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Transcription of our conversation with Sachin Agarwal and Steven Buss, Co-Founders of GrowSF.
Immad Akhund (00:49):
Welcome to the Curiosity Podcast, where we go deep on a wide variety of technical topics with the smartest leaders in the world. I'm Immad Akhund. I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Mercury.
Rajat Suri (00:58):
And I'm Raj Suri. I'm the Co-Founder of Lima, Presto, and Lyft. And today we're going to talk to Sachin Agarwal and Steven Buss about their organization GrowSF, a nonprofit looking to change the policy in politics of San Francisco. And this was a really fascinating conversation on a very important topic that has gained, I would say international interest. The trajectory of San Francisco gets a lot of attention from everyone these days. Immad, what were you interested to talk to Sachin and Steven about?
Immad Akhund (01:31):
My kids just got into a new school in San Francisco, so I was doing this matriculation at the school and they were like, you are the year of 2036. And after I was like, wow, I've never made a 13 year commitment before, but it really made me go, okay, if I'm living in San Francisco for that long, I really should. And it's clearly got so many broken issues about it that are political in nature. So it really made me go, okay, I should really care about this. And at that point, I did go to one of these GrowSF events and I thought Sachin and Steven just really have a very genuine common sense approach to this. And I thought we could learn a lot by having them on, and it was a good chat.
Rajat Suri (02:13):
I was always curious about how do cities function? How do they make decisions? The story of San Francisco is one of a relatively small group of people getting a chance to actually have a huge influence in how the city is run. And the city has a lot of very clear problems. And so I've never chosen to move to San Francisco. I live in Los Alto. It's a small city next to Palo Alto and Stanford and I have deliberately not chosen. I mean most of my peers, including you, have moved to San Francisco and lived there. And we made a choice not to go there because of the issues that were so evident, some of the safety issues, the crime, the homelessness, et cetera. And we're like, well, that's not a place we want to raise our kids. And the questions always come to my mind, why is that The Bay Area is growing so fast, there's so much money here, there's so much smart people moving here. Why the juxtaposition between the city of the future or the area of the future, Silicon Valley and then San Francisco, which seems like it's from sometimes feels like a third world country.
Immad Akhund (03:16):
There's this idea of supply and demand. And because San Francisco is such a, the weather is just so good. It's such a picturesque place. There's so much opportunity in terms of jobs and wealth that the bar, you have to make the city so bad to reduce the demand in another city. If it function at all, like San Francisco, no one would move it. But San Francisco has so many good things, and I love living here that it just creates this super high demand for people moving in that the city can perform so much worse that it doesn't have a market function for it, which Sarin and Steven kind of touched on as well, but there's still people living here. I'm living here, I'm choosing to live here. There's nothing forcing me to do that. So the pain is worth the benefits, I guess, but it would really be really nice if we just had the benefits without the pain.
Rajat Suri (04:12):
No, absolutely. Yeah, I can totally see it. I mean, it is a beautiful city and we love showing it off to visitors. It deserves a real shot at being well governed. So excited to talk to Sachin and Steven and we'll welcome them here right now.
Immad Akhund (04:29):
Excited to have you both here. I think it's really cool that you are really trying to improve San Francisco. A lot of people just complain and sit back and don't do anything about it. So I live in San Francisco, so I'm really glad some people are doing more than just sitting back and complaining. I'd love to hear you started a while ago. So what got you really frustrated and over this hump to go like, okay, we're going to actually do something about it.
Sachin Agarwal (04:54):
So basically my background, I was in tech for 20 years and a few years ago my wife and I decided that we're going to raise our kids in the city. There's no other place I'd rather live than San Francisco. And so started to dig in to understand how does our government operate? Why is the city off track? So it seemed like a few years ago things had kind of veered in a different direction and when we decided we got to invest the time and the effort to do something about it, and through that process I met Steven and we got to know each other and we had a shared vision.
Immad Akhund (05:24):
Which year ago was this?
Sachin Agarwal (05:25):
I first started getting involved end of 2019, and then it was 2020 that Steven and I met each other. And actually it was during pandemic, so we didn't actually even meet for a long time. It was a lot of late night phone calls and just chatting through what's going on in San Francisco.
Immad Akhund (05:40):
Would you say there was any one specific event or something that happened in San Francisco? You were like, oh my God, we got to do something about this for either of you?
Sachin Agarwal (05:47):
It was November, 2019, Dean Preston won by 120 some votes and Chesa Boudin won by a couple of thousand votes and people on Twitter were pissed and I'm like, oh my God, it's too late to be pissed. Now we had to do something before we lose another election.
Immad Akhund (06:05):
One weird thing is I'm from London originally, I don't feel like I cared at all about London governance. And when I moved to San Francisco, I moved in 2007. I don't think anyone really talked about what is the local city governance. And I feel like that's maybe part of the problem, right? People don't care. And then the people, some extreme set of the population does care and then you end up at extreme politicians. Is that roughly why we are in this situation?
Steven Buss (06:37):
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I can't speak to the uk, but at least in America, the nationalization of politics has moved the focus away from local governance to national governments. And when you vote for president, yeah, it matters. Every vote matters, but in California it doesn't matter because California is definitely going to vote for the Democrat. So why even pay attention to national politics here? I tell friends and supporters. If it's not happening in San Francisco, I don't even know about it. And I take that super focused approach to city hall, to local government. I think Sachin does the same, and I think it's important that we fix San Francisco, we focus on local issues that we actually have the ability to fix and stop electing people based on national slogans. Someone who ran recently was running on Medicare for all, which you absolutely cannot do at the San Francisco level. So why is this part of your campaign?
