San Francisco will elect a mayor in June, our fourth—or third, possibly—chief executive in a tragic-turned-tumultuous seven-month span.

There is much at stake in this, the Year of Several Mayors. There is also no point in voting. Your choice, it is false: London Breed, Jane Kim, Mark Leno—all are one and the same, without so much as “a cigarette paper’s worth of difference between [them] on the major issues,” as former Mayor Willie Brown wrote in his regular San Francisco Chronicle column.

Alert the historians, instructed Tom Ammiano, the public school teacher-turned-comedian-turned-Brown’s once-and-former nemesis, for we have the San Francisco version of bipartisan consensus.

“I just realized I agree with Willie Brown,” Ammiano told 48Hills.

Brown and Ammiano are wrong, but there is some justification for the confusion and apathy that are a regular feature of our local elections. It is true that all the candidates vying to inherit the final 18 months of the late Mayor Ed Lee’s second term, following his death from a heart attack in early December, share values in common. They are all Democrats. At dinner parties in Washington, D.C., or a lobbyists’ bash in Sacramento, they would be the immediate frontrunner for biggest liberal snowflake in the room.

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They all believe the auto break-in epidemic, with its attendant dusting of glass crunching beneath our boots like a child-unfriendly snowfall, is bad. They also all think it should be more difficult for a tenant to be evicted in this ongoing housing affordability crisis. They’ve also taken pains to show they’re pro-development. Each candidate says they support upzoning San Francisco in transit corridors—but not without some very serious qualifications—and even the furthest left among them has been quick to point out how pro-development she’s been.

These are all safe and predictable stances, standard-issue political maneuvers for anyone seeking the highest office in a city full of renters who vote, where real estate developers and the money behind them wield phenomenal temporal power.

But some electoral exegesis is necessary. The historical forces of inertia and incumbency mean June’s victor will be the favorite in November 2019 and then again in 2023. They stand a strong chance of running San Francisco for the next decade. This should not be overstated. In our strong-mayor town, the mayor calls the shots. S/he spends the money, appoints the commissions, vetoes the barely passed laws.

They will spend, appoint, and wield influence differently—and different groups of interests are betting on different candidates to win.

For context: Imagine a San Francisco run in the 1980s by George Moscone and then Harvey Milk rather than Dianne Feinstein. Imagine a San Francisco now without a Twitter tax break in 2011, or one where the swarm of Ubers and Lyfts were met with reasonable controls rather than an anarcho-capitalist shrug. Now look forward to the 2020s, when Breed, the Board of Supervisors president and once acting mayor from the Western Addition projects with Ron Conway on speed-dial, has the role instead of the Bernie Sanders-endorsed, socialist-friendly Kim.

This is why they play the games. The major candidates are different people with different styles, who would surround themselves with different people. They will spend, appoint, and wield influence differently—and different groups of interests are betting on different candidates to win.

Particularly on housing. Based on voting patterns, stances, and introduced legislation (all of which are different, Tom and Willie!), alliances, and campaign cash, we’ve assigned each major candidate an appropriate acronym: a sort of Briggs-Myers for our political moment.

For the purposes of this review, we’ll examine each candidate’s record in the following arenas:

Owning or renting. Ellis Act reform, no-fault eviction protections, right to counsel, and the like.

Free market or government controls: As in a free market versus one with rules. Rent control, vacancy controls, speculator tax, Airbnb restrictions.

Gentrifying or diversifying: Affordable housing, pulling community benefits from developers.

Building or blocking: Who never saw a construction crane they didn’t like, and who’s really worried about the character of the neighborhood if that Spanish-Med parking garage is demolished to make way for housing?

London Breed

Whether or not Conway used Ed Lee’s private family funeral to stump for Breed is immaterial: San Francisco’s classic downtown coalition of developers, building owners, and moderate unions has has chosen their candidate—and it is London Breed. Conway, at times described in terms reserved for a Rasputin, has also put his weight behind Breed, who appears best poised to continue Ed Lee’s policies rather than abandon them.

