Mayoral Priorities

Since the pandemic, Mayor Breed has made numerous investments to support San Francisco’s economy and downtown core, which includes Downtown, South of Market, Union Square, Civic Center, Yerba Buena, and Mission Bay. In February 2023, Mayor Breed rolled out her Roadmap to Downtown San Francisco’s Future, a strategy to build a stronger and more resilient Downtown and City. In the first few months, Mayor Breed has taken significant steps forward to meet the ambitious goals set out in her Roadmap, including: ensuring Downtown is clean, safe, and inviting, attracting and retaining a diverse range of industries and employers, facilitating new uses and flexibility in buildings, make it easier to start and grow a business through the City’s new permit center and our permitting agencies, grow and prepare our workforce, and investing in transportation

Mayor Breed continues to create more housing and shelter to help make homelessness rare, brief, and one-time only. While there remains a lot of work to do, San Francisco is making progress on this goal. The Mayor’s Homelessness Recovery Plan, a two-year plan launched in July 2020, exceeded the City’s goal of creating 1,500 new units of permanent supportive housing over two years, by creating almost 3,000 new units as well as just under 1,500 prevention and rental assistance slots.

Under the Mayor’s Five-Year Strategic Plan, launched in April 2023, the City set goals to move 30,000 people into housing and reduce unsheltered homelessness by 50%. This plan builds on the City’s success to increase access to shelter and housing over the last few years, which resulted in a 15% decline in unsheltered homelessness and a 3.5% decrease in overall homelessness among individuals, youth, and families.

As part of her initiative to help those suffering from mental health and substance use disorders on City streets, Mayor Breed partnered with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to open 70 new behavioral health beds, adding to the City’s existing 2,200 behavioral health beds. The additional 70 residential step-down beds will provide clients with transitional recovery housing for up to two years following completion of their residential treatment for substance use disorder.

Mayor Breed is focused on larger efforts to provide comprehensive substance use treatment for San Franciscans while also addressing conditions on our streets. Since taking office, Mayor Breed has added hundreds of mental health stabilization beds, authored conservatorship legislation to help those who are unable to help themselves, supported state law changes to reform mental health laws, opened the City’s first drug sobering center, and launched a Street Crisis Response Team, which has had more than 27,000 encounters since the program launched in November 2020.

Mayor Breed recognizes that law enforcement and the communities they serve must work together to build a safer city. Since becoming Mayor, she has launched targeted efforts to address the public safety needs of residents, including increasing police foot patrols, re-hiring retired officers and community ambassadors to patrol high-traffic locations, creating multi-racial neighborhood safety patrols, and continuing to promote responsible, effective criminal legal reform.

Understanding that police staffing shortages is a national issue with fewer people entering or remaining in the law enforcement profession than in recent years, the Board of Supervisors approved Mayor Breed’s $25 million Police Supplemental that will help address public safety issues in the City. To address our police staffing shortage, Mayor Breed is focusing on bringing new officers in with a focus on creating a more diverse and professionalized workforce, keeping the officers we have trained so we don’t lose their expertise to other jurisdictions, adding more non-sworn employees to free up officers to do the work they are uniquely needed and trained to do, and creating alternatives to policing with our Ambassadors to provide a more appropriate, effective response and to free up officers to other work.

To fundamentally change how San Francisco approves and builds housing, Mayor Breed introduced her Housing For All plan which is the City’s effort to allow for 82,000 new homes to be built over the next 8 years. Mayor Breed is focused on adding more housing at all income levels by introducing legislation to remove barriers in the San Francisco Planning Code in order to make it easier and faster to approve new housing. This legislation will eliminate unnecessary processes and hearings, eliminate certain requirements and geographic restrictions, and expand housing incentive programs for new housing that fits within the City’s existing zoning laws.   

Mayor Breed has also supported the investment of more than $1 billion in affordable housing, including successfully passing a $600 million affordable housing bond. Thousands of units of affordable housing have been constructed under Mayor Breed’s leadership in partnership.

