Mark Leno lost his life partner to the AIDS epidemic, dedicated himself to being a community volunteer and civic leader, and became the first openly gay man to serve in the California Senate.

Mark’s accomplishments include raising California’s minimum wage to $15, requiring developers to build affordable housing in every large project, stopping the chemical industry from putting dangerous toxins in consumer products, and passing landmark laws for equal rights, marriage equality, and protecting transgender Californians.

Mark has run a small business in San Francisco for 40 years. He lives in Noe Valley, and would be the first gay Mayor in San Francisco history.

We have a choice in this election — keep with the status quo, or vote for fundamental change. Mark Leno believes it’s time for change. He’s running for Mayor to shake up City Hall, embrace bold new ideas, and lead a regional effort to combat our toughest challenges including homelessness and the housing crisis.

• CHANGE THE STATUS QUO AT CITY HALL

  Mark was the first candidate to issue a Fair Campaign Pledge renouncing all Super PACs and outside committees in the election for Mayor. He will clean up City Hall, reducing the influence of lobbyists, Super PACs and wealthy insiders.

• ESTABLISH MENTAL HEALTH JUSTICE CENTER

  We need to stop recycling homeless people through the criminal justice system and treat those with chronic mental health and substance abuse issues. Mark is taking the lead to establish a Mental Health Justice Center — a huge step forward in our efforts to address homelessness and the suffering on our streets.

• CREATE 50,000 UNITS OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING

  Mark passed the first law requiring market-rate developers to build affordable housing, creating thousands of new affordable units. As Mayor he will lead a regional effort to build housing, and will create 50,000 affordable, workforce, and permanent supportive housing units in San Francisco in the next ten years.

• STOP THE EPIDEMIC OF CAR BREAK-INS

  Our city’s response to car break-ins is a bad joke. Mark will establish a property crime unit in every district police station, increase foot patrols and community policing, and hold our public safety leaders accountable.

• DEFEND SAN FRANCISCO AGAINST TRUMP

  A civil rights leader who passed landmark laws for equality, Mark will stand up to Donald Trump and his hateful agenda attacking people of color, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ San Franciscans.

For 20 years I have worked in service toward individual, organizational, and collective well-being as an educator, service provider, strategist, community organizer, and nonprofit Founder/Director. I have work experience in the fields of mental health, transitional housing, homelessness, harm reduction, youth leadership/development, anti-displacement, sustainable business practices, neighborhood development, and organizational development. I know how to take a concept such as “end homelessness” or “develop affordable housing” and collaboratively implement community-focused solutions with a budget, timeline, and measurable outcomes.

After graduating with an interdisciplinary master’s degree in Organizational Development and Training from SF State in 2010, I developed a service-learning course in SF State’s MPA Program to support strategic planning, communications, and evaluation for nonprofit organizations and graduate students through SF State’s Public Administration Department.

In 2011, I joined neighborhood activists to prevent local businesses from being displaced by a Chase Bank and learned how to shape City Hall’s guiding policies for development as an advocate for social and economic equity. I founded Neighbors Developing Divisadero as a nonprofit, public-benefit corporation to develop a “strategic yes” to inclusive, enriching, and sustainable development.

My solutions-focused 2015 Mayoral campaign inspired over 79,500 San Franciscans to choose me as their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice candidate. After the election I founded
the Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge to develop and pilot community-integrated solutions to San Francisco’s encampment and shelter/affordable housing-shortage crisis and served as a Board Member and Operations Manager at San Francisco Community Land Trust.

I became active in local politics after the global financial collapse, when City Hall rolled out short-sighted policies that displaced hundreds of thousands of long-time residents. In 2011, I joined neighbors to push back against a Chase Bank that displaced local businesses on the Divisadero Corridor. I realized eight years ago that in addition to a righteous no against profit-driven displacement, we also needed a strategic yesfor inclusive, culturally enriching, and sustainable development. My platform is ahead of its time politically, but the policies I’m proposing can all be developed and implemented over the next year. No matter who you vote for as your first, second, or third choice, please promote my actionable initiatives to stabilize and heal our systems, neighborhoods, and neighbors in crisis.

