A fight for the heart and soul of San Francisco is shaping up just weeks after Mayor Ed Lee’s passing and the battle lines are being drawn in an ugly, public spectacle.
London Breed, who was appointed acting mayor after Lee died, has already been forced out of the job. The Board of Supervisors appointed Supervisor Mark Farrell to the position at a meeting last week which became emotional at times, if not bizarre.
The entire process of filling the vacancy has been strange from the get-go. The fight over Lee’s successor began just days after Lee’s death at his funeral of all places.
“At Ed Lee’s private funeral service for friends and family at Duggan’s Serra Mortuary in Daly City on Saturday, the tech billionaire [Ron Conway] gave a speech strongly backing Acting Mayor Breed’s rumored candidacy, according to sources who asked not to be identified,” the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time.
Endorsing candidates at a funeral? Totally normal.
Conway’s jockeying had the opposite effect.
“The more Ron Conway openly became the kingmaker for London, the more people like me who have come to respect her and work with her very well became more and more reticent,” Supervisor Aaron Peskin told Mission Local.
When the time came to vote on Tuesday, Supervisor Hillary Ronen delivered a theatrical speech in which she expressed far more than reticence.
“There are white, rich men—billionaires—in this city that have steered the policies for the past mayoral administrations … that have gotten us into the absolute mess that we are in today, where poor people and people of color cannot afford to live in the city. I hate to say it, but those same white men are enthusiastically supporting your candidacy, London Breed.”
That’s Ronen, a white progressive, talking about Breed, the first African American woman to ever serve as San Francisco’s mayor.
It was a “deeply ugly scene,” according to local reporter Joe Eskenazi.
“In short, the left-leaning bloc of the city’s legislative body, at this particular moment in American history, chose to unseat a black woman who worked her way from public housing to City Hall and replace her with a well-off white venture capitalist who graduated from St. Ignatius High and lives in the Marina,” he writes.
“The optics here are so bad they border on evil.”
The vote to replace Breed with Farrell was 6 to 3.
Those who voted to put Farrell in the job say they were just respecting separation of powers. Since Breed was already serving as the President of the Board of Supervisors, a duel role as board president and mayor of the city gave one person too much power, they said. But the city’s black community isn’t buying it.
Rev. Amos Brown, head of the San Francisco chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., was especially insulted by Ronen’s speech which he said suggested the entire black community is being manipulated by rich, white developers.
“There’s never been an intentional effort on the so-called progressive liberals of this town to work with the black community so that we would have our fair share,” he added.
Much of this will be sorted out during the special election in June. As City Lab notes, it’s sure to be a hot one, with the fight over Lee’s successor already exposing some significant fissures in the Bay.
The tension surrounding Tuesday’s vote reflects that frustration, but it’s also a sign of San Francisco’s increasingly strained relationship with the tech industry. The city’s spirit of diversity and tolerance may have helped nurture the boom, but tech moguls like Conway—and the power they wield in municipal politics—are also widely blamed for the Bay Area’s affordability crisis. For many residents, the June election appears set to be a referendum on the city’s identity, if only a symbolic one.
Let the games begin.