Immad Akhund (07:46):
Oh, so when you're saying nationalization, you're not just saying people care about national stuff, there's actual politicians running on national issues that they have no power to change in the role that they're running for.
Steven Buss (07:57):
Exactly, exactly. Because voters have become, because we pay so much attention to national politics, we've become so focused on saying the right national message and ignoring, I'm going to make sure that city hall is less corrupt or I'm going to make sure that the streets get cleaned. No one talks about that until now. Now they're talking about it because GrowSF and our aligned organizations, our allies are pushing so hard on let's fix San Francisco.
Sachin Agarwal (08:25):
Just to give a little background on San Francisco government, what we've identified all the problems that you see in the city around housing development or homelessness or fentanyl dealers, they're all policy decisions. And the people who are in power in San Francisco, they're the board of supervisors and there's 11 board of supervisors that vote on all of these policies. And especially up until a few years ago, most people in San Francisco couldn't even tell you who their supervisor was or who they had voted for. And so for us, we actually see this as a really simple problem in that most people want common sense outcomes in San Francisco and they just need to know which 11 people to vote for. And if we just do that, the city will turn itself around.
Rajat Suri (09:07):
That's really interesting that people are just so unaware of their local city politics. I live just south of San Francisco and Los Altos, and I'll say people are very politically active here in Los Altos. It's a small town, 20,000 people, and there's just way more, I would say activity, political activity here. And people care a lot about even the smallest things that happen, like putting humps on a road is a big political issue here, like speed bumps, everything. Everything is a political issue here, and it takes a relatively small group of people to actually change policy in a big way. I would love to understand why that is.
Immad Akhund (09:44):
Raj was fighting against the pickleball. Don't forget your pickleball story, Raj.
Rajat Suri (09:49):
I got involved with city politics because their tennis court that they were changing to pickleball and there were only a few tennis sports here. So I'm a tennis player, I play tennis, wanted to make sure still I'm with you.
Immad Akhund (09:59):
I'm also tennis. God, Steven's might defend the pickleball player.
Rajat Suri (10:01):
Pickleball is good too. It's just like don't destroy the tennis court. It's like, so yeah, I've gotten my small taste of the local politics and I realize it affects you in a big way. But I'm curious, why do you think San Francisco in particular, what challenges do you think San Francisco has in particular? Because do you think it's part of the culture, like a lot of young people moving to the city who are less engaged or have less of a stake in the future of the city versus maybe homeowners, et cetera? Why? What challenges have you faced in making people aware and making people care about the politics of the city?
Steven Buss (10:34):
I think San Francisco suffers from Dutch disease or the resource curse. So this is a thing in international development where a country with lots of natural resources tends to develop extractive institutions rather than strong institutions that will build human capital and the development of people and civic society. So anyway, San Francisco, we are such an epicenter of tech innovation and wealth that the city has shifted from a nurturing institution to an extractive institution where there's so much wealth being generated, the city can capture, it doesn't actually have to deliver good outcomes because the money's going to flow basically in spite of San Francisco government. And I think what we've seen, and the reason this is all happening now is the pandemic disrupted the free flow of capital in the city hall, and that's when people started to notice, oh, things are getting bad, things are getting worse, and we don't have competent leadership.
(11:50):
So the pandemic was a bit of a blessing and a curse, mostly a curse, but it did wake people up to realize we have a city government incapable of running the basics of city, which is keep streets clean, keep people safe, have good education. I like to click around on Zillow. I'm always Barbie dream house shopping, and I'll click on these seven and 10 million homes just to look around. And the three schools in the area are one out of 10, three out of 10, two out of 10. Well, I do understand how we got here. We voted for people who are incapable of running an enterprise, who are focused on virtue signaling and saying the right things and not delivering outcomes. So all that is to say San Francisco's unique problems is that we had it too easy, the government didn't have to do a good job, but now that things have turned around and tech industries having layoffs, tourism has been severely impacted from Covid, it's highlighted the fissures, the weaknesses in local government. So there's nothing specific about the geography of the city or even the people who live here. San Francisco is just like any other city. The only thing that led to our bad outcomes was it was easy money and the city didn't have to deliver.
Sachin Agarwal (13:13):
Yeah, I'll add to that. I think that San Francisco might be a little unique in that local elections are really important and really confusing here. Basically we're a city of Democrats, and so for most down ballot races for these supervisor races, you've got a Democrat against a Democrat. And it's really hard to know what the difference between these two folks, what the differences are and who's actually focused on outcomes and who's focused on fixing the city and moving it forward versus who's a NIMBY who wants to hold it back and wants to shut the doors to immigrants and businesses and tech companies. And what happened over the last 10, 15 years is that the kind of far left anti-growth folks, they took over the leadership of the Democratic Party, the local San Francisco Democratic Party, and they created a voter guide called League of Pissed Off Voters, which is a great brand, but they basically endorsed all the anti-growth folks and they were winning, and so it was very smart on their part.
(14:09):
I mean, that's politics. And so now our job is basically to counter that and to say, look, we are going to break it down for you. If you want Nimbyism and anti-growth, sure you can vote with them, but if you want the best public schools in the country and if you want more housing growth, so rent comes down and you want to welcome the tech community and make it easier for small businesses, then this is how you should vote. You should follow the Garf voter guide. And it really just is that simple. So I do think it was like this Democrat versus Democrat dynamic here that's made it really tough.
