Before sitting down with London Breed for one of her final interviews as mayor of San Francisco, I noticed that her ornate, wood-paneled office looked different from the last time we talked inside Room 200 at City Hall. Photos and artwork along the shelves and walls were still there, as was the “What Would Beyoncé Do?” placard on the desk.
But since our last sitdown interview in the summer of 2023, the furniture had moved.
“It’s more feng shui,” Breed said casually while posing for a photograph next to a window overlooking Civic Center Plaza.
Since losing to Daniel Lurie in last month’s election, Breed has been noticeably zen about the results and her future. She has insisted that San Francisco’s comeback is underway while limiting criticism of her political opponents. But over the course of a 30-minute interview, Breed made clear that she believes she has not received enough credit for the city’s progress on housing, homelessness, public safety, and the drug crisis.
“I think that’s been the toughest challenge: having a bunch of people take credit for the work you’ve done, having a bunch of people say that you’re not doing anything, and then needing to explain to people what I’ve done and how that relates to what they care about,” the mayor said.
Breed also had stern words for glory-seeking supervisors and political opponents, saying she will miss the job of mayor but not so much San Francisco’s notorious brand of politics, which she acknowledged is as vicious as the “knife fight in a phone booth” analogy would suggest.
“Criticism is easy,” Breed said. “But actually putting together the pieces of the puzzle to be effective and do the job, and to have the kinds of results that we’re finally starting to see — that’s hard work.”
She suggested that competition among policymakers to “make their mark” has led to poorly written laws that contribute to the city’s broken bureaucracy. The one thing Breed would change with a snap of the fingers is the ability to directly hire and fire department heads.
“The mayor should be able to make those decisions, because the mayor is accountable for those decisions, because the mayor is elected by the people and expected to deliver,” she said.
Breed is bullish about San Francisco’s future, even if her legacy will always be tied to the pandemic — for better and worse. She was named acting mayor in late 2017, after the sudden death of Ed Lee, then was bounced out of office in a contentious appointment process before reclaiming the role in a special election in June 2018.
Before she could fully implement her vision, however, the pandemic struck.
San Francisco had the lowest death rate of any major U.S. city as Breed moved swiftly to shut down in March 2020, before anywhere else. But the lockdown and shift to remote work led to a prolonged economic downturn that has hurt the city’s tax base.
Meanwhile, fentanyl and unsheltered homelessness emerged as full-blown crises that horrified and frustrated voters.
Over the last couple of years, Breed preached patience as her administration pushed increasingly strict policies around drugs and homelessness, and support for police. The mayor said her work to streamline housing and business permits will pay dividends in the future.
“I’ve been able to lead this city for six and a half years, and I have been able to get this city to where it is, where [progress] is finally starting to take root,” Breed said.
She declined to speculate on the challenges Lurie will face upon taking office Jan. 8 but cautioned that Donald Trump’s second term will be a distraction for the city’s administration — if not a threat for many immigrants living here.
“San Francisco will be a target,” Breed said. “I think that we won’t have the luxury to just focus on San Francisco. We have to think about some of the things that I did: set up hotlines, made investments in organizations that serve our immigrant communities to ensure that they are supported, protected, and they have resources.”
It’s not clear what Breed intends to do after leaving office, but it doesn’t sound as if she has plans to be out of work for long. Breed has close ties to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and speculation has been building that she could enter the corporate world after spending her entire career in public service and the nonprofit sector.
“I’m sure there’ll be other people who will be reaching out to me and asking what I want to do, or what they can do,” Breed said. “We’ll see. But I’m putting out all options.”