Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Ahsha Safaí. Read earlier dispatches here.
In his application essay to MIT’s master’s program in city planning, Safaí wrote, “I want to come to the program to become a mayor of a city one day. I want to learn, exactly, the elements it takes to run a city.”
Now, as a candidate, he’s finding that it was easier to get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology than to become mayor of San Francisco. The credential impresses people on the campaign trail, but he nevertheless remains behind in the polls. Last week, his once staunch ally SEIU 1021, the city’s largest union, solely endorsed his opponent, Aaron Peskin, for mayor.
“I was more surprised than anything, because I’ve done so much work with them,” Safaí said, when asked if he was disappointed in the outcome. “I heard it was close. It was going to be Aaron one, me two, but it didn’t happen. So we’ve just got to move on.”
At least he went to the right school. Aixa Cintron, a former faculty member at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a thesis advisor for Safaí, called the department “one of the most down-to-earth” at MIT.
“The intention of the program wasn’t to create academic researchers,” she said. “It was to send people out into the real world and, you know, to make a difference.”
Cintron, who left MIT the same year Safaí graduated and had lost touch with him, was pleasantly “surprised and impressed” when Mission Local informed her that a former student was running for mayor.
Safaí’s focus at MIT was housing, community and economic development. Choosing that track was “a natural progression,” Safaí said.
And, he’s applied what he’s learned. When Safaí worked under then-Mayor Gavin Newsom in the early 2000s, he traveled to four cities — Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Diego — to study their economic policies.
“As a planner, one of the things they are teaching is to look at all the best practices. And we did that,” Safaí said. The program that came out of all that traveling, San Francisco Shines, helps small businesses to improve their storefronts. It’s still around today.
Safaí said the planning program built a foundation to understand “how cities function in a healthy manner,” and it got him a foot in the door to work in city government. Even 24 years after his graduation, Safaí said, his body of work reflects that background.
At MIT, Safaí spent a year on his thesis, a research project studying two public-housing projects in Cambridge: Newtowne Court and Washington Elms, both managed by Cambridge Housing Authorities.
In the 151-page paper, Safaí wrote about his interviews with Haitian immigrants in the public-housing projects, exploring how public housing became a new port of entry for Haitian immigrants and what it meant for housing authorities around the country.
“It was something that, at the time, nobody else was writing about,” said Cintron, referring to the impact immigration would have on housing. “Ahsha was there at the right time.”
Safaí today says the thesis inspired him further to work in housing.
But in the prologue of the paper, Safaí, who moved to Cambridge from Iran with his mother at age 6, also told a more personal story about visiting public housing when he was a child.
During his first visit to a public-housing complex at age 10, “I didn’t feel, see, or smell anything different, except I was worried that one of the older boys was going to steal my bike,” he wrote.
He also remembered spending the night at a friend’s place in Newtowne Court, a project he would later study as a master’s student: “The heat in Derek’s apartment was unbearable.”
Those memories of growing up in Cambridge later propelled his thesis on the country’s oldest public-housing projects, but the experience also stayed with him.
After moving to San Francisco in 2000, Safaí started working at the San Francisco Housing Authority. George W. Bush was elected president the same year, and undocumented families feared becoming homeless, he said. He worked on the issue with then-Supervisor Tom Ammiano’s office and nonprofits.
“Policies are policies,” Safaí summed up. How they are implemented, he said, is what “makes a difference.”
Safaí’s proposed homeless-to-housed plan for San Francisco, includes building 600 more tiny homes, opening five to 10 new safe-parking sites for people living in their cars, converting 1,000 hotel rooms into shelters, leasing 500 rooms for homeless families and revitalizing the Homeward Bound program with at least 1,000 trips each year.
“All the work that I’ve done is about how cities function and how we are thinking about giving those with the least amount of resources more help,” Safaí concluded. “And that was the foundation of my education at MIT.”
Correction: A previous headline identified Ahsha Safaí as the only mayoral candidate with an MIT degree. Dylan Hirsch-Shell also has degrees from MIT.
I’d be more impressed if he had attended SF State.