Immad Akhund (14:39):
I think the whole supervisor thing is really confusing. It's not just the mayor that I'm voting for. It's some tiny area in San Francisco that has a tiny number of voters that can skew something that happens, has a, I mean you want to have smallish kind of governments, but it's a weird construct because you have these sub regions that are then voting one person who's going to affect all of San Francisco. It, it's just too much brainpower to I figure out what the hell's going on. Is it like a Congress person basically is like a representative? Yes, but there's 13 of them and San Francisco's a small place. Let's just have one mayor that has most of the power or oh, whatever. They could have three people there. But it's just weird to have these sub regions decide these district things.
Steven Buss (15:30):
San Francisco, it has a different kind of structure than basically any other city in California because San Francisco is a city in a county. Every county has a board of supervisors, and San Francisco is no different. So we have 11 supervisors, and if you go over to Alameda County, you've got, I don't know, several cities there. You've got Oakland, Berkeley, et cetera, but there's still only the board of supervisors for Alameda County. And then each city has their own a city council. So the county level supervisors, they're designed to set policies that benefit the region as a whole, and so they have always the interest of the whole county in mind, not just one city or one neighborhood, but San Francisco. That method, that model breaks because basically one supervisor will represent three small neighborhoods instead of the supervisors thinking about the city's health as a whole.
(16:31):
They have very narrow parochial interests where they're like, this is my fiefdom and I'm going to be the king here. Anything that happens outside of my fiefdom, I don't care. It's saying no to this thing in my district hurts someone next to me because ultimately I care about the 36,000 voters who elected me and not the 500,000 voters or the 850,000 residents of San Francisco. And it's this misalignment, this misalignment of goals that lead to much of our dysfunction. Actually, there's a great research paper called Warding Off Development or Warding Off Local Control, I forget exactly. It's by Evan Mast. And he found that as you shrink the polity I guess, of your electoral districts, your interests get more and more narrow and your politics get more and more nimby. So switching from citywide elections to district-based elections decreased the amount of permits for multifamily housing by 50%, just changing how people were elected changing nothing else. That speaks to San Francisco's problems. We elect small narrow interests to represent a huge dynamic city and we therefore get regressive outcomes.
Rajat Suri (17:52):
It's been very interesting to see to me about how the politics of the city work. Do you think there's a specific reason why San Francisco has this far left contingent? I mean, San Francisco has now become this case study nationwide for the far left taking over city government. Why is that prevalent here? Not other cities.
Steven Buss (18:10):
I mean, this goes back to what Tachin was saying. They created a very good brand and they were able to launder their anti-growth, anti-progress ideology through the lens of national progressive democratic policy. And so it's not that the voters are far left, it's that the far left had a very good strategy to take power, and so that's how it happened.
Rajat Suri (18:40):
It's a function of the people in the city and how they organized.
Sachin Agarwal (18:44):
But I think also, I mean a lot of the issues that we're seeing in San Francisco do exist in other West Coast cities like Seattle, Portland, Oakland, LA. So I don't think we're that unique there. I do think one thing that's unique about San Francisco is that we're closer to a lot of the problems in terms of the geography of the city. You've basically got Pac Heights and then a 10 minute walk away, you're in the Tenderloin, and so the problems are just really right there in front of you. But I do think a lot of cities are dealing with the same issues, but we're seeing kind of a similar dynamic where people are pushing back. I think we just saw Seattle in their last city council election, I believe voted for a lot of great pro-growth folks and turned a corner there. Oakland right now is going through a process to recall their district attorney and recall their mayor. So similar to our district attorney recall a couple years ago. So I think a lot of people have realized, hey, we've been voting against our own interests and we want change.
Immad Akhund (19:41):
I think there's also a relevancy of the resource. I remember thinking five, 10 years ago or whatever, X years ago going like, Hey, we are so rich here. Why can't we just give these homeless people a house? I think in other cities there wouldn't necessarily be that possibility. So when that prop or whatever came around that Mark Banov was supporting saying like, Hey, let's get 300 million, $300 million to get everyone a house, I was like, yes. I mean the construction of that particular law was bad, but I was supportive of, I'm like, I'm willing to give money to help people. And I think it is related to that, that there is, people are generous and they want to help, and at least the way these policies are packaged are like, Hey, let's help the needy and things like that. So I think people get on board with it.
Sachin Agarwal (20:32):
And that's a really good point. I mean, I think people in San Francisco are very compassionate. We want to solve these problems and we're willing to spend as much as it takes to solve 'em. Right now, the city is spending over a billion dollars a year on homelessness, but we're not seeing results. And the reason why we're not seeing results is a combination of the politicians that we've elected, combination of the nonprofits that are taking a lot of this money that are super corrupt, and ultimately it boils down to not being not outcomes driven and not being able to hold anyone accountable. If I say, we're spending a billion dollars, you need to deliver to me results, and if you're not delivering results, I'm going to fire you. That kind of process just doesn't exist in our government today, so that billion dollars just disappears.
Immad Akhund (21:13):
One thing that was surprising to me when I moved to San Francisco is how San Francisco is a county. I mean it's small and then a lot of things that we'd want to improve, whether it's housing or transit or whatever are hard to do as one tiny city. It would be much better if Marin, Alameda, San Carlos, is that the country or San Mateo, if we just got together and we're like, okay, because take housing. If we don't build housing, a lot of the homelessness actually gets pushed to Oakland and all these things. It's not a local problem necessarily. Is there any chance we can get to more of a Bay Area thing? Can we just enlarge the county and is there any way that's possible or you think we're just stuck in this kind of motion and there's no one that can change that?
