San Francisco has been an outlier among American cities in its inability to rebound from pandemic lockdowns. Nearly a third of offices downtown are vacant, the highest share of any major city in the country. Stores are closing every week as employees, especially in the technology sector, continue to work from home. On Monday, the mall owner Westfield said it was abandoning the city’s largest downtown shopping mall, Westfield San Francisco Centre.
San Francisco is also dealing with a crisis of homelessness and drug overdoses in certain downtown neighborhoods. When a Whole Foods supermarket not far from City Hall closed in April after making more than 500 emergency calls over 13 months, many saw it as a symbol of the city’s woes.
Mayor London Breed, a lifelong San Franciscan, has spoken with The New York Times twice in the past two months, most recently on Wednesday, about the challenges that the city faces. 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 revive this city?
No one wants to be in the ashes. I’ve been in this city my whole life and I know what it’s capable of. Time and time again, San Francisco reinvents itself. Every single time we have emerged 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 again to artists and musicians?
That’s a hard one. If we get out of our own way and get rid of bureaucracy and we are able in the next eight years to build 82,000 units, maybe. We can’t just continue being a city of those who are making a lot of money and those who are hardly making anything — and the people in between getting squeezed out.
This year, you sponsored legislation that would relax the city’s regulations for converting offices into residences. How close is that to reality?
It just passed the Board of Supervisors yesterday. It appears to have broad support. Part of what my legislation is doing is getting rid of those requirements which make absolutely no sense.
Is bloated the right word to describe the San Francisco bureaucracy?
It is definitely bloated. I think that’s the biggest obstacle to the challenges we experience — bureaucracy. It’s telling you five different ways why you can’t do something. Years and years of solving for issues that aren’t issues anymore.
Do you feel in some ways that you are trying to challenge some of the tenets of liberal ideology, repealing laws that were meant to protect people, calling for drug users to be arrested?
I don’t know if I would attribute it just to ideology. But the job of mayor is to get things done. And no one wants to hear excuses why you can’t.
San Francisco is a city of compassion. It’s one of the things the city is proud of. You are receiving pushback to your calls to arrest drug users.
My perspective growing up in San Francisco is a lot different than the perspective of the people who have problems with my approach. I have relationships with a lot of the people who are experiencing challenges every day and suffering with addiction. Addiction is a complicated thing. It requires tough love. It requires force to a certain extent, not tolerance.
What do you make of this idea of the “doom loop” — that the city will spiral downward because of all the interwoven problems that it is facing?
They forecast that for San Francisco after the dot-com bust. They forecast it for San Francisco during the crack epidemic. You continue to see stories time and time again. We’ve been counted out before. And there have been others who have tried to imply, because things aren’t happening as fast or the way that they think it should happen, that things are over.
How much was the closure of Whole Foods on Market Street a symbol of the problems that the city is facing on its streets — not serious crimes as much as grinding low-level shoplifting and nuisances?
You go to a grocery store, 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 doughnuts and we were happy to go into the grocery store on our way to school. It’s definitely changed. You go to the store now and see people constantly walking out with items in their hands, getting into altercations with staff. And no one’s able to really do anything. There’s a level of frustration I know that definitely comes with that. And to deal with that all day, I can understand that employees would say we’ve had enough.