City of San FranciscoCandidate for Mayor

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!