Candidate for
Mayor; City of San Francisco

I am a tenant, a small business owner, a building contractor, a gay man, and a humanitarian. I am a college educated building contractor who has worked in San Francisco since 1975. I use basic common sense in developing solutions and have very good problem-solving skills. In my run for Mayor in 1999, I spent nine days on the streets and nights in our homeless shelters to begin to understand this very complicated problem. I rode MUNI for 72 hours straight to get publicity and to draw attention to an issue neglected by mayor Brown. I talked with riders and drivers about their frustrations and listened to their ideas to improve the system.

What I learned from these experienced is that the people on the street and on the bus know the problems of the system intimately and have many good ideas that need to be listened to and implemented by our next Mayor.

I believe that a visionary leader needs to have the courage not to take sides in angry disputes but to listen carefully to both sides and help to develop solutions that give all parties the things most important to them. In the rent control war, tenants want security and stable reasonable rent, landlords want income and the city wants properly maintained properties and increased property taxes. All this is possible.

It is not good enough to be a tenant activist, we need to build housing to solve the housing shortage that led to rent control.

We need to build new ultra-affordable housing and move long-term tenants out of rent controlled apartments and into a home of their own and return empty rental units back to the rental market. This will lower rents.

As a building contractor, I advocate that the City redefine "affordable housing" to mean housing that all San Franciscans can afford to buy. 70% of us who work here cannot afford "affordable" housing. We need to coin a new term: ultra-affordable, that all working people can afford. If the candidate who you support is talking about affordable housing, he or she is most likely NOT talking about building housing for you.

I advocate that the City allow only affordable, ultra-affordable housing and office space to be built on any land that the City has control over, including any redevelopment property, like Hunters Point shipyard.

"Let's begin to solve the real problems and stop putting Band-Aids on the symptoms." Jim Reid