I’m sorry but you can’t sleep here

And a dozen other messages we need to deliver to San Francisco’s mayoral candidates

San Francisco is in a terrible mess. And at a crossroads, with a brilliant opportunity.

Mayor London Breed has survived so far, and will probably avoid a recall between now and the mayoral election in 2024, but she will face a new type of opposition candidate in the field.

San Francisco has reinvented itself many times in the past 100 years. It wasn’t always the summer of love here. The city was a conservative-leaning, blue collar community with an affluent minority made up of bankers, lawyers and doctors. The 1950’s beatnicks were a fringe group and had little influence on day to day life for most people, but they did create enough of a counter culture seed to welcome the first hippies, who arrived in droves from elsewhere and found a friendly, alternative and anti-war vibe that made them instantly fall in love and stay.

Fast forward, through the city’s late awakening to the tech revolution after Silicon Valley had quit making computers and was now shipping software and inventinr the cloud. No longer did…