Steven Buss (22:02):
I mean, look, anything's possible. I looked into this and wrote a little piece about it a couple years ago. It's called San Francisco is over. Bay City is just beginning. And I looked into the history of basically what happened in New York City. So they have 'em all the boroughs because those were all independent cities, if I remember my history correctly, and then they joined together or Manhattan annexed them. I forget exactly how it happened. So there's precedent for it. And indeed in it was the early 19 hundreds, there was an initiative, or maybe it was the mid 19 hundreds, obviously it's been a minute since I looked at this research. There was an initiative to have the counties all join up and I think San Francisco was trying to annex Alameda County and basically you can do it. What you have to do is you have to get the voters in the county that you're trying to annex to vote to be annexed.
(22:58):
And typically the way a government will do that is if you vote yes on this, we'll make sure your local city things get way more money than they would otherwise. So you effectively, you're bribing the electorate. It sounds worse than it's you're promising more government resources for the things that the electorate cares about. That's the proper way to say it. So it's possible that initiative all fell apart because ultimately it's a really big lift. But I think there's actually been some progress on unifying Bay area governments into a unified regional government in the past decade or so. So for context, there are 101 different cities in the Bay Area, frankly, that's too many cities, and you get the exact behavior you're describing. Amad, I remember I went to a city council meeting down in, it was either Cupertino or Sunnyvale, and they're talking about office development and housing development and they approved the office development.
(24:01):
And when they said someone asked about the housing, they said, oh, well San Francisco can build the housing, but that's what every city in the region does. They all want the office because that generates tax revenue and doesn't have any constituent services attached to it, and they don't want the housing because then you have to pay for schools, you have to pay for other infrastructure. So every city wants the offices for the tax revenue and doesn't want to build a housing. And that's how we've gotten here. But there are two organizations. There's the Metropolitan Transportation Commission or MTC and the Association of Bay Area Governments or aba, they used to be two separate entities. Now they're basically working together now it's called MPC aba, and they have representatives from all the local governments that meet to discuss regional issues including transportation and regional housing development planning. So David Chu, I believe assembly member David Schu passed and legislation that gave ABA a little more teeth on enforcing it, but there's still a lot more work that could be done to tie state level funding to good behavior from cities which could then be coordinated through MTC aba, which is all long way of saying it's very difficult to get to a unified coordinated response, a regional government, but we're making baby steps and I think we will get better coordinated over the next 30 years.
Rajat Suri (25:29):
Just wondering, you guys have this goal obviously to make San Francisco policy more moderate. Where are we in that journey? What percentage of the supervisors are moderate by your standards and what percentage of our policies are evolving in the right direction? We'd love to hear sort of where we are now and then we'd love to talk about the future as well.
Sachin Agarwal (25:45):
So we have 11 supervisors on our board. As of two years ago, we only had two folks that were kind of pro-growth, right? They wanted to welcome businesses and tech and build more housing, and we had nine that were kind of far left and really detrimental to the city. Luckily in November of 2022, we had two supervisors that we supported win seats. So now we have four good supervisors out of 11, so we don't have a majority, but we're making good progress. And the next big election for supervisor seats is November of this year. We're going to be challenging all six seats. If we can pick up two, we'll have a majority. And then I think sky's the limit on what can get done. We'll see some really immediate changes because of policies that they can enact directly because of commissions that the board of supervisors controls. And then that sets us up for the next step, which is to be able to do city charter reform and actually change the constitution of how the city operates to allow, again, more growth policies. And really we want to see a rule of velocity. You want to see a set of laws that govern the city and then we should enforce those laws. And if you want to do anything within those laws like start a business or build housing, you should just be able to get it done without anyone getting in your way.
Steven Buss (26:54):
Lemme highlight the difference between what Zins saying, which is rule of lost and the way San Francisco operates. Now, let's say you own your house and you want to add a deck in your backyard. Your neighbors get notified that you want to build something on your property and they have a dozen opportunities to inject themselves into the process and prevent you from getting your permit. So that's not a rule of law city. That's rule of the squeakiest wheel. It's whoever complains the loudest will get the most government attention. That's a dysfunctional government. It shouldn't be how we operate instead, which is what Sachin is describing. We should have. These are the rules. If you check the boxes, you get your permits. There's no discretion, it's just it's allowed and you get it.
Sachin Agarwal (27:43):
The fact that we've had all this discretionary power in the hands of the supervisors and other commissions is actually what's led to a lot of the corruption in government as well. If you know that, Hey, I want to build this house, I need a permit, but it's going to be really hard for me to get this permit. Well now you're going to hire a permit expediter. You're going to slip some cash to someone under the table in order to get that permit right? All that needs to stop, and the federal government did come in, they arrested a bunch of folks, and so there's work being done there. But again, think of Frothiness of San Francisco, all the money, all these laws have created an environment where this corruption is really rampant.
Rajat Suri (28:18):
So what are your top priorities from a policy perspective? If you had a magic wand and you could make one or two of these policies happen today, what would you do? What would you prioritize?
Steven Buss (28:28):
Oh man. Maybe my top priority right now is we need to be teaching algebra in middle school. Again. Right now, San Francisco is not allowed to teach algebra until ninth grade in the public schools. The private schools can teach it whenever they want, and indeed, some private schools teach it as early as seventh, or I think there might be one that teaches It, offers it in sixth. I don't know how many kids take it. You go down to Palo Alto, they're teaching algebra in seventh grade. So if I could wave a wand, I would say any smart kid who wants to learn math should have the opportunity to learn math at whatever age they want.
Immad Akhund (29:06):
I have a sixth grader in a private school in San Francisco, and she's doing pretty reasonable algebra, and I would say actually she's bored in math if she's not being pushed, and I don't think she's some sort of genius either. I just think kids are capable of doing algebra at sixth grade.
