Mark Farrell’s pitch to voters? ‘Common sense.’

Three times within an hour, San Francisco mayoral hopeful Mark Farrell called on voters to use “common sense” to decide on their stance on city issues. 

“San Francisco is moving away from just being ideological, this left and right, progressive and moderate,” Farrell said last night, to a sold-out crowd at Manny’s cafe in conversation with Mission Local’s managing editor, Joe Eskenazi. “Let’s just have common sense again.”

Farrell, like Daniel Lurie and Ahsha Safaí in earlier conversations, expressed his frustration with the city’s status quo, and strived to differentiate himself from the rest of the field, stacked with candidates who will be making their appeals to the same set of moderate voters. In particular, he proposed to remove all large homeless encampments in six months, wean downtown San Francisco off of its dependence on the tech industry, increase police staffing levels and open 24/7 clinics for drug users. 

But, like others, he contrasted the San Francisco of today with earlier, better times. In the old days, if you told someone you were from San Francisco, said the 50-year-old San Francisco native, “It was met with a sense of awe, a sense of wonderment, even envy. And today you get, ‘Are you okay?’”

As he sees it, San Francisco’s public safety, street conditions and economy have never been worse. And that’s mostly due to a “plain and simply failed leadership,” said Farrell. San Francisco used to have more than 2,300 police officers when Ed Lee was the mayor and Farrell was a supervisor, he said. The same number now stands at 1,857, according to the police department. Farrell mentioned former District Attorney Chesa Boudin for demoralizing the police department. 

“Since I left office, our population has declined,”  he said. “So inherently, crime should decline because of that on its face.”

The crime rate, however, did decline. San Francisco saw fewer cases of both property crimes and violent crimes in 2023 than 2018, the year Farrell left office. 

“We need to have law enforcement in San Francisco, just on principle, to create a civil society, to make sure there is deterrent,” he said. “In San Francisco, at times in the past, that has been foreign. But I think it’s just common sense that needs to be brought back.”

Farrell argued that his 7.5 years at City Hall — seven years as District 2 supervisor and six months as mayor after Ed Lee died — had equipped him with “a consistent track record” that voters could predict his performance in office. 

To him, Mayor London Breed’s track record has been inconsistent on a number of issues. Regarding the abandoned downtown, he said Breed’s ideas make the city look disorganized: “What we heard was week one, we’re going to build science labs. Week two, we’re going to build housing. Week three, it was a U.C. campus, and then it became a soccer stadium.” 

Michael Petrelis, who is running for District 9 supervisor, disrupted the conversation early on from outside the cafe, holding a sign that read “Ban cars now!” and interjecting frequently. He blared criticisms of Farrell from a bullhorn, but the volume on the speakers’ microphones was turned up, and Petrelis left after some 20 minutes. (We reported earlier that Petrelis attempted to shut down the event and left because he was tired. Petrelis wrote in an email, “My goal was not to stop the conversation and my cameraman had to leave because he had a date. I didn’t leave because I was tired.”

Downtown revival

Macy’s recent closure announcement “caught the mayor’s office off guard, and City Hall off guard,” said Farrell, who noted similar situations also happened with Nordstrom and the San Francisco Centre’s closure. 

Farrell said Breed’s office does not have relationships with the city’s largest tenants, largest building owners and the equity and debt behind them. This situation wouldn’t have happened if he were mayor, he said. He wouldn’t have been blindsided, and would’ve brought everyone together and worked out a solution comprehensively, he said. 

As for plans for a downtown recovery, Farrell said he would first focus on addressing public safety and street conditions, to create an environment where employers and employees would be willing to come back.

“Diversification” was his diagnosis for downtown in the long term. “You know, we were over-reliant on the tech industry,” said Farrell. 

“To the point where everyone wore the same vest,” noted Eskenazi.

“I’m glad I didn’t wear mine tonight,” said Farrell, who sported a black suit and white button-down. He noted that the tech industry’s tendency to work from home has turned San Francisco’s downtown into a veritable ghost town. 

How would the public sector fix things that it neither created nor broke? Eskenazi asked.

The power of tax incentives, Farrell answered. In 2011, Mayor Lee and the Board of Supervisors, including Farrell, managed to use tax breaks to attract Twitter to revitalize mid-Market. “But it didn’t work. We learned our lessons as well,” he said. 

Twitter brought a Silicon Valley model campus to San Francisco, having an in-house gym, an in-house cafe and even in-house dry cleaning, which prevented the surrounding neighborhoods from benefiting much, he said. “If we do this again, we have to do it in a much different, much smarter way,” he said. 

