Aaron Peskin
for Mayor

Good morning.

It’s wonderful to see so many friends here in Portsmouth Square, the heart of San Francisco’s Chinese community and the birthplace of our City.

Thank you so much to each and every one of you for coming.

And thank you Mr. Wing Hoo Leung for your kind introduction.

Before I begin, I have to note – it appears that the strategy of our opponents is to drown out any voice they disagree with. I believe San Francisco deserves a discussion about our future – not a shouting match.

Let’s be clear. These are the angry voices of a vocal minority, amplified by the money of billionaires, who are deadly afraid to have San Francisco hear any voice but their own.

I can’t really understand what they are saying, but if they are calling names – believe me, I’ve been called worse. But it’s never stopped me from fighting for the city I love.

And, well, I don’t have total recall – but I believe the last person we called the Terminator went on to become Governor of California.

We’re here today because we all love San Francisco and we know our city is struggling.

We are a city in need of recovery. And recovery is something I know a little about.

I know that recovery is hard work. It’s definitely not easy.

I know recovery is not about beating yourself up. It’s actually about loving yourself and accepting the love from those around you. I’m thinking about you, Nancy.

And I know that recovery is not something you do alone. You do it together. And recovery only works when we are honest with ourselves and each other.

And I know that recovery is not about anger and hatred. It’s not about harboring grudges or pursuing petty vendettas. To recover, you need to be firm, and draw clear lines – but always stay compassionate.

I am so grateful to have received the support I needed to recover and become sober. I honestly wouldn’t be standing here today without it. And it has inspired me to dedicate the next chapter of my life to the recovery of this city.

That is why I am announcing my candidacy for Mayor today.

I will be a Mayor who loves this city, and doesn’t beat up on it for political gain.

A Mayor who works for everyday San Franciscans and their neighborhoods, not just the well-to-do and the well-connected.

And I will be a hands-on Mayor, using my 25 years of governmental know-how to once again make San Francisco the city that knows how.

I was blessed to be born into a family of healers.

My father was a clinical psychologist who taught at San Francisco State and helped many people including holocaust survivors and their children. My mother - who is sitting right here - is a social worker who worked with survivors of trauma and abuse. My parents taught me that we can devote ourselves to ending intergenerational trauma. That healing is possible.

The first step towards healing San Francisco is to make the collective decision to heal ourselves. This means working together instead of fighting. It means truly addressing crime, drug overdoses and homelessness – not just weaponizing them for political campaigns.

For 25 years, I have demonstrated the ability to bring people together, achieve consensus on the toughest issues, and move the city forward. And as Mayor, that’s exactly what I will do.

Let’s talk first about crime and public safety. It’s not enough to make people safe… We have to make people feel safe, too.

But what we have seen from this administration and its allies is an effort to make people feel afraid, for their own political gain.

Right here in this neighborhood, I have stood up for safety. Stood up against hate crimes. Brought Cantonese-speaking foot patrols to walk the beat. Expanded community ambassadors and strengthened pedestrian safety.

That’s what every neighborhood in this city deserves.

For me, public safety is a progressive value. I voted to support increased police budgets, police overtime, greater police staffing, and an emergency declaration in the Tenderloin. And I was the first to call for the creation of the Drug Market Agency Coordination Center that has been operating since last Summer, and is getting real results.

Let me be clear: I support arresting drug dealers and holding them accountable. But arresting drug users, and doing nothing more, is a cynical and dangerous policy that results in more overdoses, and not more treatment for addiction.

As Mayor, I will adopt the philosophy of my former kindergarten classmate, the current Vice President of the United States Kamala Harris… I will be smart on crime.

First, we need more staff –additional police on the street walking beats, more medics, emergency room nurses, mental health providers, drug treatment specialists, and 911 call operators who are also essential in keeping us safe.

This isn’t just about funding – it’s about digging deep into the broken structures of government and fixing them from the inside out.

I will create a schools to officers pipeline to recruit people directly from our communities into the police force, so that students get a college education and our neighborhoods are kept safe by police officers who understand them and respect them.

And I will finally establish citywide community policing, that has been long-promised but never realized with foot patrols and community ambassadors in every neighborhood. I have worked a quarter of a century with the incredible officers on the beat in Central Station, and know first-hand how effective community policing can be.