Steven Buss (29:25):
Absolutely.
Immad Akhund (29:26):
I actually grew up in Pakistan and there I did algebra at the age of seven and a half or something, which I guess what grade would that be in America, second or third grade. It's not that hard. I feel like people think algebra is a crazy thing. This is a standard school in Pakistan. That was not a high-end thing. I think it's really crazy.
Steven Buss (29:52):
It's a real way that our government is failing us during the pandemic. This was so radicalizing for me during the pandemic, while the public schools were closed, all of the private schools had reopened. If you couldn't afford private school, I want to have kids. I can't afford private school. My kids are going to go to public school.
Immad Akhund (30:10):
Steven, maybe you can explain something. I kind of get like, I don't like it, but I get the incentives involved. It's like, okay, you want to maximize your house value, so you want to decrease the supply of housing. I just don't get this anti algebra thing. Who is incentivized to make schools worse? What is the incentive?
Steven Buss (30:31):
So I think I'm going to try to steal it for us.
Immad Akhund (30:38):
I know it's painful for you.
Steven Buss (30:40):
If you believe strongly that some kids are disadvantaged by their particular situation and that they deserve the same opportunities as kids who don't come from a disadvantaged background, but you don't have the ability to fix the underlying problems. What you want to do, and this is where people end up is they want to level the playing field, and that means given a lack of abundant resources, you're going to lower the bar instead of raising the floor. And so if you want Susie and Johnny to perform at the same level, but Johnny started here and Susie started here, your only option is to hold Johnny back because you don't actually have the institutional resources to raise Susie up. I think people have, they've been steered down a direction of opposing merit and opposing support for gifted students because they're too worried about unequal outcomes.
Immad Akhund (31:53):
That still seems so crazy to me. I mean, we're still going to have unequal outcomes because people with smarter parents or people with the ability to go private school still teaching them algebra.
Steven Buss (32:07):
Exactly. All you're doing is holding down people who don't have those options.
Sachin Agarwal (32:07):
And it's crazy. We have the resources to lift the floor to raise the floor, and we're not doing it. That's the crazy thing.
Steven Buss (32:16):
And it's especially galling because of course, when the government fails a rich family, the rich family will move the kid to private schools. When a government fails.
Immad Akhund (32:27):
Or leave San Francisco.
Steven Buss (32:27):
Leave San Francisco, when the government fails a poor family, they just get failed. And so that's the reality that we've enacted in San Francisco is that if you're rich enough, you can opt out and you can get quality education. And if you're not rich enough, then sorry, you're out of luck. Because we don't value merit in the public schools here, so we have to fix that. I'm hoping to have a public school aged child within about 10 years. So if we don't fix it within 10 years, then well, I'm going to have to go back to a well-paying job instead of a nonprofit.
Immad Akhund (33:07):
Sachin, what is your top policy you'd like to reverse?
Sachin Agarwal (33:10):
Yeah, I think as a general area, I think public safety is a big concern. I feel it personally. Day to day, our polling shows as a top issue for most San Francisco voters. It's not just about being able to walk out on the streets, but it affects public transit. We know that the number one reason why people don't use public transit is because of safety concerns. Safety affects businesses. We're seeing a lot of businesses shut down, and a lot of the reasoning is around public safety and some neighborhoods like downtown just not feeling safe and people not going there anymore. And so luckily we're seeing some progress on this, but we need to be a city where we're enforcing crime and if you break the law, you're going to be held accountable thanks to the DA that we supported in the last election. We're seeing a lot of great movement on that front, but there's still more to do.
(33:57):
But I think in addition to crime like larceny and whatnot, something that affects me day to day as a parent now is traffic crime. So people blowing through stop signs and red lights and speeding, and with me walking with my daughters to the playground, I need to feel safe and I want them to be safe. And right now we're just not doing anything about these crimes. The last data I saw a few months ago, basically traffic citations in San Francisco have gone to near zero over the last few years, and this is just letting people know that you can go do whatever you want to do and you're not going to be stopped, and that's just terrifying. We have a police shortage right now in San Francisco. That's something that folks are working on. We need to hire and retain police officers. We have a police commission right now that's terrible. They have set policies that basically make it hard for police officers to do their jobs. So there's a lot of steps and a lot of issues that need to be resolved.
Immad Akhund (34:57):
I think we talked about this before Sachin, but there's this argument that, hey, we just can't fix San Francisco while it's a one party city and we need competition. Do you think it's at all possible that there could be a reasonable Republican competition? I think New York had a pretty bad state in 1980s, I believe, and they ended up with 20 years of Republican mayors, which helped fix it. At least that's what they would claim. I guess my question to you is, is there a potential for a two party system in San Francisco? Would that be a solution or it's just not happening and we should just not even think about it?
Sachin Agarwal (35:37):
I think they're probably different opinions on this. I think with the composition of San Francisco being so heavily democratic, I don't think that a Republican has a shot of winning here. I also do think that within the Democratic Party, we are very divided between the far left and the moderates. It's not that we are the same except on the fringes. These are really different parties, and so we've already seen that by electing a few moderates, the city is shifting, and so I think we should keep on that path. Now, obviously, if the city had not been turning around, which again, I think it has been over the last couple of years, and things just got worse and worse and worse, then of course, right, anything's possible. Voters get to the point of frustration and they'll say like, Hey, we need to go to the extreme, but hopefully that's not necessary.
