Where San Francisco Mayoral Candidates Stand On Issues That Matter To CRE

In the eyes of many, San Francisco’s property market plummet has reached its bottom and is on the way toward righting itself. A longed-for interest rate cut is on the horizon, with commercial real estate professionals across the country waiting for a thaw in the largely frozen capital markets.

And as the Bay Area and the rest of the country continue to chart a course forward in the new normal created by the pandemic, an election looms on the national stage as well as locally in San Francisco. The City by the Bay will cast ballots for a new mayor Nov. 5.

It’s a crucial time for commercial real estate in San Francisco and beyond. With issues like an affordable housing crisis, a still-reeling downtown and what California Gov. Gavin Newsom has called “dangerous” encampments for homeless people, this year’s mayoral candidates will have a big impact on CRE. 

Bisnow sought to interview each of the five candidates about their position on these issues. Responses follow from incumbent Mayor London Breed and challenger Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit founder and heir to the Levi Strauss clothing company. Breed responded via email while Lurie participated in a phone interview.

The remaining three candidates, Mark Farrell, Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

These responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Bisnow: The office vacancy rate has hovered above 30% for the past six months. What would you do to help landlords fill their office buildings?

Mayor London Breed: I have a vision for Downtown’s future – a multi-use, vibrant, 24/7 downtown – and my administration is making it happen. This work includes:

• Attracting new businesses by offering tax breaks for small business, retail, hospitality, and removing disincentives for locally based businesses.
• New leases are being signed, led by artificial intelligence, which alone is projected to add 12M SF of office by 2030.
• Filling empty storefronts through my Vacant to Vibrant program, eliminating fees, offering free rent and other incentives, and changing laws to remove barriers to opening a small business.
• Cleaning crews/ambassadors to work alongside public safety officers.
• My 30x30 initiative to bring 30K more residents and students downtown by 2030. 

Daniel Lurie: People and businesses alike are not coming back downtown until our streets are safe and clean. That's why public safety is my No. 1 priority. We need a fully staffed police department, sheriff's department and dispatcher’s office. 

So, we do the basics: We clean up the streets, we make people feel safe and then we look to guidance from my city hall accountability plan. 

Then, we address certainty in permitting so that people can move into spaces quickly and get fast approvals. We need to reform conditional-use permits to allow more conferences and experiences downtown. 

Also, we need to turn downtown into a 24/7 neighborhood by boosting office-to-residential conversions through property tax relief that we just passed. 

We’re going to have a climate innovation hub. We have 22 Salesforce towers worth of empty office space. I want to marry that with our amazing companies: Anthropic, Open AI, Google, Meta and great research institutions around AI. I want to combine all those forces and make sure San Francisco is the leader in tackling the climate crisis.

We're leaking out investments to New York and to other cities. We should have that tax revenue here, and those jobs here.

Bisnow: What are your plans to create more affordable housing?

Breed: Simply put, we need to build, build, build.

With my Housing for All plan, San Francisco can be a city for ALL: seniors, middle-income families, renters, young people who grew up here, young people who want to move here, and everyone in between.

The City’s inability or unwillingness to build enough homes for the past several decades has fueled so many of the problems we face: outrageous rents and home prices; homelessness; our shortage of police officers, teachers, and Muni drivers; climate change; and families leaving the city for more affordable places to live.

I’ve been working to ensure San Francisco builds the housing we need. And as I’ve stated publicly, as Mayor I will veto any piece of anti-housing legislation that comes across my desk.

Lurie: Currently, it takes over 1,100 days to build housing from the time you submit a permit to the time it gets approved. It's the longest in the state, and that’s why it costs so much to get housing built. 

SB 423 shortens the time period, but we have to get housing built.

I want to see housing built at all income levels, especially affordable and workforce. It has to happen throughout the city along commercial corridors. There are some great examples, like what's happening at Stonestown, where we have the community, the neighborhood, labor and local businesses coming together to get things built. 

Bisnow: How do you intend to curtail crime, homelessness and encampments across the city?

Breed: We are bringing on new officers with a focus on creating a more diverse and professionalized workforce, keeping the officers we have trained so we don’t lose their expertise to other jurisdictions, adding more non-sworn employees to free up officers to do the work they are uniquely trained and needed for, and creating policing alternatives with our Ambassadors.

There will be consequences for those who break the law. Yes, San Francisco is a City that believes in and offers second chances, but it is also a city of accountability.

There is still a lot of work to do, including building back police staffing, implementing policies that support officers being out on the streets and giving them the technological tools to do their jobs. 

Here’s how I plan to address homelessness:

• Continue to add shelter and homeless housing capacity.
• Add more housing.
• Add treatment through SB1 and mandate conservatorship, as well as more street outreach to bring people indoors.
• Continue aggressive outreach and enforcement.

Lurie: My shelter plan addresses these concerns.

We have a mental health and drug crisis. Public safety is my number one issue. You can't just be for public safety during the election year. And that's what we're seeing, frankly, from this mayor and the last one.

Until this past year, there were two arrests per day citywide around drug dealing. That's been stepped up because it's an election year, so I have a plan to go after drug dealers. 

And two, we have a six-point plan on how we're going to go after the demand side. We are going to have a co-responder model where we have trained for conditions out on the street dealing with those that are in the throes of a mental health crisis so that police officers can take a step back, because a police officer with a badge and gun doesn’t need to be the first interaction on the street. 

I've talked often about how we need to build more mental health and drug treatment beds. Right now we have this narrative that we have to hold these people accountable that are doing drugs.

We also have to hold the systems accountable that have failed. Right now, when you're seeking treatment, 50% of the time you're turned away. So now we're getting tough on people using drugs, but there's no place to put them.

Still, we are spending $700M a year on our behavioral health system, so let's make sure that we build the needed beds and get trained clinicians to staff those beds.  

I have a robust mental health and drug crisis plan that’s compassionate, and it makes the promise of treatment on demand a reality.