But while we focus on crime in the streets, we must also address criminality and corruption in our City government. Every crime of corruption is a crime against taxpayers, a crime against city services, and a crime against the public trust.

I am proud to have fought bribery, embezzlement and fraud in city government my entire career. As Mayor, I will establish a new tool for fighting corruption and cleaning up City Hall – an Inspector General, under the Controller, with the power of subpoena and investigation.

Homelessness is another place where we need to come together and heal our city.

To address homelessness, we have to first admit the truth: our crisis of homelessness doesn’t start at the bottom, on the streets. It starts at the top, with a lack of leadership.

Hundreds of supportive housing units lay vacant. Millions of dollars wasted. Not enough coordination. Not enough accountability.

It is not leadership to keep finding other people to blame for homelessness. They’ve blamed compassion. They’ve blamed non-profits. They’ve blamed progressives. They’ve blamed judges. But at the end of the day, the buck stops with the Mayor.

My approach to homelessness will be based on four pillars: prevention, shelter, treatment and housing.

Prevention and shelter are critical. We often hear that substance abuse and mental health problems cause homelessness. But just as often, these problems only become acute after people lose their homes and are forced to the streets.

By keeping people housed, we can stop the downward spiral before it happens. We showed during the pandemic that rent relief and eviction protection keep at-risk individuals safely in their homes. Yet as we speak, millions of dollars that could be spent on this effort are not being used. I will change that.

We must also protect, strengthen and expand rent control.

Rent control is a lifeline.

It stops unfair evictions and limits rent increases. It helps those at risk of homelessness stay in their homes. And it makes this city affordable to poets, artists, musicians, writers and dreamers. To students and hotel workers. To immigrants and struggling families. To teachers and Muni operators and to the people who work in the service and tourism sectors that are so important in our city.

And we have a chance to expand rent control across California this November by voting to eliminate Costa Hawkins Act. If it is successful, as Mayor, I will immediately expand rent control to the 40% of San Francisco tenants who don’t benefit from it today because of Costa Hawkins.

Because every tenant deserves the same protection.

And I will work to outlaw the demolition of rent-controlled housing unless it is replaced with new rent controlled housing.

As Supervisor, I showed that we can expand our shelter capacity. We brought the first transitional aged youth shelter in the city right here to District 3. We acquired hundreds of units of permanent supportive housing.

As Mayor, I will expand our shelter capacity by at least 2,000 additional shelter beds. We currently have shelter beds for less than half of the homeless population on our streets. New York City, by contrast, has shelter beds for 85%.

Without shelter beds, the goal of clearing tent encampments is performative cruelty and an empty promise. If there is no place for people to shelter, they will just keep coming back.

And with shelter comes the opportunity for treatment. We must dramatically expand the number of treatment beds and staffing for substance abuse and behavioral health. I know and I have seen that there are people on our streets who require involuntary intervention to be helped. I support conservatorship laws, and I encourage people to seek treatment – like I have – but that’s just another empty promise if we are forcing people into treatment that simply doesn’t exist.

The final pillar is to build affordable housing. The State of California has said that San Francisco must build 46,000 units of affordable housing in the next eight years. 46,000 units. This requirement – not the 36,000 market rate homes also required – will be the most difficult, and the most important, to achieve.

I led our first affordable housing bond in five years, Proposition A, in the March Primary, which will provide homes for 4,500 working San Franciscans and which was embraced by over 70% of San Francisco voters.

And I will campaign this November for the regional housing bond which could house four times as many San Franciscans as Prop A.

And I will do something that has never been done in San Francisco before. I will launch a Marshall Plan for middle class housing – for our union brothers and sisters, the teachers, nurses, firefighters and families who don’t qualify for low-income housing but can’t afford market rate luxury housing. Using tax deferred financing that won’t raise taxes, we can build affordable homes for at least 15,000 middle class San Franciscans – the heart and soul of our city.

There are those who claim we don’t need to focus on affordable housing. Who advocate just for more and more and more luxury housing. Who tell us that some time, somewhere in the far distant future, these luxury homes affordable only for the rich will magically become affordable for the rest of us.