Breed is also running as the self-described “most pro-housing” candidate in the race. Building trades-developer coalitions, like the Alliance for Jobs and Affordable Growth, have been backing Breed since her 2012 election to the Board of Supervisors. Within months, in 2013, with evictions then at their highest level since the first apartment-clearing dot-com boom in the early aughts, Breed came out on the side of owning, introducing legislation that would have carved out a loophole in a 10-year moratorium on condominium conversions. It failed, but having the ability to convert a building emptied of tenants into condominiums, remember, is an enormous and sometimes irresistible incentive to evict in the first place—and has been shown to deplete the city’s nonrenewable stock of rent-controlled housing and aid gentrification.

Breed also has a sizable blind spot: Expect her hands-off approach during the yearslong standoff at Midtown Park Apartments, a former housing co-op now owned by the city, whose residents claim to be more or less abandoned by their supervisor, to be used as a cudgel.

Breed has some market-control credentials. She did co-sponsor the failed moratorium on new market-rate housing in the Mission, but did not affix her name the so-called “speculator tax” that would have put heavy levies on anyone flipping property.

Finding $2.6 million in city funds to rehab more than 170 federally funded, locally managed units of public housing was a good start, but that was in 2014; most solutions to the crisis proffered by Breed since have been market-driven.

“The housing crisis has grown visibly worse recently, but it is — at its core — the result of decades of bad housing policy in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” wrote Breed.

About that market: According to the YIMBY set’s house organ, Breed is both pro-tenant and pro-developer. Lest you think she wants to have her avocado toast and eat it too, she herself has made it clearer: She believes our affordability crisis is driven primarily by a lack of housing supply.

“The housing crisis has grown visibly worse recently, but it is — at its core — the result of decades of bad housing policy in San Francisco and the Bay Area,” wrote Breed on Medium, repeating an oft-repeated YIMBY talking point. “From 2010 to 2015, San Francisco created eight jobs for every home we built. Yes eight jobs for every home.”

Breed’s record on market controls is more mixed. She generally supports them, but not before trying to make them weaker. For example: In 2014, she cast the sixth and deciding vote to kill an early effort by now-assemblymember David Chiu to regulate Airbnb. One year later, Breed opposed Prop F, the ballot measure that would have restricted Airbnb rentals to 75 nights per year, but later introduced stricter legislation that would have limited all short-term rentals to 60 nights a year. (The ballot measure failed and Lee vetoed her legislation.)

Now-Mayor Breed has been a strong advocate for the city and her district. She's taken pro-housing stances in the past, though not as bold rhetoric as we'd like. She hasn't spearheaded powerful housing legislation, but she's generally come out on the right side on housing. — SF YIMBY (@SFyimby) December 12, 2017

She also voted for Ellis Act protections in 2014, but not before introducing amendments that would have depleted it. Breed, a lifelong renter in the Lower Haight, did vote for a package of tenant-friendly laws titled Eviction Protections 2.0 (authored by her board colleague and mayoral rival Kim).

Breed has done enough to say she’s been tenant-friendly—and who isn’t in this town?—but her preference to let the market take the wheel makes Breed the closest thing in the race to a YIMBY. But that’s boring. We dub her a SWIMBOY: “Sure, whatever, in my backyard—or yours.”

Mark Leno

Of the three main contenders, Mark Leno is the candidate furthest apart. In the apples-to-orange bromide, he is the citrus, having spent the past 14 years in the state Legislature in Sacramento—where he was extraordinarily busy. A glowing exit profile in the Los Angeles Times mentioned the 161 bills he authored in the state Capitol and his groundbreaking record on LGBT issues, but did not mention housing. That’s an error of omission on the Times’s part, as Leno consistently pushed legislation that sought to tip the scales in favor of renters. Leno pushed bills to reform the Ellis Act, and other more quotidian issues like security deposits.

“He is the only legislator in all of California who managed to make a dent in the Ellis Act,” said Deepa Varma, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union (which gave Leno and Kim a dual endorsement).

As for helping property owners, Leno was almost always in the California Apartment Association’s doghouse. The CAA did everything it could to beat back Leno bills that would have housed poor or homeless San Franciscans, including modest Section 8 reform.

