Last Thursday night, inside the scintillatingly clean Genentech Hall on UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, the six candidates running for mayor of San Francisco convened to answer questions about a few—let’s say—unfortunately familiar SF topics, including homelessness, affordability and public defecation. The answers offered by the candidates ranged from encouraging to asinine and, on the whole, left me feeling very fucking nervous about the future of our city.
I wanted to physically attend the debate for a few reasons, chief among them being that I care about the outcome of the election and about the personally impacting issues at stake. But I also wanted to see if the candidate most likely to win, good ol’ Ed Lee—appearing ever-pompous in his expensive-looking suit, with his whiskery little moustache like a Brillo Pad beneath his nose—would offer evidence that he possessed some capacity for politicking with empathy and human compassion.
He didn’t.
My girlfriend and I arrived to the debate 15 minutes early, which, apparently, qualified as late, because the main lecture hall was already full. We were herded into an overflow room, in which the debate was live-streamed onto a projector screen. This room, too, quickly filled up.
My first impression once the debate began was that candidate Kent Graham seemed stoned. It was also apparent that Lee—our frumple-faced Feinstein-backed incumbent—was the only actual politician of the bunch. His talking points came off as cryptic but practiced, as if he and Ron Conway had rehearsed them hundreds of times deep inside the bowels of City Hall, probably in some dimly lit room decorated by taxidermied deer heads. He was also the only candidate to not offer “I don’t know” as an official response to any of the first five questions.
It was largely for this reason that, two hours later, as I left the hall, I couldn’t help but imagine what the next four years with Lee as our mayor might look like.
I tried reminding myself of the good that Lee has done since winning the mayoral election four years ago. For instance, in 2011, the unemployment rate was hovering at around 10%. Now it’s down to 3.5%. There’s more, too, I told myself. The budget has grown by more than $2 billion. In 2018, the minimum wage will hit $15 an hour. These are undoubtedly good things. But hard as I tried, these good things were repelled by an invisible neuronic momentum, a current of thick, hot trash. Probably un-coincidentally, I couldn’t get Lee’s response to the question, “What will you do about the increased amount of trash and human waste on the streets?” out of my head. I’m paraphrasing, but his response called for high school kids to take “personal responsibility” for throwing away their bags of Doritos once they were done with them.
“Dude are you fucking serious?” a woman in the overflow room said in response, throwing up her hands, projecting her voice over a chorus of boos. “Fuck him.”
While he managed to avoid directly responding to accusations of capitulating to corporate interests, criminalizing homelessness or prioritizing economic growth over the needs and realities of most San Franciscans—largely because the moderator never asked questions as direct as these, and because the debate’s format forbid any actual debating among the candidates—Lee’s callousness in response to the trash question epitomizes why so many people don’t like him. Speaking with all the eloquence of a used-car salesman, he often doesn’t appear to care about anyone who doesn’t possess seed funding, venture capital or a Super Bowl ticket. His bad rep feels earned.
I acknowledge that Lee probably does care. He just proposed a new plan to “make San Francisco affordable again” and has recently stated that affordable housing is his number-one new priority. But considering his curmudgeonly decorum during the debate—along with his televised, oh so compassionate request for homeless people to leave the city before the Super Bowl—it still doesn’t feel like he actually gives a shit.
Empathy and passion inspire confidence. I want a mayor who at least seems like he cares about the problems that people in his city—in front of his damn office—are dealing with. I want a mayor who thinks critically about how to address issues like homelessness, who doesn’t write off the repercussions of the issue—like increased amount of trash and shit on the street—as results of people not assuming responsibility for their bags of chips.
I want a mayor who cares about the city as much Amy Farah Weiss and Broke-Ass Stuart do. “I love San Francisco so much it hurts,” said Stuart, in his debate-pamphlet bio. “How many people want a mayor who has the political will to demand more than 50% affordable housing?” said Weiss near the end of the debate. “That’s what you need in city hall. You need political will in order to make sure that development is supporting the needs of the people who work in San Francisco.”
As I write this, I can feel in my fingers a caffeinated anxiety that, come November 3, we won’t have that kind of mayor in City Hall. Instead, I fear we will have a mayor who only encourages the contradictions that are quickly becoming commonsense components of our city’s identity: a sanctuary city defoliated by forced evictions, whose leaders give tax breaks to tech companies but arrest the occupants of homeless encampments.
If Lee is reelected, I hope he can tap into his background in tenants’ and human rights to prove me wrong. At the very least, I would like to start seeing him act like he gives a shit about the people who’ve been left out of San Francisco’s economic gold rush. If not, I’ll need some of whatever Kent Graham was smoking before the debate. Yo, Kent, what up?