San Francisco’s District 8 supervisor candidates debated housing, public safety, and homelessness Tuesday evening at the Commonwealth Club, against the backdrop of former front-runner Manny Yekutiel’s withdrawal from the race after multiple allegations of sexual assault. Yekutiel has denied the allegations. The remaining candidates — Gary McCoy, Michael Nguyen, and Darshini Patel — are vying to represent a district that includes the Castro, Noe Valley, Glen Park, Diamond Heights, the Upper Haight, and Cole Valley.
KQED’s Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos moderated the debate, with San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung serving as M.C. Democrats organized the event in the five days after Yekutiel’s departure as a kind of good-faith “make-good.” It had endorsed Yekutiel before endorsing McCoy in his place.
Many of Yekutiel’s former supporters, including incumbent Supervisor and Board President Rafael Mandelman, have also backed McCoy.
The debate highlighted the race’s central tensions: affordability, where and how to build housing, street safety, neighborhood businesses and responses to homelessness and public drug use. The candidates largely agreed on the need for more housing, better infrastructure, action on vacant storefronts, and an improved behavioral health system. They differed on the role of government, the balance between enforcement and treatment, surveillance and privacy, and the political relationships needed to get things done at City Hall.
Finger-pointing and political contamination
Political alliances and endorsements were, as usual, a particular point of contention. It just would not be a San Francisco political debate without the usual litmus tests and pointing out of political cooties.
Nguyen and Patel suggested that McCoy was shifting toward the center to accommodate his new supporters. McCoy and Nguyen, meanwhile, challenged Patel over an unsolicited endorsement from the centrist group GrowSF. She said she hadn’t been consulted, she learned of it from a reporter, and had already declined the endorsement. She added that it complicated her effort to present herself as a grassroots candidate.
McCoy asked whether Patel would disavow a GrowSF mailer that he said misrepresented his positions. Patel said she had not seen it but agreed to disavow it. She also noted that GrowSF had apparently spent about $40,000 supporting her candidacy, while union political action committees had spent nearly $450,000 supporting McCoy.
Housing and affordability
McCoy said the city should encourage housing construction at every income level while supporting subsidized housing near the Glen Park BART station and inclusionary housing at Church and Market streets. His support for permanent supportive housing drew on his own experience.
I went from the streets to shelters, to treatment, to permanent supportive housing, to subsidized housing. There was a full ladder out of homelessness for me. I currently live in a market-rate, two-bedroom apartment.
— Gary McCoy
Patel called for more housing near high-frequency transit and proposed converting existing multifamily buildings into social housing.
“There are many locations throughout District 8, even in Noe Valley, that are existing multiunit family homes that are empty, that have been on sale for six months to 18 months, that we could convert into this type of affordable housing,” she said.
She also proposed assigning a staff member in her office to address failures in government processes, including permitting.
Nguyen argued that the problem was funding, not construction. He said $25.1 billion would be needed to fund roughly 12,600 affordable housing units already in the planning pipeline. He proposed closing a corporate loophole in Proposition 13 and imposing a local income tax on people earning more than $100 million annually. He also opposed recent reductions in inclusionary housing requirements.
Public safety and homelessness
Nguyen gave the city’s public safety response a “C-minus,” describing its handling of behavioral health problems on the streets as “a big, hot mess.” He called for restoring district public safety liaisons and adopting what he called a “four pillars” approach, with prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and enforcement funded equally and shaped by community consensus.
Patel questioned how much progress Mayor Daniel Lurie had made in improving street conditions.
“I don’t know if you’ve been to Mission Street lately, but it’s really bad,” she said. “Every time I go to a Castro Merchants Association meeting, I hear about the people who are now moving into Upper Market. I think it depends on where you look in the city, and some areas look better than others. But looking better is different than being better.”
Patel supported California’s CARE Court program but said its reach and effectiveness were limited. Some people with serious mental health problems do not qualify, she said, while shortages of treatment beds and shelter capacity undermine the system. She cited Lurie’s unsuccessful promise to add 1,500 shelter beds and questioned why the city had struggled to deliver the care it says is needed.