Even more so than “pro-housing, pro-tenant” Breed, Leno has learned to play the middle. Leno declined to challenge Ed Lee in 2015, when Lee’s positives were in the toilet and when most mayors across the country were facing tough reelection campaigns.

Leno’s record on power over the market leans solidly toward controls. He authored the city’s very first inclusionary housing bill back in 2002, which has also had the odd effect of positioning the market as the main source of affordable housing. (In fairness, to date in America, most government funding from low-income housing has come from Congress, and of late—like, the last 30 years—Congress has decided to fund almost everything else. Like Donald Rumsfeld might have said, you help the poor with the housing you have, and in our case, we have apartment blocks that needed TLC when Ronald Reagan was still sharp-witted.)

But what about building? Or blocking? Hard to say as he hasn’t been here on the Board of Supervisors for any of the recent watershed fights.

He does appear to have pulled an early flip-flop on future construction, telling one debate-hall crowd he was for upzoning in transit corridors, which is what SB 827, an effort of his successor, state Sen. Scott Wiener, would do, before telling a progressive mayoral forum last week that he’s not down for that, at all.

. @MarkLeno is the epitome of a slick insider politician who tells everyone what they want to hear, and stands for nothing.



Not two weeks ago he told @UnitedDemClub he supported #SB827. Now with a different audience, he’s back to being anti-housing. https://t.co/Xrvc3I3je1 — scott f (@graue) February 15, 2018

So he’s lost YIMBY cred. Is this fair? Let’s hear from one of his institutional supporters:

Proud to support Mark Leno for Mayor. He has the experience & ability to work with everyone in SF. Mark will shake up City Hall to make our street safer & fight homelessness. At the same time, he will work to make room for everyone with more market rate & affordable housing. pic.twitter.com/bREFnzyu1j — Phil Ting (@PhilTing) February 18, 2018

There you have it: The middle-of-the-road shakeup. A disruptor for us all. All homes matter.

Leno’s legislative record in Sacramento is absolutely pro-tenant, but to take that message home to a city in an affordability crisis, he’s clearly willing to make moves that would see our skyline surge—to a point.

Mark Leno’s a TBOTO: this backyard, or that one—he’ll find a way to make it work.

Jane Kim

Are you ready for a candidate of contradictions? Get ready for Jane Kim, the housing-blocking progressive who’s done more to curb the power of the free market while seeing the most housing of anyone in San Francisco built in her backyard.

Figuratively a backyard, as Kim—a New York City native who’s lived in District Six high-rises—hasn’t really had one. Luckily, “balcony” also begins with b. Also fortunate, her record makes her the most pro-tenant and most pro-market-controls candidate in the race, by a country mile.

A lifetime ago, Kim’s entry into politics was via the Chinatown Community Development Corporation (CCDC), where she worked as an organizer. Tenants knocking on doors (and letting campaign workers into their SRO buildings, so that they could knock on doors) is partly why she was elected supervisor way back in 2010.

Threw together a quick 'n' dirty mapped visualization of the SF housing production data in this post by @TheFrisc. https://t.co/AWx2sNQ4LL



The real story here, of course, is that two-dimensional, flat square in the Sunset. pic.twitter.com/VKcZjitNnQ — All the City Lights (@ATCLMusic) February 2, 2018

If Kim wants to be mayor, she’ll have to get those tenants and all of their friends to vote, as the developer set isn’t her best friend: This one’s easy for renters who like a market with brakes on it; Kim supported both the speculator tax and the Mission moratorium, the effort to stop market-rate housing from getting built in the Mission District. She authored the eviction 2.0 protections that make it harder than ever for owners to throw out renters for profit.

All of that housing, approved and built in her district, can be a little misleading. Not all the new construction—seen along Market Street, Mission Bay, and South of Market—was approved during Kim’s tenure. Some of the skyscrapers filling up now are from the era prior to hers. (And not all of it is exactly, uh, good.)

“[H]er record makes her the most pro-tenant and most pro-market-controls candidate in the race, by a country mile.“

Kim has pushed for more affordable housing to be included in market-rate developments—for good and ill, depending on your perspective. Kim was the force behind Proposition C, the ballot proposition requiring 25 percent affordable housing in new neighborhoods that’s also been blamed for killing off new construction, and compelling would-be condo developers to opt for hotels instead, meaning less affordable housing. This is the trouble with a market-driven solution.

