By Manny Yekutiel—
San Francisco has always been a place people choose to be, choose to make their home. We are here because we love our city.
I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, and from a very young age I knew two things: that I was gay and that it was going to be a problem.
When I came out to my father at the end of my senior year of college, he disowned me on the spot. Things could have spiraled downward, but I remembered that there was a city with a reputation for taking people in like me who needed a fresh start, who needed to find new family, new community. That city was San Francisco.
I came to San Francisco with one friend, one duffle bag, and a desire to start over. In the thirteen years I’ve been here, San Francisco has given me everything: a chosen-family, a loving community, a real home. Because of this, I’ve devoted my time to building and supporting our community right back.
When people needed a place to gather and get informed and organized after Trump’s first election, with the help of a willing neighborhood crew, I built a small business called Manny’s, a community gathering space, restaurant, and coffee shop that has, for almost eight years now, served that exact purpose.
When small businesses struggled to recover after the pandemic, Daniel Lurie and I created the nonprofit Civic Joy Fund to sponsor and organize string lights, night markets, block parties, and community events with the help of hundreds of citizen leaders, artists, drag performers, AV technicians, musicians, and creatives.
The result? A colorful resurgence that has brought tens of millions of dollars in direct spending into our neighborhoods.
There’s a pattern here. The strength of San Francisco exists not within one person. That strength exists in our collective. When we work together, we can solve any problem in front of us. I don’t just believe it. I’ve seen it.
I’ve been an organizer, a small business owner, a nonprofit leader, a city commissioner, and a community builder. And now I’m running for Supervisor because our city is at an inflection point and, if we work together, I truly believe we can solve the big problems that stand in the way of us reaching our full potential as a city.
I’m running to make San Francisco more affordable, more safe, and more joyful.
We will make it more affordable to live here by building 10,000 new units of housing in the district, by making public education an easier choice for parents, and by making child care free.
We will make it more safe by hiring 500 more police officers, by getting deadly drugs off the street and out of people’s bodies, and by bringing those suffering from mental illness into care.
And we will make it more joyful by filling every vacant storefront, by investing more into our public spaces, and by fostering a deeper sense of in-person community.
Every generation of San Franciscans has their chance to leave their mark on the city’s future. Let’s be the ones who found a way to make it easier to live here, who reinvented San Francisco as a place that nurtured art and creativity, that found a way to house its teachers, its firefighters, its musicians, its writers, that remembered its responsibility to be a place that takes in everyone, including the young gay kid from far away whose father walked away from him.
I believe that we can build it. But I also know that the only way we do big things in this city is when we do them together. That’s the philosophy I’ve brought to my work until now and the kind of Supervisor I’ll be.
I hope you’ll join me.
2026 Race for District 8 Supervisor
Published on April 9, 2026
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