“Why is it so difficult to provide the care that we all constantly talk about is needed everywhere?”
— Darshini Patel
McCoy recounted being assaulted at Civic Center Plaza in broad daylight while speaking by phone with Mandelman.
“It took over 38 minutes for the cops to show up,” he said. “This was about three years ago. And that’s unacceptable.”
He called for fully staffing the Police Department to improve response times and reduce overtime, as well as creating what he called “behavioral health campuses” to reduce waits when first responders bring people to emergency departments.
McCoy, who as policy chief for the harm-reduction nonprofit HealthRight360, championed the controversial Tenderloin Linkage Center during the London Breed administration, also pointed to Los Angeles’s “Reaching the 95 percent” initiative, which uses low-barrier, client-centered treatment and does not require abstinence, as a model for San Francisco.
“It modernizes and changes the way treatment looks and works for people,” he said. “It gives them second chances without discharging them to the street; if they do return to use, it incentivizes them to go into treatment.” He also supported restoring clinicians and peer navigators to street-response teams.
Surveillance and civil liberties
McCoy supports drones but said he would eliminate Flock license plate-reading cameras “on day one” unless the city strengthened privacy protections. He proposed cutting data retention from 365 days to 30. Mayor Lurie announced new rules along similar lines last month, along with proposed state legislation to tighten penalties for data misuse. The Voice of San Francisco previously reported on the changes.
Nguyen opposed both Flock cameras and police drones.
“I am the only candidate on this stage that is against Flock, against drones … our civil liberties, once you get them, once you lose them, they’re gone forever.”
— Michael Nguyen
Patel distinguished between surveillance technologies. She supported traffic-safety cameras and the city’s drone program but opposed automated license-plate readers.
Vacant storefronts
Patel called for stronger enforcement of the vacant storefront tax, with different rules for small and large property owners. She also proposed creating a Zillow-like database for commercial properties to give prospective businesses more negotiating power.
Nguyen urged the city to expand Vacant to Vibrant, an S.F. New Deal program that pairs businesses, artists, and nonprofits with property owners to turn empty storefronts into temporary pop-ups. He proposed extending the program’s timeframe from three months to two years in District 8, along with more aggressive legislation compelling commercial landlords to “use or lose” their properties.
McCoy said the tax’s reliance on landlords to report their own vacancies was a fundamental weakness. He proposed hiring more enforcement staff, conducting independent vacancy surveys, and increasing taxes on owners with multiple empty storefronts. He also suggested incentives for artists and entertainers to use vacant spaces temporarily.
Working with Lurie
Asked how they would balance cooperation with the mayor against the Board of Supervisors’ oversight responsibilities, the candidates again offered different approaches.
Patel emphasized the board’s role as a check on executive power. Questioning the mayor’s decisions, she said, should be understood as a necessary part of governance, not an act of hostility.
“Questioning should not be viewed as something aggressive or antagonistic,” she said.
She said supervisors must scrutinize budget allocations, departmental restructuring, and administrative decisions to ensure they serve residents.
Nguyen stressed coalition-building and consensus, citing his work on the city’s LGBTQI+ advisory committee and the Democratic County Central Committee as evidence that he could work across political divides while defending progressive priorities. He described himself as an independent voice who would put neighborhood interests first.
McCoy emphasized his established relationships with elected officials and community organizations. He said he was proud to have the support of 10 of the 11 sitting supervisors, arguing that those relationships demonstrated his ability to work with people who did not always share his views.
He said he would bring the same collaborative approach to working with Lurie while remaining accountable to District 8 residents.
“We have been able to go into a room with each other, have a conversation, and make sure we’re doing the same thing by listening to the needs of the community, and having a result that, uh, everyone is either satisfied with or where everybody is pissed about. Either way, (you know) you’ve done the right job, Right?”