Steven Buss (36:23):
I agree, and I think what we're seeing inside the Democratic Party is exactly what Sachin's describing. We've got two factions, which both are, they're very different. And the problem we're having is that because the two factions are all under the same label Democratic Party, it's hard to tell voters the difference between a candidate, right? In a city with a Democratic party and a Republican party, it's easy to be like, well, these are the values of the Democratic party. These are the values of the Republican party. And I can pick the one that I think probably aligns with me without knowing too much on the details of your policies. We can't do that here because basically everyone here has Democratic party values and they'll just pick whoever's endorsed by the Democratic party not understanding that some of those are communists and some of them are moderates.
(37:14):
The factions in San Francisco, a Democratic party are so far apart. So I think there's something that we could do to better signal the differences in the factions. Maybe adding something to the ballot that's like, yeah, I'm a Democratic party and I'm part of this branch of it. So you could be the progressive Democrats or you could be the liberal Democrats, whatever. So I've been watching the stats on the Republican Party in San Francisco for, I don't know, the past 10 years, and it is actually growing, which is I think maybe surprising for a lot of people to hear, well, it's grown from 1% to 2%. No, no, it's more than that. It's like 12%. But there's an upstart faction of the SF GOP Brion Society, and they're like the never-Trumper branch of the Republican party here. So they're trying to shift the GOP away from national GOP rhetoric and focused on local issues. They might have success, I don't know. I mean, it's a pretty bad, the Republican party has a very bad branding problem in San Francisco, so who knows if they'll succeed, but at least they're the more sane faction. So I wish 'em luck.
Sachin Agarwal (38:31):
Another interesting situation in San Francisco, so we've got 20% of voters registered as no party preference. So you've got these folks that are like, oh man, I don't like the Democratic Party. It doesn't represent me, so I'm going to be an independent. And now what that does is it actually takes some of your voting power away because as an NPP voter, you cannot vote for the leadership of the Democratic Party. So going back to something you were saying earlier, that's what causes these kind of extremes because now you've only got these extreme Democrats voting for the leadership of the Democratic Party and the same on the right side, and all these people in the middle who just want the city to work, they're not able to vote in these races. And so one of the programs that we ran over the last few months is to message to no party preference voters to tell them, Hey, look, it's really important for you to vote for the leadership of the Democratic Party in San Francisco because we are a democratic city and you only have a say if you are a registered democrat. And that was really successful. We got thousands of people to reregister. We're optimistic about that being another way to move things into a more reasonable space.
Steven Buss (39:35):
Yeah, it's pretty funny. We registered more Democrats in the past three months than the local Democratic Party has in the past five years. It's pretty great.
Rajat Suri (39:44):
How many people have you managed to mobilize through GrowSF in? Just in general? I'm just wondering what the overall numbers are. I'm sure you probably keep track of this. What's your KPI in terms of voter mobilization and how do you track that?
Sachin Agarwal (39:55):
Yeah, so we've been around for about three and a half years now. We've got tens of thousands of people on our email list and tens of thousand followers on Twitter. But what we do really well is around every election we run a super PAC and we use our super PAC to basically distribute our voter guide and our endorsements to all voters in San Francisco. Just some rough stats for the November, 2022 election, we sent over a half a million pieces of mail. So we sent our voter guide in English and Chinese to all voters. We ran a large campaign on Facebook and Instagram. We had Google search ads, so if you search for any election related keyword or candidate, we would appear. And our voter guide, we really pride ourselves on providing fair, well-researched active information so people can make up their own decision on how to vote. So in November, we had a literally 400,000 views on our voter guide just over the course of those 30 days when people are voting. So we're basically hitting every voter with our message.
Steven Buss (40:52):
One of the great things I love about what we're doing at GrowSF is we're not actually trying to change anyone's mind what we know, we run polls to figure out what do people want, what do they say they want? And then we take that and we compare it against the outcomes that we're getting and we say, okay, well people, when you ask them, people want more police, people want better schools, people want cleaner streets, they want to arrest Fentanyl dealers, but we're not getting that result. So all we have to do is say, well, you want these things, we agree with you, and if to get those outcomes, we think you should vote this way. All of that has led to us moving about 20% of the vote in San Francisco. We figured this out through some statistical analysis of the Department of Elections data, and we are pretty confident that we move about 20% of the vote. The Democratic party moves about 14%, and then every other group moves less. I'm proud to say we have reduced the League of pissed off voters down to third place. They used to actually, they moved more votes than anyone else in San Francisco until voters started to realize that they were, the league was this extremist far left organization leading us down a terrible path. Every election that I've been tracking since I got involved in politics in 2016, they have lost ground. So that's great. It's great news for the city.
Sachin Agarwal (42:24):
And it's really interesting to look at the two strategies. So the League of Pissed Off Voters, you don't know who they are, you literally don't see any faces or names behind them. Who's making these endorsements? Who's backing them? And with sf, we're the opposite. We're extremely transparent. You know who Steve and I are, who's on our team, who's on our board, our endorsements are well-resourced. We put our reasoning on the voter guys, you can read how we arrived at our recommendation, and that's what our goal is with all of that is to build trust with voters so that you don't just get a piece of mail or see an ad and you're like, okay, I guess I'm going to vote this way. You actually have to understand who GrowSF is. We publish a weekly newsletter, we're putting out other content so that you're like, okay, I align with what Future Growth wants to see, so I'm going to use the recommendations and then even better yet, I'm going to share their voter guide with my friends and my family because that goes a long way when someone tells you, Hey, I trust these people.
(43:18):
Now you're going to trust us as well. Every election, our goal is to just move more and more votes.
