Mayor London Breed visited The Chronicle the other day to explain why she should be elected to her first four-year term. My eyes told me there was just one of her sitting at the head of the conference table, but my ears told me there were two.

On housing, Breed knew her stuff, laid out big plans and clearly explained her vision. On the devastating trifecta of homelessness, drug addiction and untreated mental illness? Not so much. She continued to stress small, incremental fixes — which were short on vision and detail — in a city that desperately needs major change.

A colleague kicked off the discussion by asking her to respond to a Chamber of Commerce poll from this year showing just 12% of respondents think the city’s quality of life is getting better.

“I appreciate the fact that 12%, at least, see a difference,” she said. “I notice a slight difference in certain areas in San Francisco.”

Want a slight difference in certain areas? Vote for me! It’s not exactly the most stirring campaign slogan.

Regardless, Breed will almost certainly be our mayor after the November election because she has no serious competition. She’s putting enormous energy into building more housing for people of all income levels, despite roadblocks from many supervisors. But while that could help alleviate our homeless crisis, it doesn’t address the full scope of our sidewalk misery.

On the development front, she’s backing a $600 million housing bond in November. The Board of Supervisors rejected her charter amendment to make affordable housing and teacher housing far easier to build, but she’s determined to try again. She and the board together back a separate ballot measure to rezone public land for teacher housing. She’s advocated for state Sen. Scott Wiener’s stalled state legislation to make it easier to build apartments near public transit, which many supervisors opposed.

Breed’s also tackling the city’s mind-bending bureaucracy in getting just about anything built. She sped up the process of permitting in-law units and cleared a backlog of more than 900. Next year, she’ll open a new permit center where the various agencies that have a hand in issuing building permits will be located under one roof. The city is taking over the long-beleaguered Housing Authority, which runs public housing projects.

Most importantly, there are 70,000 units of housing in the pipeline. Breed said she wants as many as possible opened during her tenure.

“I want to get all of them built,” she said, even though her office will be lucky to see 40,000 to 50,000 completed in the next eight years.

She clearly articulated her vision for more housing at all income levels leading to a city where all sorts of people can live — including police officers, nurses, bus drivers and, she sagely pointed out, journalists. She said the current scenario in which many middle-income people drive from the far reaches of the Bay Area to their city jobs isn’t good for congestion or the warming climate.

“We have to get more aggressive with building, period,” Breed said.

This determined, clear mayor wasn’t really there for the questions about homelessness, drug dealing, mental illness and general misery on our streets.

There were some contradictions and confusion. For example, she talked about sending Spanish-speaking outreach workers to talk to drug dealers and persuade them to accept city jobs, but said what’s really needed is a police crackdown.

She said that even the newly enacted expansion of conservatorship laws isn’t good enough, and she’s looking at how to strengthen them even more. But she couldn’t say how.

I tried to ask her why San Francisco can’t compel more mentally ill people into treatment under the current state law seeing as how a recent report from the board’s budget analyst, Harvey Rose, showed neighboring counties are doing a better job under the same limitations.

She didn’t let me finish the question before interjecting, “The Harvey Rose report? Who works for the Board of Supervisors where they don’t sometimes even do in-depth research?”

She added the data were incorrect and Rose’s office had “spun” it. It turns out the public conservatorship office within the Human Services Agency had given a bad piece of data to the state, and that prompted an inaccurate comparison to what other counties are doing. According to newer numbers, San Francisco is conserving people at a much higher rate than the state average.

Severin Campbell, a principal in Rose’s office, said they are fixing that data point but that the thrust of the report remains correct.

“There is one wrong number, but the overall picture is accurate,” Campbell said. “We stand by it.”

Regardless of the report, it’s obvious from a walk around downtown that San Francisco needs to do far more to address its mental health and drug crises. Breed recently walked away from discussions with Supervisors Matt Haney and Hillary Ronen over their Mental Health SF proposal to spend $100 million annually to reform the broken mental health care system.

Breed objected to the supervisors’ desire to include privately insured patients who can’t access mental health care. She also alluded to other differences, saying, “There’s more to it than what I’m actually willing to share.”

It sounds like the mayor will fight the passage of Mental Health SF, directed at the March 2020 ballot, like she fought Proposition C last November to tax the city’s biggest businesses a combined $300 million annually to fund services for those struggling with homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness. It is widely assumed that if she’d backed that measure, which received 61% voter approval, it would have achieved the necessary two-thirds of votes to pass. Instead, it’s tied up in court for years.

Breed didn’t present much of an alternative other than continuing in her slow, steady quest to open 1,000 shelter beds and 200 mental health treatment beds. One galling detail revealed in our conversation: Marin County was renting 10 of the 54 new mental health beds at St. Mary’s Hospital until Breed coughed up the money to take them back for city use.

Breed was also asked about the controversy over boulders purchased by residents of Clinton Park, an alley near Market Street, to block a sidewalk tent encampment that had become a haven for drugs. Her public works chief, Mohammed Nuru, said, incredibly, that the problem with the boulders was that they weren’t big enough.

Asked what she thought of bigger boulders, Breed said, “It’s important we listen to the community and come up with a solution that could work to make the quality of life better for them, and I’m definitely open to that.”

A colleague asked her if it’s fair to call her an incrementalist, and she said it wasn’t. But she added, “I don’t always talk about the big vision of what I want to see in San Francisco. ... People want change immediately, but we know that change takes time.”

To demonstrate how the mayor’s slow, methodical approach isn’t even close to keeping up with the ballooning crisis, I checked the city’s waiting list for a shelter bed again. On Monday, 1,078 people were waiting for a cot in one of the richest cities in the world. On Thursday, there were 1,131.

The 77-year-old who was No. 22 on the list on Monday had moved up to No. 19.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf