If San Franciscans could collectively make new year’s resolutions, there’s little doubt what issues they’d hope to improve.
During last year’s hard-fought election, denizens repeatedly told pollsters they want to feel safe in their communities, they want the fentanyl crisis to stop, they want affordable places to live, and they want a government that just plain works.
Today, a new mayor assumes responsibility for those dreams.
Daniel Lurie took office Wednesday morning in an inauguration rife with pageantry. Everyone from the connected elite to the hoi polloi packed the ceremony at Civic Center, just outside City Hall, eager to hear Lurie’s vision for the City of Saint Francis.
The event drew roughly 2,600 attendees, according to Lurie’s team. Luminaries with prime seating included former mayors Willie Brown and Frank Jordan, outgoing mayor London Breed, First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, local and state officials, and members of the Board of Supervisors. Gov. Gavin Newsom was expected to attend, but stayed in Los Angeles area due to the major fires in the area, Lurie’s spokesperson said.
Dr. Nadine Burke, the former surgeon general of California and a Lurie campaign supporter; Lurie’s wife, Becca Prowda; and Warriors coach Steve Kerr each gave remarks praising Lurie’s vision. In his own speech, Lurie described ambitious plans to solve the fentanyl and homelessness crises, improve City Hall governance, and revive the city’s downtown economy.
“Together, we can all get better, do better, and return San Francisco to its rightful place as the greatest city in the world,” Lurie told the crowd.
The road ahead won’t be easy. Lurie will need to move beyond campaign platitudes to garner goodwill, said Jim Ross, a political consultant who led Gavin Newsom’s successful 2003 race for San Francisco mayor. In other words, the infamously vague mayoral candidate will need to offer up more specifics.
“Governing as mayor of San Francisco is all about the details: nuts and bolts, making things happen for residents,” Ross said.
It’s not like Lurie’s been sitting on his hands since he won office. Already the mayor-elect has announced four policy chiefs, new positions suggested by the policy think tank SPUR to wrangle the city’s sprawling departmental bureaucracy. He even hired the head of that think tank as chief of transportation and climate.
Rodney Fong, CEO of the Chamber of Commerce, was feeling hopeful for the city’s economy. “We’re feeling, already every single week, an increase in business in San Francisco,” Fong said at the inauguration ceremony.
Districty Attorney Brooke Jenkins said she supports Lurie’s push for more drug treatment beds, an effort he advocated for during his campaign.
“We have to have a system in a place where we can take them to detox and to be prepared to accept the offers of treatment,” Jenkins said.
Lurie will need the help. As much as he wants to build a new San Francisco, the world may end up bashing in his plans with a baseball bat.
His success as mayor very well may be judged on issues far outside his control.
Imagine a world where President Trump makes good on his promise to deport millions of noncitizen Americans. When thousands of San Franciscans are carried out of Mission district homes by armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, will Lurie be marked as a limp mayor for a failure to defend them?
At a Tuesday-night event at the Congregation Emanu-El synagogue on Lake Street, Lurie praised San Francisco’s liberal values but suggested that the city needs to look inward.
“San Francisco is known all over the world as a place where people are allowed to love who they want to love and practice any faith that they choose without fear of persecution, a place where people seek safe harbor and shelter, and that will remain true under my administration,” he said. “But … to truly be a safe harbor, we have to get our house in order.”
Lurie has pledged to hasten San Francisco’s revival. However, even a small dent in the immigrant population could deflate that promise by devastating our culinary industry, already teetering on the edge.
We saw this come to pass with outgoing Mayor London Breed. While her own decisions played into her failure, in some ways, failure was thrust upon her. It began with the pandemic that arrived two months into her term and emptied out downtown, perhaps permanently.
Then there’s the deus ex machina of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass decision. It isn’t a stretch to say that decision, and Breed’s subsequent encampment sweeps, played a role in alleviating voters’ frustrations about street conditions.
To be sure, pushing people without homes from neighborhood to neighborhood doesn’t solve the crisis, but sweeps — viewed in cold, cynical political terms — alleviate short-term pain for housed voters.
By the time the courts uncuffed Breed to act, it was far too late for her campaign. Numerous such traps are laid in front of the Lurie administration.
Allies of Trump have told California leaders they could be jailed for upholding laws pertaining to sanctuary cities. And Trump’s administration could withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from San Francisco during a five-alarm budget crisis.
The city’s $876 million, two-year budget hole was partially plugged last year by Breed. The city’s top financial officers acknowledged, in writing, that she closed most of those holes with one-time sources of funding, ensuring that our budget is held together with all the strength of bubble gum and shoe strings.
Vague campaign slogans were enough to secure election for Lurie in a year when San Franciscans hungered for change, but they won’t fix the underlying problems driving that impulse. The plans and personnel Lurie deploys in coming days may begin to address the city’s ills.
Lurie’s legacy — and the hopes of San Franciscans — may be defined by how he responds to the challenges and opportunities no one sees coming.
Gabriel Greschler, Han Li and Annie Gaus contributed to this report.