Kim’s also been the one, or among the ones, to push the envelope for more affordable housing requirements.

"Jane Kim has been with us for almost every vote. She worked w/us to write + pass Eviction Protection 2.0, which resulted in immediate drop in frivolous eviction attempts + allows tenants to add roommates to help pay rent." Thank you SF Tenants Union for your endorsement today! — Jane Kim 金貞妍 (@JaneKim) February 14, 2018

What about stopping construction? Can someone with so much construction in her district also be called a blocker? The classic SF progressive tactic regarding housing is to act as a bulwark, blocking while extracting as much concessions out of the developer as possible before the project goes forward. This has had mixed results.

Regarding @JaneKim, the $80 million sale of 30 Van Ness was voted down because she wanted a higher affordable housing percentage: https://t.co/3QIznNOOhu



Project was delayed about a year and new price was $10 million less for higher affordable https://t.co/r4zHNcGebq — Roland Li (@rolandlisf) February 18, 2018

Kim’s desire to use the state to determine the housing market’s path also extends to using the power of government to build, baby. She’s suggested that San Francisco should compel Brisbane to convert those several hundred acres of vacant land near Caltrain tracks into housing, by any legal means available.

For Jane Kim, it’s IMBYCU: “In my backyard, but it’ll cost you.”

The underdogs:

Angela Alioto

The lone candidate for mayor who’s also a character in a David Talbot book, the former Board of Supervisors president is by far the most interesting candidate.

Alioto was the only one to witness the Summer of Love firsthand. She’s the only one whose father was San Francisco’s mayor, who grounded her for going to Golden Gate Park to see Janis Joplin; and whose house was damaged by a pipe bomb that, at least remotely possibly, could have been planted by disgruntled police.

She is the only candidate to have run for the office at least two other times, she is the only one to have read Dante in Italian, and she’s the only candidate to go on record saying the devil is real and exorcism is legitimate. For these reasons, she is also the only candidate in the race described to us as “batshit crazy” by another sitting San Francisco elected official.

What a story! We could listen to Angela talk for hours. (In fact, we have, on several occasions.) But what’s all this mean for housing? Alioto has legitimate homelessness credentials, which is a mixed bag. Former mayor Gavin Newsom put her in charge of the city’s ten-year-plan on ending chronic homelessness, and—well, you see how that’s gone.

Alioto says homelessness would be her top priority, and has identified—correctly—a lack of supportive housing as the chief reason why our streets double as tent cities. As for the rest? Alioto served as supervisor from 1989 to 1997, an era so far in the rearview it may as well be the Cretaceous period. Do you know anyone who was living here, then? Ask them. Ask your parents, your sugar daddies, your 50-year-old roommates. Hear about the four-bedroom Mission District flats rented for $50, a can of Turkish coffee, and a fill-in gig playing bass in the Dead Kennedys. Oh, the backyards we all had. OTBYWAH—a paean to a bygone era. Hear them echo on the streets at night, muffled by Carl Sandburg’s fog. OH-TEE-BYE-WAH!

Amy Farah Weiss

Quick! Who was the last person to challenge Ed Lee in a political contest? If you guessed Amy Farah Weiss, who finished with 12 percent of the vote in the 2015 race Mark Leno quite possibly could have won but decided wasn’t worth running, then you probably also know Weiss’s resume includes doing more—physically more—to directly address the city’s homeless crisis than most living humans.

This also means that Weiss, the lone challenger in our review who has not held elected office, has the least in common with everyone else, and the smallest record in which she can be judged. Her local political activism began with a campaign to help block a major commercial bank’s expansion on Divisadero Street. Would she build? Would she curb the market, or let it curb all of us?

Weiss told the Bay City Beacon that she’s running as a Democratic Socialist—disclaimer: this writer is a dues-paying member of SF DSA, but the chapter has not endorsed a candidate—and socialists tend to want to control things. It’s not your backyard, it’s ours.