London Breed needs a job, and she wants you to know that.
A year ago, she left her post as the 45th mayor of San Francisco — and its $383,000 salary — after losing her re-election bid to Daniel Lurie, the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Past mayors have used the office as a springboard. San Francisco’s 38th mayor, Dianne Feinstein, became a longtime U.S. senator who once chaired the Senate Rules Committee. The 42nd mayor, Gavin Newsom, is finishing his second term as California governor and has his sights on running for president.
Ms. Breed, 51, is still unemployed. She didn’t serve long enough to qualify for a municipal pension and health care benefits, and is living off her savings.
“I need to get myself out there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times.
Twelve months after Ms. Breed left office, San Francisco is on the rebound, fueled by an A.I. boom and the steady return of office workers. Crime and homeless encampments are down. Tourism is up. So is the optimism of San Franciscans.
Mr. Lurie, a political neophyte, has reaped the benefits of strong poll numbers and praise for the city’s turnaround.
It is common for former elected officials to resent their successors, especially if a prosperous stretch follows. And in the glow of San Francisco’s recovery, Ms. Breed has been largely forgotten as she has retreated to the political wilderness.
All of this raises a question: When a city comes back to life, who gets the credit?
“I know that people think this happened overnight, but it definitely did not,” Ms. Breed said. “This is my stuff, and I’m very proud of it. He is doing a good job of publicizing it, I think, better than I did, in terms of bragging about all this.”
Ms. Breed was the first Black woman to run San Francisco. She grew up in abject poverty, raised in public housing projects that were so violent that residents gave them the nickname “Outta Control.” Her grandmother took care of her while her mother was in and out of incarceration for drug dealing. She was the pride of her neighborhood when she graduated from college, and again when she interned in the office of Willie Brown, the city’s 41st mayor, and later ran the African American Art & Culture Complex.
She became mayor in 2018 after serving on the Board of Supervisors for more than five years. City residents gave her credit for steering San Francisco through the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and likely saving many lives, but they soured on her as the downtown core decayed and the fentanyl crisis exploded.
Ms. Breed said that losing to Mr. Lurie was “disappointing and sad” and that she needed a break after an exhausting tenure.
Over the past year, she traveled to Portugal, Italy and Ghana. She caught a stop of Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour. She buried her mother, Priscilla, who died after suffering a stroke. Ms. Breed received a stipend for training aspiring policymakers over six months at the Aspen Institute, a think tank in Washington. That ended last month.
Life is different now. She has no driver. No secretary. No staff of any kind after running a city government of 34,000 employees. She holds meetings, including a nearly two-hour interview with The Times, at the Battery, a downtown San Francisco social club she joined because she no longer has an office of her own.
The extent to which Ms. Breed can claim credit for the city’s momentum is unclear, but Eric Jaye, a longtime San Francisco political consultant, agreed that earlier policies laid much of the groundwork. He noted that Ms. Breed suffered politically because of her reputation for being negative and combative, in contrast to Mr. Lurie.
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“It’s absolutely true that many of the policies that are now bearing fruit predate him,” Mr. Jaye said, “but the tone that he has set, the relentless positivity that he’s brought to the job, is different.”
Ms. Breed and Mr. Lurie are both moderate Democrats, and the new mayor has continued a lot of the work that his predecessor started. In a city that has been marked by booms and busts since the Gold Rush, Ms. Breed was in charge during a bust, and Mr. Lurie is reveling in running a city that is booming again.
“Let’s go, San Francisco!” he says regularly in his Instagram videos, which cover topics from a San Francisco 49ers playoff win to a new burger joint opening in Union Square. His approval ratings far outpace Ms. Breed’s toward the end of her tenure, and voters have told pollsters that their optimism about the city has spiked.
Mr. Lurie, who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and takes a salary of $1 a year as mayor, said the focus on his vibe shift belies the governance changes he made in his first year. He said he brought together 20 department heads who meet with him weekly and now collaborate to solve San Francisco’s problems. He also said that he shows up all over the city, all the time.
“I’m not sitting in this building saying, ‘Oh, how’s it going out there?’ I’m out there,” he said. “People see that and experience that and understand that I’m going to be relentless in solving the problems they see every day.”
Ruth Bernstein, a senior principal at EMC Research who has conducted polls in San Francisco and California for 31 years, said that Mr. Lurie’s approval ratings were roughly in line with what previous mayors enjoyed in their first year in office, including Ms. Breed.
Ms. Breed said that she wanted Mr. Lurie to be successful. It’s just that it has been hard for her to see him get so much credit, she said, and she wondered if race was a factor.
“All of what’s happening in this city has everything to do with my administration,” she said. “It’s so easy to attach a white face to the work of a Black person.”
Ms. Breed said she was proud of her efforts to accelerate development, fill vacant storefronts by arranging lower rents for small businesses and bring in major conferences and sporting events.
She said she was especially proud that voters approved her ballot measure to equip the police department with technology that has helped to reduce car break-ins and other crimes.
At a downtown ribbon cutting for a Ukrainian cultural space this week, Mr. Lurie declined to say whether Ms. Breed deserved more credit than she had received. He also would not comment on her observation about race.
“I respect my predecessor,” he said. “This is a job that’s relentless, and I appreciate everybody who came before me.”
At Mr. Lurie’s State of the City address on Thursday, Ms. Breed sat in the front row between Mr. Brown, the former mayor, and Brooke Jenkins, the city’s district attorney.
Mr. Lurie declared that San Francisco was on the path to becoming “the greatest city in the world,” and received loud applause and a couple of standing ovations during his speech.
“For the first time in five years,” he said, “San Franciscans believe we’re moving in the right direction.”
Ms. Breed noted afterward that the address was “pretty good” but had “a few inaccuracies.”
Then, she was off.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
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