Mayor Breed is pushing to make San Francisco a cleaner and more resilient City, addressing the urgent threat of climate change by moving forward ambitious environmental goals through her Climate Action Plan. To reach these ambitious targets, San Francisco is addressing climate change from all angles: housing, transportation and land use, energy, buildings, zero waste, and healthy ecosystems This includes transitioning to 100% renewable electricity by 2025 and reaching net-zero emissions by 2040. In addition to reducing emissions and harmful pollution, policies in the Climate Action Plan promote economic recovery, workforce development, racial and social equity, public health, and resilience.

Access to clean, affordable electricity is at the heart of San Francisco’s strategy for reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions and improving the health and well-being of communities across the city. Under Mayor Breed’s leadership, San Francisco has advanced programs that reduce carbon emissions and promote equitable access to clean energy in San Francisco, including discounts for 100% renewable energy for low-income customers, rebates to replace fossil fuel powered appliances, and incentives for installing electric vehicle charging infrastructure. To reduce pollution from transportation, Mayor Breed has committed to increasing low-carbon trips to at least 80% and electrifying all vehicles that remain on the road by 2040. To accelerate the adoption of zero emission vehicles and expand public charging infrastructure, she has passed legislation that requires parking garages and lots to install charging infrastructure, and another ordinance that makes it easier to open standalone charging locations.

People in San Francisco should be able to get around our city safely, reliably and comfortably, regardless of whether they walk, bike, take Muni or drive. Since her time in office, Mayor Breed has championed a transportation system that supports the city’s economy and our workforce. During the pandemic, Mayor Breed oversaw the transformation of Muni to prioritize service for essential workers and healthcare hubs. At the onset of the pandemic, Mayor Breed created the Shared Spaces program, rethinking how we use our parking spaces to revitalize the city's commercial corridors and support our local businesses. In addition to Shared Spaces, the Mayor has directed SFMTA to implement major efficiency and reliability improvements for Muni. Major lines like the 22-Fillmore and 14-Mission are operating faster, more frequently and more reliably than they have in decades, and as a result have ridership levels that exceed pre-COVID numbers.

Even as Muni had to reduce services levels due to its hiring freeze, Mayor Breed ensured that Muni’s Equity Priority Neighborhoods received the highest level of service – including adding the new 15-Bayview Hunters Point Express, which dramatically reduced commute times for essential workers. Mayor Breed has also directed staff to implement all audit findings to ensure SFMTA projects are delivered on time and on budget. As a result, SFMTA has made dramatic changes to their project development, procurement and management processes, with most projects begun in the last two years now being on-time and on-budget.

Mayor Breed champions the City’s Vision Zero Policy that aims to eliminate traffic fatalities from our streets. She oversaw the SFMTA’s quick-build program that delivers street projects at one-tenth the cost of traditional projects in one-fifth the time. The program has delivered over 27 street safety projects, including over 20 miles of new protected bike lanes, to help make our streets safer for everyone on our streets. And, in Spring 2022, Mayor Breed spearheaded the legislation to convert JFK Drive into a promenade to expand our City's access to open, recreational space.

Advancing equity has been at the forefront of all Mayor Breed’s investments to address the City’s most pressing issues. Across economic recovery, housing, homelessness, public safety, climate change, and COVID-19 recovery, Mayor Breed’s programs center the needs of San Francisco’s most marginalized communities.

To ensure that all San Franciscans have access to a thriving economy, Mayor Breed has invested in workforce development opportunities for local residents. This includes her Opportunities for All initiative, which is providing more than 4,000 paid internships for youth to gain the skills and experience that will propel them into their future careers, with a special focus on youth of color, who make up 95% of participants. Mayor Breed’s Dream Keeper Initiative is investing $60 million annually to address economic and other disparities facing San Francisco’s diverse Black communities. The Dream Keeper Initiative supports City and community-led programs that ensure that Black leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals continue to thrive in our city. Mayor Breed has also been committed to ensuring that low-income San Franciscans have access to crucial safety net programs and public benefits to meet their basic needs regardless of their socioeconomic status.

San Francisco’s housing and homelessness crises have disproportionately impacted our lowest income residents and our communities of color. Mayor Breed’s investments in her Homelessness Recovery Plan, as well as her efforts to build housing at all levels of affordability are in direct response to the racial and social disparities that have come to define our housing market and conditions on our streets.