by Christin Evans
From October 7 through November 5, polls in San Francisco will be open for voting. When the ballots are tallied, Mayor London Breed might be out of a job. There are several candidates—including the incumbent and four major challengers—vying for the Mayor’s office and to run City Hall. Each lists plans to address homelessness on their website. Here are the “solutions” to homelessness they’ve promised to deliver—notably, there’s a lot of talk about shelter beds, and not much about affordable housing.
Aaron Peskin (aaron2024.com) says he’ll add 2,000 shelter beds and will aim to end student and child homelessness. He’s also promising a policy of treatment, not arrests, for drug users. Peskin wants to use state money from Proposition 1 to open new treatment beds regionally. He also is promising to make loans to affordable housing developers to speed up the new acquisition of affordable housing.
Ahsha Safaí (ahshaformayor.com) also promises to add a total of 2,600 shelter beds including 1,000 hotel rooms, 600 tiny homes, 500 safe parking spots and 500 private rooms for families. He also wants to change the way people are counted on the street so that as specific areas are swept, that people are counted and tracked as the City makes contact with each person.
Daniel Lurie (daniellurie.com), who previously ran Tipping Point Community, a nonprofit that built new housing for homeless folks, says that he will also focus first on adding shelter beds. His commitment is to add 1,500 more shelter beds. He also says he’ll add treatment beds, though he didn’t specify how many.
London Breed (londonformayor.com), for her part, says the City is on track to exceed her original goal to add more than 1,000 shelter beds and that she still plans to add close to 400 more beds by the end of June 2025. She has also announced that she wants to implement a citywide overnight parking ban for RVs and other large vehicles. She says she will continue forward with the more aggressive sweeps she started in late July, which has included arrests for illegal lodging and sit/lie among other infractions generally only applied to people without a home.
Mark Farrell (markfarrell.com) is the only candidate who makes no commitment to open new shelter beds on his website. He says he’d open a 24/7 intake center, enforce a tent ban, and focus on abstinence-based and recovery-based programs.
