By Joe Garofoli
Manny Yekutiel, activist and owner of Manny’s, a cafe and community gathering place in the Mission District, is considering a run for mayor.Stephen Lam/The Chronicle
Since opening shop five years ago, Manny Yekutiel has rallied patrons of his eponymous Mission District civic engagement space to raise $10 million for Democrats around the country. More recently, he helped to create the Civic Joy Fund, whose $2 million endowment is focused on revitalizing San Francisco with everything from volunteer trash cleanups to last weekend’s citywide drag shows.
Soon, though, Yekutiel may be more focused on spotlighting one particular cause: his own.
“I’m thinking about running for mayor,” Yekutiel told me. He said he will make a final decision on New Year’s Day, 10 months before voters will decide whether to reelect London Breed or go in another direction.
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“People want change,” Yekutiel said. “People want different leadership and they want to see these problems in our city get solved. They want commonsense solutions to these problems. And there are a lot of folks who are not seeing that happen. And I’m seriously considering it because I, too, share that sentiment. I want to see our city solve these core issues so that we can reach our full potential.”
People will differ on whether the charismatic Yekutiel should join the fray, but he didn’t arrive at this juncture rashly. It’s been a long journey, and one that I’ve watched evolve during conversations that began when I called him about a month ago. I wanted to talk to him for a piece about people who wield political power and influence without serving in elective office. Like him.
I had gotten to know Yekutiel over the years through covering events at Manny’s, where the Chronicle co-hosts an event series and I have appeared on panels. He and his staff have made Manny’s a must-stop for national political figures. Seventeen 2020 Democratic presidential candidates, more than 50 members of Congress and just about every major officeholder in California have appeared in the cozy cafe and bar space at 16th and Valencia streets. Many are interviewed by Yekutiel, which he said has given him “a look under the hood” of government.
My inquiry was well-timed. Yekutiel, 34, was going through a “What should I be doing next?” moment of self-reflection after a recent brush with mortality. In early October, he was visiting family in Israel when he was caught in an air raid that was part of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
He said he started to think that he wanted to do something different — something more — with his life. “Confronting your own mortality forces you to ask tough questions,” he said. “My first thought was, ‘When I get back (to San Francisco), I need to start from scratch.’ ”
His first step was leaving the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency board, to which Breed appointed him in 2021. At the time, Breed praised Yekutiel, saying he “knows how to bring people together.” But he said he felt he was “spending a lot of my time not actually doing stuff and actually making things happen, not fixing problems. And that is when I’m at my peak.”
This is the third time in Yekutiel’s life that he’s paused to reevaluate his priorities. The first time was after his work ended on Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and he moved to San Francisco. The second was after he left a job as the Northern California deputy finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
He’s spent the last two months meeting with political leaders, activists and nonprofit directors, including Sheriff Paul Miyamoto and outgoing city tourism chief Joe D’Alessandro. He let me tag along to a couple of these, including a walk through the Tenderloin to a homeless shelter.
He bopped from stop to stop on his aquamarine Vespa scooter, wearing a custom mirrored helmet that looked like half a disco ball. He’d chat up pedestrians while waiting at stoplights or wave to friends he saw along the way — the connector in his element.
Yet when we first started chatting, Yekutiel explained why running for office was off the table, even though people have suggested the move for years, given his level of civic involvement in San Francisco. (He also served a stint on the Small Business Commission.)
“Well, I have a business,” he said. “That’s the main reason. I own a business and it requires a lot of my attention.” Then he paused, reluctant to close the door. “I guess,” he said, “it’s part of what I’m trying to investigate right now.”
He knew running for mayor would pit him against not only Breed but his friend Daniel Lurie, founder of the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, who launched the Civic Joy Fund with him in May. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí is running as well, and former Supervisor Mark Farrell is considering it. His competitors would be well-funded.
And then there are the political realities that his opponents would confront him with on Day One. Yekutiel has never held elective office. Should his first job be leading a city with a $14.6 billion budget, whose politics have been compared to a knife fight in a phone booth? Would he side with the city’s progressives, its moderates or neither? What’s he going to do to address the affordable housing, homelessness and fentanyl crises?
San Francisco’s political culture and byzantine bureaucracy can devour even those with good intentions. Would they crush what his friend Supervisor Rafael Mandelman praised as “the joyfulness in his work”?
Yekutiel said he is unfazed. He used to be a presidential campaign fundraiser in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and, moreover, Manny’s patrons have sent millions of campaign texts and written 25,000 letters to swing state voters over the years. The tougher question he’s wrestling with is whether this would be the best way to direct his passion for improving San Francisco and fixing its core problems. Would the political power he holds outside the system accompany him to the inside?
It’s the question he’s been asking himself and others for weeks.
D’Alessandro, who is retiring this month as CEO of San Francisco Travel, is a Yekutiel fan. He admires his sense of social justice and his ability to listen. Yet asked what advice he would give Yekutiel if he were pondering running for office, he said, “I think he should stay doing what he’s doing.”
D’Alessandro said San Francisco needs more people like Yekutiel who are energetic and love their community “and don’t necessarily want to push their agenda forward, but want to do things that they believe can ultimately make San Francisco a better place and get us out of some of the challenges that we have today.”
He said he has seen how politics — and particularly the practice of raising money — “takes a hold of people and it changes them from the way that they were before.”
Mandelman — known as “Raphy” to his friend, Yekutiel — offered similar advice. For several years, the two have either exercised or walked around the Castro at dawn once a week. They talk about city politics, LGBTQ politics, what’s going on at Manny’s, the neighborhood and “boys,” as the two gay men both say.
Last month, Mandelman awarded Yekutiel and other Castro neighbors a proclamation from the city honoring them for reviving the storied Halloween celebration in the Castro this year. It was Yekutiel at his best — quickly organizing people, gathering consensus and navigating chaos and bureaucracy in pursuit of celebrating the best of San Francisco.
But Mandelman isn’t sure that being mayor is the best use of Yekutiel’s organizing talents. Not yet, at least. “He’s enormously talented. I don’t know that he’s ready to be mayor,” Mandelman told me. “You can have a lot of conversations — and then there’s actually being in the muck of the work.”
While Yekutiel has been in the muck somewhat through his work on the SFMTA and Small Business commissions, Mandelman recalled that the experience “was really frustrating for him.” The supervisor said, “I wouldn’t at the moment recommend that he run for mayor. And I would not recommend that I try to be Manny Yekutiel. I couldn’t do it. Or even come close. Most people couldn’t. I mean, he’s pretty remarkable.”
Mandelman thinks there’s a chance he will run, “but again, after all these Tuesday morning walks, I would be surprised.”
I thought the same thing — at least until we spent several hours together last Saturday at Yekutiel’s latest co-creation, San Francisco Is a Drag, a two-day showcase during which 100 drag performers did pop-up performances around the city. The idea was to flaunt how San Francisco is still happening, he said, as well as pay drag performers $1,000 apiece for their efforts. Seeing the expressions of glee and surprise and shock on the faces of passing motorists and pedestrians as they spotted the performers was a very San Francisco moment.
Yekutiel, perhaps offering another hint about his decision, said that people love drag “because it reminds us that you should question the boxes that you live in. It liberates us.”
Reach Joe Garofoli: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @joegarofoli
Dec 7, 2023 (SFChronicle.com)
By Joe Garofoli
Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here:
He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go Steelers!
He can be reached at jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com.
