A year since she stepped off the public stage and retreated to lick her wounds, former SF Mayor London Breed sat down for an interview with the New York Times.

It's perhaps notable that Breed didn't grant such an interview to the Chronicle — there is likely some bad blood there. But Breed sat down recently with Heather Knight, a former Chronicle columnist turned SF bureau chief for the Times, using her ersatz office these days at The Battery, to talk about what she's been up to this last year and how she is, in fact, more than a little miffed that Daniel Lurie is enjoying all the credit for a city on an upswing, when that upswing did arguably begin well before he took office.

As Breed puts it now to the Times, "I know that people think this happened overnight, but it definitely did not. This is my stuff, and I’m very proud of it."

There's no arguing with a grumpy electorate, and London Breed was probably, inescapably, the victim of a pandemic hangover and several years of negative headlines about everything from retail closures to homeless encampments. The encampment cleanups, which many decried as inhumane, most certainly occurred primarily on her watch, and if there has been anything positive to come from crackdowns on open drug use on the street, that started under her tenure as well.

But Lurie took office last January and enjoyed a string of good luck, and a city that was eager for change and a new face to attach to that change.

Breed concedes that perhaps Lurie is just a more convincing cheerleader, and has succeeded in his social media efforts especially. But the fact that he's a cheery white guy can only help.

"He is doing a good job of publicizing it, I think, better than I did, in terms of bragging about all this," Breed tells the Times.

She adds, "All of what’s happening in this city has everything to do with my administration. It’s so easy to attach a white face to the work of a Black person."

Political consultant Eric Jaye agrees that Breed likely laid the groundwork for much of what residents are giving Lurie credit for, and tells the Times that Breed's sometimes combative or negative tone might have cost her. As he puts it, "It’s absolutely true that many of the policies that are now bearing fruit predate [Lurie], but the tone that he has set, the relentless positivity that he’s brought to the job, is different."

Lurie's approval ratings are basically in line with what most mayors have in their first year, including Breed, according to a pollster. And we shouldn't discount the notion of him being an outsider in SF politics, arriving to shake things up, even if he is part of the centimillionaire class.

Breed, meanwhile, had a very different upbringing in the same city, being raised in the projects by her grandmother, with a mother who dealt drugs. And at this point she's seeking out her political next step, and living off her savings. (Knight points out that while she no longer has the $383,000 salary offered to modern mayors, Lurie is taking only $1 per year in salary, because he doesn't need it.)

She's apparently done some traveling, going to Italy, Portugal, and Ghana, and caught Beyonce's "Cowboy Carter" tour. She's taking meetings at the Battery, where she's now a paying member. And she reportedly received a stipend at a six-month "policy academy" program at the Aspen Institute, a DC think tank in Washington.

Lurie has been on a sort of premature victory lap, touting a "city on the rise" in his State of the City address Thursday and the declining crime rate, and he reportedly would not comment to the Times about whether Breed deserved more credit for any of this.

Such is politics, though, and sometimes it's truly thankless. Breed says she needs to put herself "out there" more in the coming year, so maybe we'll be seeing more of her, somewhere. Will that mean running for higher office? And if so, what office? She seemed to want to flirt with the idea of running for Nancy Pelosi's House seat before quickly backing off that idea last fall. So, we'll see what comes next.

Previously: London Breed Confirms She Is Thinking of Running for Pelosi's House Seat

Top image: San Francisco Mayor London Breed speaks on stage during Macy's 35th Annual Great Tree Lighting In San Francisco at Macy's Union Square on November 13, 2024 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for Macy's)