Immad Akhund (43:24):
Yeah, I think you guys are doing great work and I'm really pleased that you're out there. I worry a little bit that you guys and other people in SF are going to be really pissed off because it's reached such a crappy extreme that we want to fix it. But what happens in five years time where everyone else goes back to their busy lives, they're like, okay, finally we've got algebra back, we have basic crime being prosecuted, et cetera, and maybe we're slightly more YIMBY and then five years time we all go back to our normal busy lives and stopping attention to SF politics and then more extremist elements. Maybe it'll takes eight years because we're so annoyed. But is this just a pendulum that kind of swings back and forth basically is my question.
Steven Buss (44:13):
I guess I'll have a general and a specific answer. All politics is a pendulum in every Democratic society swings left and right. It is the natural course of voters making experiments. They're like, oh, we think this is a good idea. Let's try it and it doesn't work. So then you go back the other direction. It's always a pendulum. So that's the general answer. The specific answer is San Francisco voters have never been paying more attention than they are now. That's why things are changing, right? People are upset, they're paying attention. We're voting differently. And the way to ensure that we don't backslide is to make it so that number one, we deliver on our promises. We can't elect people who then fail to do what they said because that way we're going to lose again. And voters deserve better than to elect people who do nothing.
(45:15):
Number one, deliver on what we promise. Number two, ensure that we continue to produce the best deeply researched voter guide maybe in five to 10 years. All GrowSF does is a voter guide and we don't have to do anything else. That'd be great. That sounds like a much more enjoyable life. I'm kidding. I love doing this. I couldn't do anything else, but it's possible We get there and all we need is voters to know this organization does the work to understand what the impacts of the ballot initiatives are and what people running for office actually believe. And that's enough. I actually do truly believe that. I truly believe that good information is enough to run a good democracy. I don't worry too much about US backsliding and back into extremism. There will be swings, but we're going to hold the center.
Sachin Agarwal (46:14):
I think also right now, the swings between the far left and common sense are huge because we have so much government bureaucracy and red tape and these things, discretionary view on things like housing permits and all these commissions that it gives a lot of leeway for how government's operating functionally or not functionally, if we start to edit down the city charter to cut the red tape, reduce the number of commissions, you might have a little bit of jitteriness of like, oh, we elected this person or this person, but the Delta might just be here and not here. Now of course, then we can edit the city charter again to create all the commissions. But now you're looking at a 20 year cycle, not an eight year cycle. So I do think we can just bring it in a little bit tighter and that'll be good for us.
Immad Akhund (47:03):
Awesome. Really appreciate you coming on here, Sachin and Steven. Yeah, it was great. It was great to pleasure to be here on this. Hey, nice job guys. You guys are doing some great work.
Steven Buss (47:12):
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Immad Akhund (47:14):
So hopefully this podcast can mobilize a few people. November, 2024, we've got to flip some seats, so let's go.
Steven Buss (47:20):
But first, March, 2024 ballots will be arriving within seven days.
Immad Akhund (47:26):
Wait, what's happening in March, 2024?
Steven Buss (47:27):
Oh, that's the Democratic County Central Committee election. That's for the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Immad Akhund (47:32):
But you only get that if you are a registered Democrat. We're Democrat.
Steven Buss (47:35):
There's still time register. You can still register as a Democrat.
Immad Akhund (47:39):
Really? I really hate labels. I know you do. I really hate labels.
Steven Buss (47:44):
I get it. But registering as a Democrat is the number one most powerful thing.
Immad Akhund (47:48):
You register for SF Democrat, or does that put me as the National Democrat as well?
Steven Buss (47:53):
Yeah, it's national.
Rajat Suri (47:57):
After the election, you can register independent again.
Immad Akhund (48:00):
You can unregister, do a seven day registration.
Steven Buss (48:03):
You can go back to no party preference if you like, but just being a registered Democrat doesn't mean you have to agree with everything Democrats are doing.
Immad Akhund (48:11):
In fact, I know, but it's like a public label, right?
Steven Buss (48:14):
It is public. Yeah, sure. But there's nothing…
Immad Akhund (48:17):
Something I find annoying about labels. That's fair. But I get it. I mean, it's an important thing and I should probably get over that. All right, cool. We are overrunning a little bit. Really appreciate your time and thanks for coming on. So that was a great chat, really went deep with Steven and Sach and what was your favorite part, Raj?
Rajat Suri (48:38):
I just love how deep they're going on this problem of how to move votes, and they've identified a root cause, which is two major root causes I got from that, which is the Democratic party leadership has an outsize influence in that they endorse a candidate and most people just vote with who the party leadership endorses. So there's like a mini election that kind of decides a bigger election, which is who elected democratic leadership. And then most people don't know when they read these ballots, they don't know which of these candidates agree with them more. So gross have is publishing these lists of people who basically agree with these kind of more moderate set of policy ideas, which seem to be a majority of voters seem to agree with already. So I can totally understand. They're trying to fix a problem in the democratic process, which is people just don't know what they're voting for and they're not as engaged as they should be.
Immad Akhund (49:32):
There's this element of grandstanding that people are cutting their teeth in and the SF board or the SF School district, and they're trying to make this change that're like, oh, we must be great national politicians because we're talking about all of these national topics that have nothing to do with improving San Francisco. And you see this, even this algebra thing that we talked about. That's literally someone trying to make some equity argument and try to make a stand and improve things or think that they're improving things, but they're just grandstanding basically and hurting people.
