hall departments like Building Inspection. In 2020, the FBI indicted SF’s then-chief building inspector and the former head of Public Works, Mohammed Nuru, on suspicion of bribery and other abuses of power.
Both men’s tenures predated Breed’s administration, though they served under her for several years. Breed paid a nearly $23,000 fine in 2021 for ethics violations, some stemming from gifts from Nuru, her former boyfriend. Breed has never been implicated in any federal investigations into city departments.
Lurie is pitching voters that as an outsider, he’ll clean up City Hall and improve housing production.
Density: Other reforms Lurie proposes are already happening. He wants to “encourage the use of the state density bonus for middle-income housing” and do away with “subjective design standards” that give opponents room to fight a project even if it meets all the rules. Under new state laws, cities like SF must close these loopholes.
Lurie is calling for height limits to rise to six or eight stories along transit corridors and other busy streets, putting him in line with Breed’s current plan.
Policy: Another Lurie idea is to use statistical analysis to better predict the effects and outcomes of new zoning which could, in theory, take some guesswork, not to mention heat, out of zoning debates.
Like other candidates, Lurie wants to cut taxes and fees. He says he’ll lobby for state cuts, but he’ll also do away with local fees and taxes – with a twist. When SF meets its housing goals, those fees and taxes could come back.
Aaron Peskin
No current San Francisco politician has been shaping housing policy as long as Peskin. He first broke into politics with a successful 2000 run for District 3 supervisor focused on preserving historic buildings and neighborhood character.
Density proponents have long singled out Peskin as a housing obstructionist, which is sometimes true and sometimes not. While SF politics have shifted away from obstructionism, Peskin is campaigning on both sides of the issue.
Production: His “Housing Record Fact Sheet” boasts that Peskin has voted for “at least 115,000 new housing units” during his four board terms, including votes for large developments at the Hunters Point Shipyard, Pier 70, and Parkmerced.
His platform includes three housing production promises: a pledge to create 15,000 middle-income units, a plan to fund nearly 75,000 approved units stuck in SF’s housing “pipeline” – including some of those large projects Peskin helped pass – and a pitch to redevelop certain city-owned sites into affordable housing.
The platform also cites his bill, co-authored with Mayor Breed, that encourages conversion of downtown offices into housing, but correctly notes that it will only work for a small number of buildings.
Policy: Peskin is also the city’s most vocal champion of more rent control, which is limited to homes built before 1979. He tried to expand those limits two years ago, but The Frisc reported that he tried to bolster his bill with academic studies that, in fact, did not support his case. Peskin withdrew the effort.
He is seizing a new opportunity. Prop. 33, an attempt to kill statewide curbs on rent control, is on the upcoming ballot. Anticipating a victory, Peskin and the board have passed a rent control expansion that Breed says she’ll sign if Prop. 33 passes. It would move the cutoff date to 1994, a compromise after Peskin first proposed making nearly all SF homes subject to rent control.
Density: Peskin has also made strong appeals to anti-development and anti-density groups. During the campaign, Peskin has been a reliable presence at a series of meetings denouncing Breed’s plan to upzone low-rise neighborhoods like the Richmond, Sunset, West of Twin Peaks, and Peskin’s own backyard in the city’s northeast corner.
At a recent meeting in the Richmond, Peskin used the specter of the 1960s Fontana Towers, which loom over Ghirardelli Square, to warn that history could repeat itself.
The scuffle over Peskin’s “waterfront carveout” near his own backyard this year encapsulates his campaign’s approach to housing. It began when he teamed up with Breed in 2023 on a new law to convert vacant properties near Union Square into homes.
But the rule also allowed three projects near his home to grow taller. So he persuaded the board to exempt those blocks from his own law and overcome a mayoral veto.
Those three projects have found ways to thwart the carveout and even grow taller in some cases, but Peskin still laid down a clear marker for voters about his vision for new housing.
Ahsha Safaí
The District 11 supervisor is running a campaign of conciliation, pledging on his site that “Housing in San Francisco doesn’t have to be so divisive.”
He stresses both affordability and abundance: “We can all agree that anyone who wants to live in San Francisco should be able to afford to live here” and “in order to make that a reality, we need to build more housing.”
Safaí touts this example of his pragmatic approach: For years, Breed has sparred with Sup. Dean Preston over Preston’s Prop I, a large property sales tax hike, which voters passed in 2020.
It was meant to fund public housing but didn’t quite gain enough votes to be locked into that purpose, so Breed has put the money in the city’s general fund, sometimes refusing to spend it on housing. Safaí says he’ll break the deadlock and spend the Prop I cash on housing.
Red tape: Safaí’s soft-touch approach frames development not just as a response to a crisis or state mandates but as problem solving. Like other candidates, he calls for less red tape: a streamlined permitting process, tax cuts on development, and lower fees on ADUs – backyard or basement “granny flats,” legal in SF since 2016 but with fewer built than expected.
To cut red tape, Safaí proposes a kind of guardian angel system. A developer would be assigned a single planner to guide them through the maze. Instead of navigating through departments and their gatekeepers to gain approval and permits, “One City staff should guide every project from start to finish until the project is completely entitled,” he writes.
Density: He also wants to “maximiz[e] height and density along commercial corridors” but in the same sentence also advises “targeting six-to-eight story buildings,” which might not actually mean maximization. He also pledges to “include the voice of each neighborhood” and has concentrated much of his campaign language on encouraging greater development downtown.
Labor: A longtime union organizer, Safaí has campaigned with labor leaders and stood with them in 2020 when they criticized the modular affordable housing project that is now the centerpiece of Lurie’s housing platform.
Units for Lurie’s project were manufactured in Vallejo, shipped to SF, and assembled on site. Safaí he’d support modular homes in the future only if they used San Francisco union labor to build.