Let’s talk about homelessness. It’s clear that San Francisco’s next Mayor must achieve a significant reduction in the thousands of people living in crisis conditions on our sidewalks. San Francisco currently spends $30 million a year on a “move along” strategy for DPW and SFPD to shuffle homeless residents from block to block with terrible outcomes. As Founder and Director of SaintFrancisChallenge.org,I have worked with encampment residents, impacted neighbors, business owners, nonprofits, and City workers and officials over the last two and a half years to develop a model that can transition thousands of San Francisco’s unsheltered residents into Safe Organized Spaces. These SOS transitional villages are administered by nonprofit organizations with a license agreement, insurance, health and safety protocols, and community benefits on underutilized public or private land in impacted neighborhoods. Safe Organized Spaces provide triage stabilization and the necessary amount of on-site services to support pathways to healing, housing, and community-integration.

When it comes to stabilizing our affordable housing crisis, our next Mayor should #1): Fund rent subsidies and legal right to counsel for tenants facing eviction; #2) Create an online registry of rent-burdened or displaced workers, families, and residents who are seeking affordable housing at no more than 30% of their net income; #3) Develop a parcel tax that incentivizes property owners to rent out empty units, along with a new program that supports property owners with tenant screening, management and financing for rehab if they agree to provide affordable housing; #4) Support the financing and development of Additional Dwelling Units for property owners who agree to provide affordable housing; #5) Focus on further streamlining 50% affordable housing projects by creating new financing mechanisms and a framework for public/private partnerships with pension funds and developers to finance the low-to-moderate income housing units; #6) Invest in workforce development programming in the construction fields; and #7) Support the expansion of stable rent by repealing Costa Hawkins.

What can our next Mayor accomplish in a year to support livable and safe neighborhoods? Instead of investing $34 million to hire 200 new Police Officers, I will invest $34 million into unarmed programming that strategically targets the 100 blocks and neighborhoods with the highest incidents of crime and public safety issues.

Our next Mayor must support environmental justice and work with elected officials in Congress to ensure the Navy adequately remediates the toxic soil at Treasure Island and Bayview Hunters Point.

Our next Mayor must initiate a task force to locally regulate Uber and Lyft to the extent possible, create reparations for taxi drivers, and develop a locally-regulated transit platform that is pro-driver, pro-passenger, and pro-environment.

Our next Mayor must make direct links to connect our students and residents to workforce opportunities with the Central SoMa plan to prevent Tech Boom Displacement 3.0.

San Francisco residents, including me, want a Mayor who will put our $10 billion budget to good use. I have laid out a set of deliverables and performance metrics in a dozen categories that can be used to track my performance over the next year. I invite you to build upon that framework and use it to track the performance of whoever becomes Mayor. Visit my website at weissformayor.com and click on the outcomes tracker tool, which is also available in Spanish and Chinese. Thank you for reading and please include me on your Vote 1-2-3 for Equity slate on June 5th!

I was born and raised in San Francisco in public housing, and I am a product of our local public schools. I have dedicated my entire adult life to public service. After graduating from UC Davis I returned home to serve the city and the community I love. I earned my Master’s in Public Administration from the University of San Francisco. I served as the Executive Director of the African American Art & Culture Complex, a non-profit dedicated to helping young people. I served as a Fire Commissioner, Redevelopment Agency Commissioner, and a development specialist with the Treasure Island Development Authority. I am also the twice-elected President of our legislative body - the Board of Supervisors.

I have a strong track record of working on issues including housing, transportation, public safety, homelessness, and the environment. I’m not afraid of addressing tough challenges.

As Supervisor I have worked to tackle our housing challenges. I introduced legislation creating a right to civil counsel for tenants facing eviction. I passed groundbreaking Neighborhood Preference legislation that prioritizes neighborhood residents for the affordable housing units built in their communities, and as a result we are seeing an increase in local residents moving into new affordable housing units.  When I was told we had empty public housing units and homeless families waiting months for a shelter bed, I secured $2 million to rehabilitate those public housing units for 179 formerly homeless families who now have a safe place to call home.

I have also been a fierce advocate for improvements to public transportation. I carried legislation enabling Muni to buy hundreds of cleaner, more reliable buses, and replace and expand its entire fleet of light rail vehicles. This investment in our fleet, will allow us to expand and improve service, and reliability.

