Michael Schlein for Mayor of San Francisco

The Challenge

San Francisco has a few key challenges that everyone is looking for solutions for: Homelessness, drugs, crime, housing and general affordability. SF also has other issues as well - Racial inequality, funding shortfalls for elementary schools and City College, funding issues with Muni, traffic, road safety, unfunded pensions, cleanliness, water availability, and more. With all that the city faces, we think that small actions aren't going to be enough, and more radical actions are needed. We need a revolution.

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The Budget

To tackle all of San Francisco's problems simultaneously, the budget really must be increased. When the city has needed to raise the budget in the past it's always been sales tax this, parking fee that. In a city where people making $90000 a year are struggling, we need to find ways to make things more affordable, not less. To add money to the budget without taxing citizens further, we believe San Francisco should invest a portion of the budget in business with a fast return on investment. We have some of the smartest investors in our area, so let's work with them to determine what SF can put funds into to make more money. One thing that SF can invest in that could bring a fast return, though only a one time payout, is condominiums. The city already owns some land that could have condos built on them if it were motivated to do so, such as the Glen Park Bart Station. Building condos would also help the housing situation as well. 

Glen Park BART Station

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Public Safety

Theft is a massive problem in SF. Many businesses have been closed or lost money to theft. Citizens get their cars broken into enough to leave their windows open, so that crooks at least avoid breaking their windows for no reason. Michael Schlein has personally had his car broken into, as well as his catalytic converter stolen 3 times in less than a 2 year span. Something must be done! Yet, a return to tough on crime policies of sending people, often poor and of color, to jail for years for petty crimes is a massive steps backwards. We propose a brand new system to tackle crime instead: We will hire thousands more police officers than ever before to push enforcement of crime to the absolute maximum, with the goal of catching LITERALLY every criminal no matter how small the violation, but nearly eliminating the punishment for petty crimes. The idea is to change the deterrent from long jail sentences, to dissuading thieves by eliminating any possibility of them ever succeeding. Basically, if we put enough resources into policing we can catch crooks enough that they never profit, and most will quit attempting to steal here, even if the punishment is virtually nothing. We propose reducing jail sentences for petty crimes from years in jail down to a week or two. Again, in this system crime never pays, so even a sentence of a week in jail is sufficient punishment for these crimes. In addition to that, we propose eliminating the stigma of crimes by withholding conviction information from all employers, landlords, etc. Having criminal convictions on your record can make life unnecessarily difficult and incentivize folks to fall back into committing more crime. We will remove the punishment and the stigma for petty crime, and instead have our police forces stand tall to meet the challenge of protecting people saying 'you can try to steal from us, but we will catch you literally EVERY time, and you will NEVER succeed!' This system will both make San Francisco as safe as it can be, but also save the lives of misguided folks from years of unnecessary incarceration.

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Police Hiring

Directly related to public safety is the need to hire new police. San Francisco's police staffing is far short of what it was at its peak, and the city is attempting to hire many new officers, but those efforts have seen very long delays. We propose hiring an outside hiring agency to fill the police staffing needs, as well as hiring immigrants on visas to fill San Francisco's policing ranks. We believe that immigrants can make some of the most motivated and effective police officers if given an opportunity, with the extra incentive being an offer of full US citizenship for those that do a good job for the minimum number of years. Once they have obtained US citizenship, SF immigrant police officers can choose to stay in SF or move on to a position elsewhere with experience in a middleclass profession that has openings everywhere across the US. Not only will hiring more officers close the gap in policing left by understaffing, but it will allow us to address another issue: bad officers. While most police officers are decent people trying to do their best, the actions of a few bad officers have harmed the public's trust in all police. When hiring new officers we will go through and reassign officers with a negative record to positions such as dispatch, and push for more discipline of officers that fail to follow police rules and regulations. Staffing shortfalls can make it tougher to punish bad officers, but by increasing staffing levels we can take a less tolerant approach to bad officers.