Rajat Suri (50:11):
Yeah, no, there's definitely an element of that. And San Francisco, I mean, it has a rich tradition of progressive politicians. So we didn't really get into that, but obviously you have people like Harvey Milk and Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, I think they were all leaders in the progressive movement back in the day, although I would say Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein became more moderate, or maybe they're seen more moderate now. But there's a rich history, I think of San Francisco being the leaders in progressive politics and progressive politics. I think they make some mistakes and they do some things really well, and they do some things really poorly. And I think it's a little bit of the risk taking. We see in the tech culture. In the tech culture, you got to move fast and break things. You make some mistakes, but you get some things really right as well. Some things like algebra not being banned until high schoolers clearly have mistake, but there's other things that progressive politics do figure out, and everyone's like, oh yeah, you guys were gay marriage. Yeah, okay. You guys were right about that.
Immad Akhund (51:10):
One positive way to look at it is America is this kind of pool of experimentation. Exactly. San Francisco is the far-left experimentation. There's probably some city that's doing far-right experimentation, and we end up with seeing like, Hey, it's not working, and clearly San Francisco is not working right now, but at least we experimented, I guess.
Rajat Suri (51:31):
I think that's a big reason why San Francisco gets a lot of attention, right? Because it's clearly running these experiments, everyone's looking at them, and then both sides are using that as ammo, right? Oh yeah. Look, leftism doesn't work because you have all this homelessness or it is really interesting to see how San Francisco become a case study.
Immad Akhund (51:48):
Because of this kind of fractional nature of the way the San Francisco work, where there's these districts and the small amount of voters that move things, and then there's the SF Democratic body, and there's a small amount of voters were things it ended up in this kind of bad place, but also reversing it is actually not as hard as it could be, right? You don't have to move a hundred thousand voters to reverse the situation if you can be very targeted. The way that GrowSF is being, one of the things that I like about that conversation is it doesn't feel hopeless, right? It's not like, Hey, we have to move all of this artifact. It's kind of a fragile system so you can apply force to the fragility of it.
Rajat Suri (52:28):
So Immad, let me ask you, I mean, as a San Francisco resident, I mean I asked them for what are the top priorities to fix? What are your top priorities that you'd love to see fixed in San Francisco?
Immad Akhund (52:36):
I think just some common sense crime stuff would just really make me feel a lot better about San Francisco. Every single person that lives in San Francisco has a story I give you quick two ones, two stories. I had an office in seventh and Folsom and someone would come in every single day and steal packages every single day. And I had the police. I was like, Hey, can we just stand outside? And they'll come in and arrest them and they're like, no, sorry. It's less than 2000 per package. I'm like, who cares? They're doing it every day. The cumulative loss is clearly more than 2000, but it's, I mean, it was obviously a crime ring as well. We always someone different. We had a camera going so we could see them. I mean, that's one example. Another example partner was at a Sunglass Hut, and someone just came in and stole a bunch of sunglass hut and she talked to the attendant there and they were like, Hey, every week someone comes in and steals the stuff. So I think there's this idea that, oh, it's petty crime and no one's getting hurt. Doesn't make sense when they're doing it over and over again. And if you don't persecute the one case, then you make this incentive to, there's just no consequences to crime.
Rajat Suri (53:44):
It’s crazy, insane.
Immad Akhund (53:45):
I would just love for just comments and it's still happening. Yes, there's a new da, but I hear stories like this still every week someone's, and this isn't like someone on social media, it's like friends or us directly experiencing this. So this is just rampant and it's just so dumb. It's so painfully dumb. No rational person would think this is the right way to do it. I kind of get even the algebra thing, but in NIMBYs, I get the rational perspective, but this is just clearly a hundred percent of people agree it's not the way it should be.
Rajat Suri (54:21):
Most cities in the world, you would hope most developed cities would not accept that behavior. That sounds like third world country behavior. Basically. People, you have to start hiring their own private security. There's no other way to get around, but you
Immad Akhund (54:31):
Can't, I mean, it's even worse than that. They're not allowed to have the private security. Actually, another story, I was at a Safeway. Someone came in, took an ice cream. The private security guy was like, okay, can you leave now? And they just walked off with some ice cream. There was just a bunch of kids, a couple of kids that probably high or something. I'm like, what the hell's going on? The private security can't do anything about it, so it's even worse. I feel like in a third world country, yeah, they'd hire private security and you wouldn't mess with them because there'd be a consequence it's constructed to have no consequences against these people, which is insane.
Rajat Suri (55:07):
IThat is absolutely insane. So we wish these guys good luck in trying to change the policy of this San Francisco to make a lot more sense. I think everybody in the Bay Area would benefit from a healthy San Francisco that had less crime and homelessness and less drug problems, et cetera.
Immad Akhund (55:26):
San Francisco is, I would say, and obviously I'm a little biased, but it's unusually important, right? Because it is the main city in Silicon Valley and that attracts young people. So I think a better San Francisco is better for the tech industry and it's better for America. And then you have this other thing where the politicians in San Francisco often end up being politics, doing politics on a national stage. So I think fixing San Francisco is, even if you Los Altus and feel good about not having to deal with San Francisco, these things have, I think an outsized return. Absolutely outsize impact.
Rajat Suri (56:05):
I agree with you. It's high stakes and that's why we hope these guys make some progress and it would be a win for democracy if they can educate people and get people motivated. I think, as you said, most people can't agree with these types of property crime, rampant acceptable rates of property crime. So cool. Well, that concludes our episode today. Thanks for tuning in and feel free to subscribe to us on Substack.
Immad Akhund (56:30):
All the different channels, wherever you're listening, like and subscribe. Appreciate your support.
Fixing San Francisco’s Broken Local Politics with GrowSF