Growing up in a community which experienced violence, public safety has been a key priority of mine. As Supervisor, I worked with Mayor Lee to put 400 new police officers on our streets, including bilingual officers. I wrote legislation to curb car break-ins in tourist hot spots and commercial corridors, through collaboration with rental car companies. I stood up for our residents and first responders during the ambulance crisis in 2014. I fought for more ambulances, more staffing, and more resources, and I delivered with $47.3 million to hire Emergency Medical Technicians, paramedics, firefighters, and 911 dispatchers, to buy new ambulances and fire equipment, to improve facilities, and to invest in new technology.

We have too many individuals struggling on our streets with severe mental health and substance abuse issues, and I have been a leader on the Board of Supervisors working to address these challenges. I created the Safe injection Services Task Force to help get IV drug users off the streets and into treatment. I consulted with medical professionals and visited safe injection facilities in Vancouver, Canada, and I am leading the effort to bring these services to San Francisco. These facilities don’t just help get the needles off our streets, they also help us save lives, and city resources.  I have also advocated for reforms to our conservatorship programs, which allow a court to appoint a guardian for someone who cannot care for themselves. I passed legislation to reform and decriminalize our conservatorship program so that public health officials can get people who are struggling with mental illness on our streets stabilized, healthy, and housed for the long term.

My strong environmental track record speaks for itself; I passed the strongest styrofoam ban in the country and ensured that the city moved forward on launching its clean energy program, CleanPowerSF, which is the single-most important thing San Francisco can do to fight climate change. I also passed legislation to provide for the safe and convenient disposal of unwanted medications, which has kept more than 32 tons of pharmaceuticals out of the San Francisco Bay and landfills.

Following the tragic death of Mayor Lee, I served as Acting Mayor. It was a difficult time for the entire city, during which I sought to lead a stable transition and housing challenges.

My policy positions have been consistent, based on the needs of San Franciscans, and informed by my upbringing in San Francisco -- not what is politically popular. My dedication to affordable housing, reducing homelessness, public safety, and economic justice makes me an ideal Mayor.

The greatest challenges facing our city are homelessness, housing affordability, and public safety.

We are in one of the greatest urban economic booms in a century, yet right at our doorsteps, thousands battle homelessness and mental illness. We have created one new unit of housing for every eight jobs resulting in an increasingly expensive city where too many low income, immigrant, and working families can no longer afford to live.  And where many of the people I went to high school with can't afford to stay. Housing issues impacting residents in San Francisco are not abstract policy issues for me, I’ve lived them. I have been a renter all of my life. I’ve seen generations of my family, friends, and classmates leave San Francisco. We also have increasing property crime making our residents feel unsafe in their own communities.

When it comes to homelessness, I am focused on keeping people in their homes, taking street behavior seriously and addressing mental health and substance abuse issues, and building more housing. I have committed to ending long term tent encampments within my first year of office. Keeping people housed is one of the most cost effective ways to address homelessness. I will pass and fund my right to civil counsel legislation to ensure residents have legal support when facing eviction, acquire and stabilize rent controlled housing units, and expand rent subsidy programs to help those struggling stay in their homes. I will also take street behavior seriously and invest in mental health and substance abuse treatment services. I will also invest in more housing for those existing homelessness including expanding hours at our shelters, creating a supportive in-law housing program, and working to pass Proposition D which will generate $1 billion for housing in our city.

Creating more affordable housing for everyone is critical. As a renter myself, I understand the need for more housing at all income levels. My housing platform at www.londonformayor.com details my comprehensive approach to tackling our housing challenges and includes: protecting and expanding our affordable and rent-controlled housing stock, increasing funding for all types of housing preservation and creation, building at least 5,000 units per year, funding the construction of modular homes for those individuals exiting homelessness, building on underutilized sites, and reforming our housing approvals process to build housing faster in San Francisco.

Finally, I know what it’s like to have your car broken into, we can and must do more to address property crimes in our city. There must be real consequences for those who commit crimes in our neighborhoods.  As Mayor, I will add 200 more police officers by the end of 2019, and ensure we have neighborhood prosecutors working at every police district focused on property and quality of life crimes. I  will also introduce legislation empowering the City Attorney to pursue repeat offenders in Civil Court, so that if the criminal justice system doesn’t stop them, a lawsuit will. I did this already with repeat graffiti offenders and it is working.