“I think unless we’re aggressive about [reviving downtown], we’re going to lose downtown forever in a potential way,” he said. 

Street safety

Farrell also wants cars back on Market Street. “Let’s just have common sense again,” he said. “At the end of the day, we have to admit that taking cars off Market Street, it’s not a panacea.”

“Market Street hasn’t been safer, statistically, since we took cars off Market Street,” Farrell said. 

Contrasting Farrell’s citation of statistics regarding street safety — but not crime, in which people “feel” less safe in spite of statistically lower levels, Eskenazi quipped “But I feel safer.” 

As for this week’s tragic car collision at West Portal which killed a family of four, Farrell said the lesson he drew was that the city should be “very granular” about every single intersection. He said he learned from friends who live in West Portal that, prior to the accident, the local community had sent multiple emails to the city saying it was a dangerous intersection, emails that went unheeded.

When asked who he would fire as mayor, Farrell mentioned the head of SFMTA, Jeffrey Tumlin, to promote public transportation, bicycling and pedestrian safety. In particular, he mentioned SFMTA’s L Taraval Project. “You tore up the street. You took away every single parking spot in the name of increasing the time or decreasing the time it will take for a trolley to get down the road and down. But you know what you’re also doing? Killing. You’re killing a lot of small businesses,” he said. 

And Police Chief Bill Scott, whom Farrell called “a very good man” who had simply been in the position too long. “At the end of the day, the average tenure of a police chief in the U.S. is three years, and he has been here for almost eight,” Farrell said. 

Farrell also intends to back city charter reform on November’s ballot, to guarantee the mayor always has the power to fire or hire department heads in a “plain and simple” way. This week, Farrell created a political action committee to push two ballot measures that would do just that, while also allowing the mayoral candidate to seek unlimited campaign donations to ostensibly back those ballot measures.

Housing and homelessness

Asked whether he would support Breed’s recent veto of Board President Aaron Peskin’s legislation limiting density in areas of his district, Farrell said he would.

“I need you to speak loudly so the people in District 2 can hear you,” Eskenazi said. Would they want 270-foot high-rises in their neighborhoods? 

It’s not about housing, but about “sloppy legislation” inside City Hall, said Farrell. “We had last summer’s density increases that everyone agreed upon. We come a few months later and say, ‘Whoops, I didn’t mean that we’re going to density decrease.’”

Farrell sought to sidestep a pro-housing or anti-housing characterization, falling back on his “common sense” pitch.

“Where is this common sense, once again?” said Farrell. “This gets back to the YIMBY, NIMBY, different sides of the aisle, where it’s just a zero-sum game and somebody has to win. Unless you’re fully with us, you’re off the boat.”

“I do not believe that we need to upzone every single neighborhood in San Francisco,” he added, saying it is the wrong approach. “As is the approach to say that we’re not going to build anywhere in San Francisco. We can do it in a very smart manner.”

Farrell also promised to take out all the large homeless encampments in six months by offering residents shelter, which he did as mayor in 2018, he said. 

He suggested having clinics for substance use care open 24/7. “We have to capture [drug users] when they’re willing to make a different decision. And to give them a chance for a better life,” he said.

And, on Day One, he would audit all of the San Francisco nonprofits working on homelessness, because the city is funding a large amount of overlapping services, he said. There could be as many as nine city departments that fund homeless spending, he said. “Many fund the same nonprofit, but don’t realize that they’re doing it, and have different metrics for how they’re measuring success.”

Mayoral competitors and predecessors 

Asked which past mayor he would seek to emulate, Farrell pointed to traits of several different city leaders. Farrell appreciated former Mayor Willie Brown’s ability to simply get things done, he said, and Gavin Newsom’s bold approach to politics and policy. He aspired to Ed Lee’s patience and Dianne Feinstein’s genuine love of San Francisco. 

He chose not to answer who his ranked-choice alliance would be, saying it was premature, but acknowledged that it would be a part of any mayoral candidate’s strategy. 

If elected, Farrell, who was the longest-serving Board of Supervisors budget chair in San Francisco’s history, will also be one of the first — if not the first — mayors of a major American city who is a venture capitalist. His finance background, he said, would be “super relevant” to the fate of San Francisco, a city that has a projected budget deficit of $728 million in fiscal year 2024 and 2025, and a 36 percent office-vacancy rate. 

“It is amazing to me that what City Hall is turning to is just a blame game … No one’s willing to take leadership and accountability,” he said. “We need that back in San Francisco if we’re going to bring our city back.”

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