It’s rubbish. In the Reagan era it was called trickle-down economics. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. It doesn’t work because it just boils down to deregulation for private developers, and there is no profit in building affordable homes.

As Supervisor, I have consistently been pro-housing. I have not just voted for, but led, rezoning of our Eastern Neighborhoods that allowed for 10,000 new homes. I have led and joined campaigns to open housing opportunities in the Hunters Point Shipyard, Pier 70, Mission Rock, Rincon Hill, Central Soma and Western Soma.

If you look at my record, rather than listen to my billionaire and real estate-funded critics, you will see that I have personally voted to increase housing capacity in this city by over 100,000 homes.

And as Mayor, I will continue to support housing at all income levels. The state requires us to approve 36,000 market rate homes in the next 8 years, and I will lead the efforts to get that job done. And I will say, if you look at the candidates running for Mayor, I am the candidate who is actually most likely – not least likely – to build the most housing this city possibly can. Why? Because I know how to bring people together and forge consensus.

But as a neighborhood leader who believes that the quality of life in San Francisco is based in the diversity and beauty of our neighborhoods, I will also fight every day to ensure that communities have a say about what happens to their neighborhoods.

The archipelago of our neighborhoods and cultural districts is what makes the tapestry of San Francisco so rich. Their future should not be decided by unaccountable planners, real estate speculators and Sacramento special interests.

We can be and we must be both pro-housing and pro-neighborhood. We can maintain the cultural, architectural, natural and historical beauty we love and still build housing. We don’t have to destroy our city to save it.

Our neighborhoods and cultural districts must also be centered in our plans for economic recovery. I am today leading efforts for tax reform that will reduce the burden of taxes on small businesses, helping them thrive and lift up the neighborhoods they serve.

While economic recovery can’t just be about downtown and the financial district, we can bring downtown back to life. It starts by making downtown a neighborhood. I have already been working to make it easier to convert office buildings to housing. But so much more can be done. We can bring housing to Union Square, encourage arts and culture at Yerba Buena and downtown, and envision a string of downtown and shoreline parks that will be treasures for those who live near and far away, from Aquatic Park, where I swim in the Bay many mornings, all the way to Hunters Point.

And speaking of the Embarcadero, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the single biggest threat to the future of San Francisco – climate change.

Where we stand today is not far from where the Bay’s edge used to be. Then it was filled and downtown was built. But if we are not prepared, the water will come back again – and that will be a disaster.

I am a lifelong environmentalist who has helped conserve thousands and thousands of acres of wilderness, and to this day continue to run a non-profit which secures water rights for Native Americans in the West like the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe in Nevada.

As Mayor, I will ensure that San Francisco is resilient against rising seas. We are surrounded by water on three sides. Climate change will be a top priority for me. It is the imperative of our time.

This is just some of my vision to help the city we love.

There will be many, many more.

We will run a citywide, grassroots campaign. In every neighborhood, every community, and every corner of this city.

I intend to listen to the voters I meet, and bring their ideas for recovery into our campaign.

Because that is the only way I know how to fight for this city that we all love so much.

I have no doubt that this will be a difficult campaign. Most of my opponents have at least one billionaire on their side – if not more. This handful of billionaires pouring millions of dollars of dark money into ugly smear campaigns threaten to destroy much of what makes this a unique, vibrant and magical city.

And while I thankfully don’t have any billionaires on my side, I have you.

And I ask you to join with me, to fight with me, to save our city without sacrificing our values.

So please – look around you. There are volunteers here today with window signs. I want every one of you to take five. One for you – and four for your friends and neighbors.

I want you to sign up to volunteer. I want you to become a precinct captain.

And please, please donate. We need your financial help, and remember every dollar you give is matched 6 to 1 by public financing.

Our website is Aaron2024.com. That’s Aaron with 2 A’s! Go there, and sign up to help this campaign. Or go to the tables behind you.

Remember, democracy is on the ballot in November as we all must work to defeat Donald Trump and his band of insurrectionists, but the future of San Francisco is on the ballot as well.

So let’s fight together to save what’s special about San Francisco and make it the city that knows how again.

Thank you. Let’s get to work.