Feeling ignored by the city's leaders has been a driving impulse for why Keith Freedman has become more involved civically and politically in San Francisco. Years ago, he helped launch and get chartered the Home Sharers Democratic Club in order to give voice to the concerns of those in the short-term rental sector at City Hall.
A gay Jewish man who lives in the city's LGBTQ Castro district, Freedman owns Hostwell, a company that manages short-term housing rentals in the city. He also represents short-term rental hosts on the San Francisco Tourism Improvement District Board.
And he serves on the board of the South of Market Business Association, as he has a business location in SOMA. Via his business and leadership roles, Freedman has been trying to attract more tourists to the city and counteract the negative headlines about crime and vacant storefronts that have dominated news coverage about the City-By-The-Bay of late.
This year, he is taking his most public-facing step yet by running to be the city's next mayor. Freedman, along with Jon Soderstrom, a gay man who lives near the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, are among the 13 mayoral contenders who will appear on the city's November 5 general election ballot.
Lacking name recognition and significant fiscal resources to mount their campaigns, the two are underdogs in the race. They have yet to be invited to any of the mayoral debates held to date with the top tier of five candidates, which includes Mayor London Breed, former mayor and supervisor Mark Farrell, current supervisors Aaron Peskin and Ahsha Safaí, along with nonprofit founder and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune Daniel Lurie.
"I know many of you don't know me very well," Freedman, 53, acknowledged during his endorsement interview last month with the members of the committee that runs the San Francisco Democratic Party.
(His interview begins at the 47-minute mark of the video posted to the party's Facebook page. As the Bay Area Reporter's online Political Notes column had predicted was likely to happen, the party leaders solely endorsed Breed in the race.)
Freedman is likely to remain unknown by most voters as well due to the criteria civic groups are using in sending out their debate invites. For example, several Castro neighborhood groups are co-hosting a mayoral forum at 6:30 p.m. September 5 at the Randall Museum Theater. To be invited, candidates must be polling with at least 5% of first-choice votes in ranked voting in the next San Francisco Chronicle poll.
Yet the newspaper didn't include Freedman by name in its poll it conducted early in the year. Nor has his last name been listed among the candidate choices in other polls conducted on the race, as he is lumped in with the generic "someone else" option.
"It really comes down to fundraising. The debate invitations tend to be tied to fundraising," Freedman noted when asked by the local Democratic Party what his plan was for winning the mayoral race. "That is really my priority now, is to get the fundraising to get the proper press attention."
Freedman had made a similar point during an interview with the B.A.R. at the Castro's Spikes Coffees and Teas a short walk from his apartment in early July. At the end of that month, he reported raising just about $8,700 during the first half of the year. But in order to qualify for the city's public financing for candidates, Freedman needs to raise $50,000 from at least 500 contributors.
If 500 B.A.R. readers who are city voters kicked in $100 each to his campaign, noted Freedman, he would be able to tap into the program and access the resources he needs to better publicize his platform and candidacy.
"Once you get past the matching funds threshold, everything gets easy," Freedman said, adding of his current predicament, "I blame the press a little bit. The major media haven't given the other eight candidates airtime. How are the voters supposed to hear about them?"
A Colorado native drawn by tech sector
The last six years Freedman has called the Castro home. His apartment on the 500 block of Castro Street is right next door to where Breed has her mayoral campaign headquarters.
He grew up in Aurora, Colorado outside of Denver. Freedman received a B.A. in computer science information systems in 1991 and then earned a master's degree in computer science from Colorado State University in 1993.
As a student intern at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, he had worked on radar tracking systems for the U.S. Counter Drug Initiative. A job managing the IT Operations Department for RCM Technologies Inc. brought him to San Francisco in 1996.
"My first office was on the 29th floor of the Embarcadero Center. I could look straight down Market Street to Twin Peaks," recalled Freedman, who hadn't been out of the closet in Colorado. "I don't think most of my work colleagues knew, but I wouldn't lie if they asked."
He quickly made friends with other gay men in town, in contrast to his college friends who moved to other big cities and struggled to make connections.
"Why I love San Francisco, I think, is it wasn't hard to find community," noted Freedman, who has a brother now living in Los Angeles and the rest of his family mostly living in Colorado.
Working 70-hour weeks in the corporate tech sector, Freedman also began renting out a second bedroom to tourists and others making short trips to the city. But finding cleaning people to make up the room who were reliable turned into a constant headache.
"I had to then drop everything to go clean it," he said.
Eventually, Freedman hired a friend who drove for a car pickup service later in the day to come clean in the mornings. It sparked a pivot in his career, leading him to launch Hostwell with another friend as a co-owner whom he eventually bought out. Today, his focus is on overseeing the renting out of short-term stay properties he manages, while he contracts with another company for cleaning services.
"This May, somehow, was one of my best months ever. June was OK and July has been awful," he told the B.A.R. "The first year after the pandemic in 2021 was really good, and now it is kind of bad. It is partly what led me to run for mayor."
Rather than just stew privately about the state of the city, Freedman made the decision last year to seek Room 200 at City Hall. It is the first time he has run for elected office.
"I could just complain or do something about it. I had thought about running for mayor for many years," he said.
Using out-of-state consultants, due to them costing less to hire, Freedman has been meeting with various groups in the city to seek their support and drum up donations to his campaign coffers. A sign of his tech expertise, Freedman has a rather extensive campaign website at mayor.keithfreedman.com, where he has posted his plans to address myriad issues, from his "Rising Tide Initiative" to address the city's housing needs to his stances on improving public safety, the business environment, and homelessness.
It is meant to show that he should be taken as a serious mayoral contender, argued Freedman. Now his task is to promote his candidacy and his positions to an electorate he is confident wants to see new leadership at City Hall.
"I don't want to change the character of San Francisco, I just want to make it better," said Freedman. "Let's take what is good and let's multiply it."
Web Extra: For more queer political news, be sure to check http://www.ebar.com Monday mornings for Political Notes, the notebook's online companion. This week's column previewed a queer congressional candidate's August 6 primary in Washington state.
Keep abreast of the latest LGBTQ political news by following the Political Notebook on Threads @ https://www.threads.net/@matthewbajko.
Got a tip on LGBTQ politics? Call Matthew S. Bajko at (415) 829-8836 or e-mail [email protected]
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