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Drugs

San Francisco is in a drug epidemic, where record numbers of overdoses and people displaced by drugs are happening. We need to take significant action to save our citizens! We propose first defining what drugs we are enforcing here in SF - Magic Mushrooms should be unenforced, while Fentanyl should be enforced. Second, we will not reduce sentences for drug crimes, and will even push for more enforcement of laws on drug use and possession. However, we will create a brand new type of probation available for drug crimes - the Drug Offender List. Once guilty of a drug crime, a drug user or dealer can voluntarily choose to join the Drug Offender List, and their jail sentence will be reduced to a week for dealers, or be eliminated for users. Voluntarily joining the Drug Offender List means agreeing to submit ALL of your personal communications for police monitoring for 5 years for drug users, or 10 years for dealers, as well as agreeing to allowing police to track your location and install drug detection devices in your home and vehicle if available. The goal of this program is simple - end dangerous drug usage through intercepting drugs before they're consumed, in the most aggressive way possible, without harshly punishing people for drugs. While handing over personal communications is a great invasion of personal freedom, it is a much smaller invasion of personal freedom than a multiyear prison sentence, and many data safeguards will be put in place similar to how health data is protected to ensure people's privacy. We will also seek to offer rehabilitation services to all drug users that desire it for free.

Homelessness

Homelessness has long been an issue San Franciscans have sought to end, yet past efforts have fallen well short of fixing this problem. We propose a very radical approach to homelessness - the construction of a housing complex that can house not only every homeless person in SF, but the entire Bay Area. We propose building a permanent housing facility prospectively at the site of the current 4th and King St Caltrain Station. The reason that site makes sense are manyfold. The government owns the land already, which is very substantial in size. The caltrain station while useful, is potentially unnecessary, as the trains could hypothetically end at the 22nd St station instead with a connecting shuttle service. The area of 22nd St where the station is located has minimal vehicle traffic most of the time, so that section could be shut down and a more substantial station can be built there without much increase on traffic. And, the 22nd St station is near the freeway entrance for 280 which leads to Kings St where the 4th St station is, making a shuttle service very easy. As far as the facility itself, we intend to build housing units for 40000 homeless people that will be divided into mostly single 150 sq ft units, 300 sq ft couple units, and 500 sq ft family units. There will also be luxury condos offered to mental health staff, onsite medical facilities, grocery and retail spaces, employment services, security services, and indoor park spaces. The goal is for the complex to be able to be self contained, so that those that have significant mental health issues can be committed to the inside of the building, requiring special permission to come and go, but can move freely to the store and park spaces within the building on their own. Onsite security will maintain the safety of the building. Employment services will work to get people working towards financial independence again. The goal is to work with people towards self reliance again, but the units will offer permanent housing for anyone that needs needs it, as long as they need it, and without restrictions or conditions.

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Housing

We propose after increasing the city's budget, that housing permit fees should be reduced (maybe eliminated), and the process to approve new building permits in higher density parts of the city be streamlined for approval - to be approved in 30 days or less, as long as all code requirements are met. We also suggest the elimination of commercial zoning in parts of the city in favor of 'commercial minimum zoning' where a certain amount of space or a certain percentage of a building's space is devoted to commercial purposes, but the rest is available to be all residential units. There are hundreds of commercial spaces, such as the Safeway on Mission and 30th St, that are one or two story buildings and can be converted into multistory buildings with commercial purposes on the first floors and residences above. Building directly above commercial spaces also offers the advantage of bringing consistent customers to these spaces as well. We believe the city should provide incentives for building residences on these spaces, such as elimination of taxes on the first year of rental income or reduction of taxes on condo sales for building on these sites. Furthermore, San Francisco has its own spaces that are one or two stories that can be built directly upon, such as the Glen Park Bart Station. The Glen Park BART Station has a gray one story building that can be replaced in favor of apartments or condos, and the station is in the perfect location to build - it has both access to BART and direct access to the interstate 280 entrance. Why the Glen Park BART Station has yet to be developed into housing, with the station entrance on the bottom floor, is an open question. In general, we also believe that San Francisco should not be a monolith, and more suburban areas of the city should largely remain that way, with new housing focused on more urban areas of the city.

Caltrain Station at 4th and King St

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