As San Francisco’s Nov. 3 election nears, El Tecolote had the opportunity to sit down with mayoral candidate and Mission District community activist, Francisco Herrera. Born in the border town of Calexico in Southern California, the 52-year-old Herrera discusses the city’s current housing crisis, answers questions about his campaign and reveals his goals if he were to be elected mayor of San Francisco.
Why do you want to be the mayor of San Francisco?
It’s time for us to come together as a community. I’ve seen a lot of wonderful examples of people in the neighborhoods working to improve the city and continually I see city hall close its doors to the wisdom of our communities. And sure big companies, of course, they bring money and that’s great.
But until we’re able to listen to: the Muni bus drivers; the 5-year plan from the coalition of homelessness and plans from [the] housing rights committee of San Francisco, and the Homefulness project of Poor Magazine; [the] small business projects the 1400 block of Haight Ashbury have put together; the projects that have been made in the Mission; the folks [at the] Chinatown Community Development Center with Norman Fong and the Chinese Progression Association—until we’re able to bring those together, there’s really no progress.
I want to be mayor to bring that wisdom in a collective way to city hall, because I think the answers are in there, in the community.
We consistently find city hall open to big, corporate giants’ business and closed to community proposals and solutions.
What qualifies you to be the mayor of San Francisco?
For almost 30 years, I’ve worked here in San Francisco in the receiving end of bad policy and good policy. And I’ve been part in that creation. In 1989, I was part of the founding members of the San Francisco Day Labor program.
I’ve worked with Instituto Familiar de La Raza. With the Community Peace Initiative, in the late 1990s, we experienced almost two years of no killings, because we were able to move the city budget to provide for programs like midnight basketball, after school programming from 3-6 p.m. Those projects happened because we—from the ground level—pushed the city budget. Working with supervisors and mayors, I’ve done that work from the community level. But I’ve been part of that process that is budgetary and policy changing, that affects the common good. Some things didn’t go through, but some things did.
I believe I have the relationships with enough people from different communities to respond to those questions.
What would be your first priority as mayor of San Francisco?
The first priority is to bring our people back. By that I mean the city workers of San Francisco. Over half of the city workers cannot afford to live in San Francisco. You know what that’s creating? That’s creating the plantation big house, where our workers have no ability to decide democratically as to the condition of the city in which they work, because they can no longer live here.
Investors plan to create Manhattan out of San Francisco. What we’re seeing is a destruction and disruption of their [the displaced] democratic process. The people who live in another place have to vote on issues in a city they practically only sleep in.
First off is to identify those sites that we can regain for our working folks. In the Mission alone, the people who’ve put together Prop I—which I strongly, strongly support—have identified 13 sites where we can create up to 3,000 homes.
What are the critical issues facing San Francisco in the coming years?
It’s affordability. Accesibilidad!
Affordability isn’t just the price of rent. Affordability is how much milk costs, how much bread costs, how much tortillas cost. It’s the price of education. Affordability is being able to pay good, living wages—good wages to teachers, nurses and firefighters. It’s access to healthcare… clean parks and good benefits to city workers.
[It means] securing the commitment of corporations in community benefits agreements, where they agree to hire at least 40 percent of locals, and making sure they do hire locally.
What steps will you take to resolve those issues?
We cannot be naïve to think that the change of one mayor with a goal of people before profit is [enough]. There are patterns that have been set and structures created that support the devastation we see now. It’s important for us to realize that this takes time. We need to create an alliance across parties and ethnic and religious lines that have the wellness of San Francisco neighborhoods in mind.
As an activist, cultural worker and Mission District Latino, how do these factors contribute to your campaign?
Racism is really funny, because the dominant culture sees a Latino and says, “Oh, that guy is only for Latinos.” I think that we bring a very interesting dynamic that we’ve developed in the last 50 years with the Chicano movement and the Latin American struggles that have to do with transparency and collective decision making… The wisdom of our neighborhoods must be brought to city hall. Because of being a Latino that has experienced marginalization, it made me particularly sensitive… to collective decision-making.