Together we can realize a bold new vision for San Francisco. For too long, we’ve become accustomed to our city’s political leadership making excuses. Constantly we are told no to affordable and middle class housing, no to safe and clean streets, and no to small business.
I’m running to be an elected member of the Democratic Party to return it to a Party of Results, not excuses. We will lose legitimacy if we fail to deliver real outcomes. We must work together to achieve solutions, big and small, to improve the quality of life in the city we love. To do that, we need to innovate on new ideas, we need to collaborate with those we don’t always agree with, and we need to cut the bureaucracy and corruption that has stalled progress for so long.
Our downtown economy is struggling due to vacant office space and a reduction in office workers, which has led to a devastating lack of patronage to local businesses and a feeling that our streets are less safe. So let’s do something different: let’s convert downtown into an academic village, with a dozen university campuses, and 10,000 students permanently living here. I started the movement to bring a university to downtown San Francisco, and I will collaborate with city and state officials to pass legislation to streamline office to housing conversions that can support students and teachers to live here. Transforming our downtown into an academic village will bring patronage to the small businesses and nightlife, employ thousands of local workers, and help keep San Francisco a hub for technology, healthcare, and the arts.
To transform our downtown, or even remodel a single family home, we need to streamline our unjustifiably burdensome permitting process. As a board member of YIMBY Action, I broke the SF Chronicle story that it takes 87 permits, 1000 days, and $500,000 in fees to build in San Francisco, indicating we are the slowest city to approve new buildings in the entire state. That’s not progressive. In fact, it’s embarrassing. We must tackle government bureaucracy to build housing faster, and I will advocate for initiatives that accelerate our permitting process - from investments in technology to speed up application approvals, allowing parallel permitting and planning approvals, and the reduction of discretionary permits to effectively cut the time to build affordable housing in half.
Our city does not have a money problem in addressing homelessness. We have a bureaucracy and implementation problem. I will advocate for a Built for Zero System - a data driven public-private partnership that centralizes fragmented government departments into a coordinated effort, and has helped 14 US cities reach a level of functional zero homelessness. The system will use real-time data collection and consolidated support services delivered via Managed Care Hubs - one-stop mobile-shops that bring housing, jobs, and healthcare services to those who need them where they need them. We have the resources, it's time to deploy those resources with accountability so we can finally start to measure results and end the era of encampments.
No city can become truly vibrant if we don’t address the public safety crises on our streets. I wrote the SF Chronicle investigation that uncovered that a primary cause for the crisis is that over 20% of police and healthcare jobs are sitting vacant, with over $500 million going unspent every year because of bureaucratic systems that take 255 days to hire a single first responder. Leveraging my experience as a former software entrepreneur, I will push for legislation to fund the expansion of a Continuous Online On-Demand Testing System that has already proven to cut the time to hire to 100 days - enabling us to quickly hire the 1000 police officers, dispatchers, nurses, ambulance drivers we need to support those suffering on our streets and arrest the drug dealers who exploit them.
We must complement safe streets and dense housing with vibrant small businesses. Over 30,000 small businesses closed their doors since the pandemic, impacting immigrant and low-income workers the most. As the cofounder of 13 Fund and a Board Member of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District I have supported small businesses and their workers in the city, and believe we must continue that support by streamlining permitting and regulations that make it difficult to operate food establishments. I will advocate for legislation at both the city and state to enable us to build permanent night markets in our downtown - ushering in food stalls, vendors, and entertainment to fill our streets with joy, music, and tens of thousands of people every week. There is nothing progressive about making families - many of them immigrants - go broke or destroy their credit because they want to open a business in the city they love.
One of the biggest bottlenecks to both operating a small business or building housing in San Francisco is corruption. And one of the biggest offenders is the Department of Building Inspection (DBI) - a department that is still issuing permits to restaurants and housing developments on paper, while forcing applicants to pay bribes for expedited processing. Having worked in the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Obama Administration where we worked to streamline small business procedures, I know the path forward is at the intersection of technology and good governance. We will advocate for a complete digitization of DBI to an online permitting system to bring transparency to the process, and routine third-party audits to ensure accountability.
Cities are for people. We must activate our roads into public spaces where rapid buses and bikes can move free of traffic, where we build urban canopies to beautify the neighborhoods and reduce pollution with carbon sinks. I will advocate for the creation of a Green Mile - a contiguous slow street along Page Street from Golden Gate Park to Market. This will enable families, pedestrians, cyclists to commute safely from one end of the city to the other. And with the addition of diverters at intersections, resident and fire truck access, and bolstering of neighboring Muni services on adjacent streets, we can build an example of modern, safe, and inclusive urban design.
Building a true modern city means making San Francisco a leader in the fight against climate change. I led the Upgrade California campaign which supported legislation to decrease the cost to electrify your home, and was the largest legislative package in modern California history for building decarbonization. I will continue to advocate for making smart A/Cs more affordable and accessible so everyone can reduce harmful pollutants and emissions from their homes.
One of the biggest impediments to our city’s progress is the lack of access to technology. From our youth and students, to our immigrant residents and small business owners, our schools and government services are woefully lacking technology. As a cofounder of 13 Fund,I bridged the tech community and public sector to fund one of the first computer labs in Chinatown. Going forward, I will continue to advocate for similar initiatives to invest in our city’s students and our government services, including advocating for a SF Digital Service where tech employees can volunteer their time to give back to our city.
A modern city must be equitable and just for all to afford to live here, especially our workers. During the pandemic, as cofounder of 13 Fund I supported restaurant workers with a guaranteed income program to help workers pay rent and healthcare with a monthly stipend. We have seen rising unemployment rates for our workers, as corporate wage theft (which outweighs all other theft combined) and a lack of downtown work compound the problem. I will accordingly advocate for increased funding to city departments that investigate labor wage theft, while supporting guaranteed income, subsidized education, and affordable housing for teachers, mental health workers, and first responders so everyone can afford to pay their rent and healthcare costs in the city.