Bilal Mahmood

• Office: DCCC, Assembly District 17
• Election Date: March 5, 2024
• Candidate: Bilal Mahmood
• Due Date: December 23, 2023
• Printable Version

Thank you for seeking GrowSF's endorsement for the March 5, 2024 Primary Election! GrowSF believes in a growing, beautiful, vibrant, healthy, safe, and prosperous city via common sense solutions and effective government.

The GrowSF endorsement committee will review all completed questionnaires and seek consensus on which candidates best align with our vision for San Francisco.

We ask that you please complete this questionnaire by December 23, 2023 so we have enough time to adequately review and discuss your answers.

Table of Contents

• Education
• Business
• Public Safety
• Housing
• Drugs
• Mental Health
• Public Transit
• General questions

Questions

Please mark the box that best aligns with your position. You may explain any position if you so desire.

Education

	Yes	No
Should all students in 8th grade have access to algebra, if they want it?	X
Should all students in 7th grade have access to algebra, if they want it?	X
Should all high school students have access to AP courses?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that promote making algebra available to 8th graders?	X
Did you support or oppose the recall of Board of Education members Collins, López, and Moliga? If you supported or opposed a subset, please specify below.	X

Explain why you did or did not support the recall of each member:

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Business

Should San Francisco…

	Yes	No
Reduce the time to obtain all permits to open a new business to no more than 3 months?	X
Reduce the cost of obtaining permits to open a new business?	X
Reduce the number of activities which must obtain permits, and expand the number of by-right activities?	X
Increase the number of available ABC permits?	X
Increase the number of available recreational marijuana permits?	X
Try to attract businesses of all sizes to the City?	X

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Public Safety

	Yes	No
Do you think that property crime in San Francisco is too high?	X
Do you support policies commonly referred to as "defund the police"?		X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that promote a fully-funded and fully-staffed police department?	X
Should police funding be from the general fund, rather than via special taxes and set-asides?
Did you support the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin?

Please explain why you did or did not support the recall of DA Chesa Boudin:

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Housing

	Yes	No
Is it too difficult to build market rate housing in San Francisco?	X
Is it too difficult to build subsidized housing in San Francisco?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that make it easier, faster, and/or cheaper to build market rate housing in San Francisco?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that make it easier, faster, and/or cheaper to build subsidized housing in San Francisco?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that would loosen the existing limits on height, density, and bulk for residential buildings? (ie taller, denser, and fewer/reduced setbacks)	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that would abolish the existing limits on height, density, and bulk for residential buildings?

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Drugs

	Yes	No
Should San Francisco arrest and prosecute fentanyl dealers?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that formally request help from the State and Federal governments to bolster our police force (both the officers and the investigators)?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies promoting "safe consumption" sites without altering existing laws and lax enforcement around open-air usage?
Should the Party adopt or support policies promoting "safe consumption" sites only if paired with zero-tolerance for open-air usage? (ie consuming drugs like fentanyl on the street would be illegal; and users would be taken to a recovery site until they are sober)

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Mental Health

	Yes	No
Should San Francisco place people who are experiencing mental health crises on the streets into involuntary mental health holds at psychiatric facilities?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies that facilitate the construction and operation of mental health facilities, and permit those facilities to treat patients involuntarily if they are deemed to be unable to care for themselves (as determined by a panel of psychiatric professionals)?	X

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

Public Transit

	Yes	No
Should SFMTA and BART conduct fare enforcement operations and prosecute fare evaders?	X
Should the Party adopt or support policies requiring SFMTA and BART to enforce fare payment?	X
Recent state funding requires Muni and BART to enforce fare payments in order to receive funding; do you agree with this requirement?	X

If you want to explain any positions above, please feel free:

General questions

What needs to change with the Party?

I am running to be an elected member of the DCCC to return the party to one focused on results, not excuses. For too long, we've become accustomed to political leadership in our city making excuses for not building enough housing, for not ensuring public safety, for not supporting our most vulnerable communities. We need new leadership that can lead with new ideas, while also collaborating with those we don't always agree with, if we are to ensure forward progress.

As a child of immigrants who currently rents and resides in the Tenderloin, I have dedicated my life to helping others with experience in both the public and private sectors - as a trained neuroscientist from Stanford, former policy analyst in the Obama Administration, and founder of both startups and philanthropic organizations in San Francisco. I have accordingly focused my policy initiatives from a place of innovation - supporting restaurant workers with a guaranteed income, rebuilding one of the first computer labs in Chinatown, and converting vacant office space into universities and student housing.

I also understand we must build bridges across San Francisco's political lines to get results, and have a track record of collaborating with activists, civil servants, and elected officials to shine a light on government corruption and champion legislation to address our housing and climate crises.

What are the top three issues facing San Francisco, and what would you like to see change?

The top 3 issues facing San Francisco are downtown recovery, homelessness, and public safety.

Our downtown economy is struggling due to vacant office space and a reduction in office workers, which has led to a devastating lack of patronage to local businesses and a feeling that our streets are less safe. I am proposing we do something different: convert downtown into an academic village, with a dozen university campuses, and 10,000 students permanently living here. I started the movement to bring a university to downtown San Francisco, and I will collaborate with city and state officials to pass legislation to streamline office to housing conversions that can support students and teachers to live here. Transforming our downtown into an academic village will bring patronage to the small businesses and nightlife, employ thousands of local workers, and help keep San Francisco a hub for technology, healthcare, and the arts.

With respect to homelessness, our city does not have a money problem. We have a bureaucracy and implementation problem. I will advocate for a Built for Zero System - a data driven public-private partnership that centralizes fragmented government departments into a coordinated effort, and has helped 14 US cities reach a level of functional zero homelessness. The system will use real-time data collection and consolidated support services delivered via Managed Care Hubs - one-stop mobile-shops that bring housing, jobs, and healthcare services to those who need them where they need them. We have the resources, it's time to deploy those resources with accountability so we can finally start to measure results and end the era of encampments.

Lastly, no city can become truly vibrant if we don't address the public safety crises on our streets. I wrote the SF Chronicle investigation that uncovered that a primary cause for the crisis is that over 20% of police and healthcare jobs are sitting vacant, with over $500 million going unspent every year because of bureaucratic systems that take 255 days to hire a single first responder. Leveraging my experience as a former software entrepreneur, I will push for legislation to fund the expansion of a Continuous Online On-Demand Testing System that has already proven to cut the time to hire to 100 days - enabling us to quickly hire the 1000 police officers, dispatchers, nurses, ambulance drivers we need to support those suffering on our streets and arrest the drug dealers who exploit them.

Tell us one thing you think needs to change in SF that the average voter wouldn't know about.

The reason it takes over 255 days on average to hire a single worker in San Francisco government - from ambulance drivers to nurses to police officers - is because for many of these positions we still make applicants take a paper exam that is proctored in person, once per month. A pilot study by the Mayor's Department of Human Resources found that if they shifted the exam to a "continuous online on-demand testing" platform, the time to hire could be reduced to 100 days. In the tech capital of the world, we should be striving to ensure that our government services are being run as effectively as the software companies we are host to.