Darshini Patel

Candidate for San Francisco County Supervisorial District 8

Darshini Patel is a first-generation American. She is a Bay Area native. Her father worked overnight shifts at Denny's. He did this to put himself through college. She has spent her career in public-service delivery roles. She coordinated Hurricane Sandy recovery. She built an Obama 2012 field operation in Virginia Beach. That operation made more than 250,000 voter contacts. She worked in the Obama White House's Domestic Policy Council. She helped deliver COVID relief to 100,000 small businesses. She served as GOTV director for the Harris 2024 campaign. This was in New Hampshire. It was the only battleground state Harris won that cycle. She has lived in District 8 for more than ten of the last fifteen years. She serves on the board of HealthRight 360. It is a San Francisco health and recovery nonprofit. She has said she would step down from that board if elected. She would also recuse herself from related votes. She built tldrsf.com. It is a free public tool. It helps people read the city budget. It also covers Board of Supervisors outcomes. It also covers the housing pipeline. She says she wrote all 28 of her platform's policy proposals herself.

Patel has three top priorities. The first is getting entitled but stalled housing projects actually built. The second is expanding childcare supply. The third is making the city budget more transparent and accountable. She would publish a public housing pipeline tracker. She would legislate permitting deadlines the city must answer for. She would push for a second dedicated affordable housing site in the district. On childcare, she wants childcare-ready ground floors on commercial corridors. She wants city rec-center rooms opened to providers. She wants enrollment wait times cut. On the budget, she wants the city to adopt 30 still-unadopted recommendations. These come from the budget analyst and cover police overtime. She wants to enforce the commercial vacancy tax. She notes hundreds of local properties haven't filed for it. She wants to publish a quarterly public scorecard. It would track her own office's progress. She supports the Family Zoning Plan. She says she would have voted for it. But she is pushing to close what she calls its demolition loophole. She wants new housing capacity that doesn't come at the expense of rent-controlled homes.

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