‘We have work to do’: Safety, schools, housing top Breed priorities in 2022 ‘State of the City’

Addressing a crowd of city department heads and officials in the Mission Bay neighborhood, where thousands of new homes are currently being built, San Francisco Mayor London Breed covered topics including schools, public safety, housing and climate change in her State of The City address Wednesday.

Stressing the importance of “a well-run school system that puts kids first,” providing essential services to residents and accountability, Mayor London Breed focused on going back to basics.

The mayor said the Police Department is in need of more officers, saying police staffing is at a “crisis level.” There are 250 fewer officers compared to two years ago, Breed said, citing a independent study commissioned by The City.

We simply do not have the police staffing to meet the needs of a major city, especially as we welcome back workers and visitors. Fixing this starts with building our police academy classes.”

She added that Asian seniors are fearful of leaving their homes given recent physical attacks against the Asian and Pacific Islander communities, and families who live in the Tenderloin who are confronted by drug dealers and violence.

Breed also said The City has made progress toward alternatives to policing, including having street crisis response teams responding to nonviolent incidents, including people with mental disorders.

The mayor spoke about climate change and meeting The City’s goal of net zero emissions by 2040, saying getting people of ot cars and creating walkable neighborhoods is climate action, adding:

Completing our bus rapid transit project on Van Ness this month — finally — as well as dozens of quick-build projects to move buses faster and create protected bike lanes all across this City over the last three years. That is climate action.”

Breed said climate policy is also about housing that The City needs to build all types of housing, not just big projects such as ones at Mission Rock and Pier 70:

To do that, we need to break down the obstructionism that blocks housing at every turn.”

Breed’s latest attempt to cut red tape and build housing quicker through a proposed charter amendment was voted down by a Board of Supervisors committee last month. Instead, the mayor said she plans to put her proposal in front of voters in November.

The mayor will soon announce her picks of who will replace recalled school board members Gabriela López, Faauuga Moliga Alison M. Collins, saying it:

… is really one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”

Breed said “no one single appointment” is going to fix the last two years that students faced while not being in school in-person. The mayor last month announced her multi-year plan called the Children and Family Recovery Plan in supporting the youth and families as part of The City’s Covid-19 recovery plan.

On The City’s recovery plan for Covid-19, the mayor said:

We have work to do. Our recovery will not be quick, or easy But it will come. It is coming. San Francisco is coming back.”

Jerold Chinn

Jerold serves as a reporter and San Francisco Bureau Chief for SFBay covering transportation and occasionally City Hall and the Mayor's Office in San Francisco. His work on transportation has been recognized by the San Francisco Press Club. Born and raised in San Francisco, he graduated from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism. Jerold previously wrote for the San Francisco Public Press, a nonprofit, noncommercial news organization. When not reporting, you can find Jerold taking Muni to check out new places to eat in the city.