The Coalition On Homelessness was the unexpected boogeyman at Thursday night’s SF mayoral debate, but London Breed and Mark Farrell took plenty of heat for their own alleged corruption issues.

Thursday night was the fifth mayoral debate of the 2024 San Francisco mayoral race, and it will probably be the last. But it came on the immediate heels of yet another lavish spending scandal implicating a personal associate of Mayor Breed, plus allegations that candidate Mark Farrell tried to pull strings at City Hall to get permits expedited on his home renovations. So corruption allegations were sure to dominate this debate, and they did, in an hour-long KQED/San Francisco Chronicle debate that can be seen below.

Yet the best zinger of the night did not come from any of the candidates, but from KQED’s co-moderator Marisa Lagos. When pressing Farrell on his many campaign finance scandals that seem to border on being outright illegal, Farrell insisted that “Every single thing that I have ever done with my campaigns has been approved, vetted by, and signed off by my attorneys.”

To which Lagos shot back, “That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily legal though!” The audience howled with laughter, and the retort clearly threw Farrell off. (The response on his face at the 9:07 mark in that Youtube video is priceless.)

Still, Breed took heavy fire for corruption trouble too, notably the criminal sentences of her good friends Mohammed Nuru and former SFPUC chief Harlan Kelly. Lagos asked Breed very pointedly, “Are you willing to hold your friends accountable?”

Breed turned this into a dig at her opponents, saying that the work of these scandal-tinted departments also helped “People who don’t have angel investors, or weren’t born with silver spoons in their mouth.” She noted the city has 34,0000 employees, and “from time to time, we have had challenges with some of them.” She also noted that, for what it's worth, she’s appointed people like Dennis Herrera, Carmen Chu, and David Chiu, who have not had massive scandals.

Breed also pointed out that crime in SF is now lower than it was under Mark Fallell’s interim mayorship, which statistics say is true.

But Farrell insisted, “If you believe those stats. I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”

Lagos pressed Farrell on how there were more murders during his six-month tenure than Breed’s last six months. Farrell oddly started his response with, “During my time in office as [Board of Supervisors] budget chair, I partnered with Mayor Lee for four years.”

But he also touted the “higher staffing levels for police” on his term, and reiterated that “We need a new police chief.”

He said that as mayor, he would “push back against a police commission that is making it incredibly difficult for police officers to do their job on the streets of San Francisco every single day.”

Both before and after the debate, the moderate candidates ganged up on the Coalition on Homelessness and their lawsuit against encampment sweeps. Farrell went after them on Twitter hours before the debate saying, “they protested my house for clearing tent encampments,” (the Coalition disputes this), and Breed attacked them during the debate.

She called the Coalition “An organization funded by Daniel Lurie, an organization that continues to pay to put tents out on the streets so people can refuse the support that we are offering them.” Breed added that “We want to make sure that people are so uncomfortable that they take us up on our offer to go indoors.”

Lurie responded, “They are so scared of somebody coming from outside this broken system that has failed to deliver,” speaking of Breed and Farrell. “At every single level, they have failed. And now they’re trying to attack me. I can take it, but can you take four more years of it?”

Lurie too was pushed on his Tipping Point nonprofit, which absolutely failed at its goal of cutting chronic homelessness by 50%. Lagos cut into Lurie’s “outsider” image, noting that “you and your family are part of the financial old guard.”

Lurie twice repeated his claim that Tipping Point had gotten “40,000 people housed since 2015.” He got in a subtle dig that “We’ve always wished we had a stronger partner at the city,” and claimed they had successful homeless housing projects at 833 Bryant Street and 33 Gough Street.

“In my first six months, we’re going to stand up 1,500 emergency shelter beds, to make sure they’re safe,” Lurie said Thursday. “We’ve focused so much on harm reduction to the exclusion of getting people into treatment, and I will do that.”

But Breed took it to Lurie with harsh barbs. “Unlike some of my opponents on this stage, I actually have a job,” she said, and added of Lurie, “He hasn’t even been employed for the past five years. What does he know?”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin went after all three of them, hitting Farrell for allegedly "laundering money from [Recology] through a nonprofit that his wife was on the board of.” He nailed Breed on the Farrell home renovation permit issue (which Breed personally leaked to the press), calling out “London Breed expediting Mark Farrell’s permits.” And he torched Lurie on Tipping Point spending “$5 million on lavish charity parties for your wealthy friends.”

But Peskin may have won the whole exchange on housing, despite his reputation. “We need to reject the narrative of the real estate speculators and developers,” Peskin said. “I have voted to approve more housing at all income levels all over this city than every candidate on this stage combined, over 100,000 units.”

“I am a champion of affordable housing, they prefer luxury housing,” he alleged.

Though KQED’s Scott Schafer went there with Peskin’s history with alcohol, pressing Peskin over “drunken late night phone calls.”

“I’ve been elected five times by the good people of Chinatown and North Beach and the northeast corner of this city, and my colleagues have elected me three times to be president of the board,” Peskin responded. “There are many things that I have done in office that I am very proud of, and some that I am not proud of, but I’ve taken accountability for those issues.” He added that he’s “learned a lot from that experience of recovery.”

Supervisor Ahsha Safai hit Breed on saying that crime is down. “To consistently tell people that crime is down is gaslighting,” Safai charged. “Go tell that to the small businesses in my district. For the last three weeks, they have literally been broken into almost every night between 1 and 5 am.” He brought up the fatal shoving of a 74-year-old woman into a BART train, and said, “Crime is happening at a brazen level,” and that it “might be better on the numbers side, but people don’t feel it.”

And boy did he unload on Breed over the December 31, 2022 floods. “On New Year’s Eve, 2022, we had the worst flood in this city’s history,” Safai said. “This mayor got on a plane and went to go party in Las Vegas. That’s not what mayors do.”

Peskin complained to the Chronicle after the debate that Breed got most of the speaking time, which she did, because she was named by other candidates so many times that she got several rebuttals (she worked the moderators on this very skillfully). But with no more debates scheduled, this may have been the last chance for any candidate to shake up the race.

That is, unless there are more money and ethics scandals that break before the  November 5 election, and there probably will be.

Related: In First SF Mayoral Debate, Crowd’s Jeers are More Memorable Than Candidates’ Performances [SFist]

Image: San Francisco Chronicle via Youtube