WATCH: Top San Francisco mayoral candidates detail vision for city, tackling crime, homelessness and more
ABC7 News teamed up with our media partner The San Francisco Standard and their political and business reporter Annie Gaus, along with Kara Swisher, author and host of the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast to talk to Farrell and the other candidates about the issues facing the city, like crime, homelessness, the economy, tourism, and the recovery of downtown.
Watch the video above to see how Farrell answered tough questions from Reggie, Annie, and Kara.
Here's where Farrell says he stands on some of the major issues:
San Francisco's Image Problem
When asked how he could fix the city's public image problem, Farrell says he wants to focus on the core issues -- public safety, cleaning up the streets, dealing with the homeless issue and fentanyl crisis. Then the city can start on marketing San Francisco again.
"Unless you fix the underlying issues that are truly making it tough for people who live here but also for people that visit here... to me it's like lipstick on a pig," he says. "We need to have sustainable growth, sustainable difference in San Francisco. So as mayor, my priority will be focusing on public safety, cleaning up our streets, and then being the most proactive mayor in the city's history marketing our city to the business community, to the tourist community, taking advantage of our sister cities across the world to bring our economy back."
"But we cannot start doing that in earnest unless we have a mayor that's going to focus in a determined fashion on those first core issues that to me are just table stakes for bringing visitors, bringing employers back to San Francisco, but also making residents of San Francisco feel safe every single day."
Drug Crisis
"What we're doing right now is simply not enough." He's suggesting declaring a fentanyl state of emergency, which would allow the city to ask for additional financial resources and law enforcement resources and then redirect city headcount and budget dollars towards that emergency.
Homelessness
His approach to homelessness has been to not go with a home-first model, and he says the majority of our money should be spent on shelters. "From my perspective, when we're building housing at such an expensive cost per unit, it is Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill to think we're going to permanently house all of those that are homeless on the streets of San Francisco today. Let alone if we did that, truly, the influx that we'd have, even more so, from around the country. We need to change our reputation as a city as a place that will treat you with compassion and respect, offer you shelter to get off the streets of our city, but not continue to allow people to come to San Francisco, pitch a tent and be there on the streets of our city as long as you want. I want to help people get off the streets, that is my North Star."
Farrell says he believes the sidewalks belong to everybody, not just someone who comes to the city to pitch a tent. "We need to take a different approach as city government." Farrell says despite legal entanglements with clearing homeless camps in the city, he would have just cleared the camps. "100%."
When asked if Breed's focus on bussing people out of San Francisco is a good idea, he responded, "I think the way Mayor Breed is doing it right now is a horrible idea." He says before under Homeward Bound, if someone was able to contact a loved one who agreed to house them, they'd be sent over. 70% of these individuals a year later were reportedly still housed, Farrell says. He said that he quadrupled the budget and over 100 people were being sent home a month.
He says that's not what is happening now, and Breed abandoned this practice. He says less than 200 people were sent home in the last year under Breed and it was instead replaced with bussing. He does agree with sending people out of town but doing it the way they did before.
Breed's Leadership
Breed said that she has faced opposition from the board of supervisors on getting her policies enacted. Farrell -- who was once a board member -- says that she may have faced opposition, but she was lacking leadership inside of City Hall to actually fight against the opposition and get things done.
"When I was on the board of supervisors and when I became mayor, nothing was perfect but we had active working relationships inside City Hall, even with people that I disagreed with 95% of the time. Because we believe that we needed to find and work on the 20th issue where we could find common ground, start to either pass legislation or laws or the budget where we'd remarkably improve the lives of San Francisco residents. That is not happening today, so yeah, the board of supervisors or people who simply don't agree with you in a legislative context might be obstructionist to your vision, but it's up to you as a leader and a city leader and it's up to the mayor of San Francisco to be that leader to get things done. And that's not what's happening right now."
Why should people trust your leadership?
In the past few months, there have been questions about Farrell's ethics and questions about campaign finance, raising money from city contractors to steer for favored nonprofits, and the speeding up of a permit at his own home.
When asked why people should trust his leadership amid the allegations of what appears to be unethical practices, Farrell said to look back to what he did when he was in office before and what he would do as mayor next year.
He points out these allegations have come from his opponents. "We have followed our lawyers' advice from the beginning, in each one of these instances."
"No one raised issues back then when these things were cropping up inside of City Hall."
He says he believes San Francisco needs a leader who would turn the page on years of ineffective leadership and write a new chapter for his city. "At the end of the day, it's a distraction that my opponents are continuing to try to raise on the campaign trail. It's not working, but they're going to continue to raise it to make sure we avoid really talking about the experience and the competence and the vison around the issues that truly matter to San Francisco residents."
Downtown Revitalization
Farrell responded to being called the "business friendly" candidate. He has suggested tax breaks for businesses that require their employees to work onsite in order to revive Downtown.
When asked to enforce that idea and what else can be done, he said, "It's a ghost town compared to what it used to be. In my view, City Hall needs to be focused on doing everything possibly, proactively, to bring that back."
"I believe we need to bring back public safety and clean streets - those are table stakes in my point of view to bring economic recovery in a sustainable way. But the I also do believe that we need to use tax incentives out of City Hall to bring employers and employees back to the Downtown and South of Market cores."
He believes there should be one tax incentive for employers that will actually relocate to those areas, and one if employers actually bring employees back into the office 4+ days a week to work, then they'll qualify for additional incentive.
He said he wants to focus on getting the incentive passed before deciding on how to enforce this within companies -- although it could likely be something like badge swipes.
"In my mind, tax incentives for companies are there to encourage behavior that we want out of our city government that we think will benefit all San Francisco residents. We need to bring our economy back Downtown and South of Market."
Commercial real estate is in a decline in San Francisco following the pandemic, like other cities. When asked if San Francisco should change the plan for what Downtown is, Farrell says because of 40% vacant office space, in long-term we have to think of the conversion to residential housing. "To me, we need to think bigger and bolder."
On Class B and Class C office buildings: "What if we allow them to demo, massively upzone the Financial District? Commit to tax abatement vehicles or developers instead of actually abandoning, as we have in San Francisco today, $30 million of steel in the ground at 1st and Mission or just putting the money elsewhere. 35,000 fully entitled units in San Francisco not being built today, let's incentivize them, let's get them building. We can bring our construction crews back, get them back to work and build for the future of San Francisco and that urbanist vision downtown of South of Market that I think we can all get excited about that we've talked about for years but has never come to fruition."