Wondering why your rent is exorbitant, you have to search for months to find a home you can afford, and homelessness is rising? It all comes down to one major issue: San Francisco is way behind on housing construction. The city needs to build 82,000 homes by 2031 to meet our Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) goal, or an average of roughly 13,000 new homes each year. Here’s how we’re doing on that goal: in 2024, San Francisco built just a little more than 1,000 homes.

The results are in. San Francisco has a new mayor, the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors has changed for the first time in recent memory, common sense has returned to the school board, our elected officials are committed to enacting commission reform, and solving the fentanyl epidemic is at the top of the city’s agenda. This edition of City Hall Digest digs into exactly what happened in an historic election.

With just two weeks to go until the November 5 election, it’s been a chaotic week in San Francisco. There are massive changes at San Francisco’s public schools, and the Dream Keeper Initiative scandal keeps getting bigger. The latest City Hall Digest digs into the latest scandal at San Francisco City Hall, and the changes in store with a new SFUSD Superintendent.

They say people don’t quit jobs, they quit bad managers. When you have a bad manager, you know it. You know it because you can’t get out of bed in the morning. You can’t speak your mind because you don’t trust you’ll be listened to. You can’t get good results because there are roadblocks in your way and no one to help clear them.

A good manager, on the other hand, can see the mechanics of their team like a doctor studying an X-Ray, collapsing inefficiencies, lightening workloads, and nipping bad dynamics in the bud. Tim Cook and Lisa Su are transformational leaders who got there by being world class operators. 

We’ve endorsed Mark Farrell for mayor because he’s a leader who is also a good manager. Our CEO Kanishka Cheng was a legislative aide to Mark when he was a supervisor—she was one of only four aides who ever worked for Mark, because unlike many other politicians, he had so little staff turnover. She remembers quarterly staff off-sites to define and measure goals. She remembers Mark actually reading department heads’ budgets and policy proposals in their entirety before meeting with them—and no, this is not common practice among all of our elected officials. She also remembers the way he valued a spirit of cooperation across the aisle.

All the candidates have big plans to fix San Francisco, but Mark is the only one talking about the factor that makes or breaks what gets done: what kind of manager they would be. Mark has said it’s important to him that his team comes to work in-person five days a week to ensure maximum clarity and cooperation: “I want to work and govern our city the right way, and that means holding every department head accountable.”

Supervisor Myrna Melgar’s time in office has been inconsistent and chaotic, as she swings between rejecting and embracing the extremes on both sides of major issues.  It’s a frustrating situation for San Francisco’s District 7 residents, who have been asking for some pretty basic things from City Hall for years, with no real results from Supervisor Melgar. An ideal supervisor is able to find solutions and build coalitions to get sh*t done. Myrna Melgar hasn’t found that balance. Her failure to remain consistently in touch with her constituents’ needs ultimately prevents us from endorsing her. 

With less than a month until Election Day, rumors are flying. Mark Farrell (our top pick for mayor), current Mayor London Breed, and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie are all vying for similar voters’ hearts. 

This is San Francisco politics, so campaign mailers and the press aren’t talking about efficacy. Instead, they’re hurling insults and playing dirty politics, forcing everyone else to follow suit or die. One of Mark Farrell’s opponents is the incumbent facing the fact that 59 percent of voters say their city is on the wrong track; the other is using more than $7 million of his own money to run a campaign that spends a significant amount against Mark. Thanks to his inherited wealth, Lurie’s campaign budget is bigger than all the other candidates’ combined and is breaking spending records in San Francisco politics.

This is not how we’d like the world to be, but here we are. And because this is where we are, we must address some of the swirling rumors, because they matter to voters—and rightfully so. Voters want to vote for a trustworthy and transparent mayor.