Daniel Lurie’s successful mayoral campaign was precise in its political positioning — hedging neither too far left nor right — but notably vague on certain policy commitments. One big exception, however, was his promise to end unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco within six months of taking office.
The ambition and specificity of the proposal were memorable, which made it all the more striking when Lurie abruptly stopped talking about it after the election. Since being sworn in as mayor, he and his office have repeatedly declined to share details on the six-month pledge, and it was not mentioned in his inauguration speech.
Why the reticence? Perhaps because Lurie’s plan to eliminate unsheltered homelessness — first presented at a press conference in May — wasn’t conceived with a six-month end goal, according to people with knowledge of his intentions.
Elizabeth Funk, CEO of the nonprofit DignityMoves, acknowledged in a phone interview that Lurie’s “Home Run” project promised to build 1,500 shelter beds in six months, but the necessary figure to get a “functional zero” of unsheltered people would be 2,500 new units of interim bridge housing — which Lurie’s proposal wouldn’t achieve for two years.
“That was a slip-up,” Funk said of Lurie’s comments at the May press conference. “I’d helped him kind of write the plan, but that was not what the plan says.”
The mayor’s office and Lurie’s campaign would not clarify whether he made a mistake in saying he would end unsheltered homelessness in six months, or if he decided to go rogue and make an impromptu promise. But the campaign did nothing to dispel the notion that he would follow through on that promise, keeping a press release announcing the plan on its website. Lurie repeated the claim in a story published a month later by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Charles Lutvak, a spokesperson for the mayor, issued a statement that did not address Lurie’s claim that he would end unsheltered homelessness. “As people are dying in our streets, Mayor Lurie set an ambitious goal of adding 1,500 beds over six months,” Lutvak wrote. “The Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance he announced on day one is the urgent action we need to add that capacity, connect people to treatment, and tackle this crisis.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to questions about what plans are in the works for shelter beds and whether funding had been identified for the projects.
Several City Hall sources who work on solutions for homelessness said Lurie’s goal would be nearly impossible without a miraculous infusion of money and property. Another complication: Kunal Modi, a policy chief whom Lurie hired to oversee homelessness, has yet to officially start work.
San Francisco has 3,647 shelter beds, about 90% of which were occupied at the time of publication. Shelter beds are typically kept below 95% occupancy to make room for emergency admissions from hospitals, jails, and outreach operations. The waitlist for beds Monday had 397 people.
Even with a record budget for addressing homelessness, Mayor London Breed was able to expand the city’s shelter portfolio by 1,450 beds between January 2018 and March 2024, a 60% increase.
Aaron Peskin, a former president of the Board of Supervisors who ran for mayor last year, told The Standard he thought Lurie’s promise was a flight of fancy.
“When Lurie was saying [his shelter bed plan] at countless debates, I attributed it to zealous overpromising, inexperience, and a political gambit that I wasn’t willing to do,” Peskin said. “I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep.”
Whit Guerrero, a member of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Commission who oversaw the opening of a navigation center on Bryant Street in 2022, said he is hopeful that Lurie can follow through with his goal, pointing to the city’s ability to rapidly shelter more than 3,000 people in empty hotels during the pandemic. However, he cautioned that the ambitious timeline could lead to inadequate services for clients, including case managers who haven’t had time to get proper training.
The city’s shelters have seen a dramatic increase in critical incident reports over the past two years, coinciding with a rising rate of mental illness and chronic health conditions among the homeless population. In the most recent point-in-time count, 51% of 956 homeless people surveyed reported suffering from mental illness.
“You can’t treat all different acuity levels of populations with the same one-size-fits-all approach. People are already bouncing off the walls,” Guerrero said. “Lurie ran his campaign on saying politicians have been getting it all wrong. Let’s hope he doesn’t follow suit and accepts the challenge of solving homelessness so it’s no longer a political football.”
Lurie has said his plans involve “semi-private” structures of all sizes, from makeshift operations like those put up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to permanent facilities like the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center.
During his campaign, Lurie promised to support his homelessness plans with a combination of public and private dollars. The private funding will likely come from connections he has made over the years at his nonprofit Tipping Point, which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropists and socialites.
“I am uniquely qualified to leverage the power of the private sector to play an important role in responding to this crisis,” Lurie wrote in his Home Run plan.
David Latterman, a political analyst in San Francisco, said residents likely won’t care about how many shelter beds are built, but they will take notice of Lurie’s progress in improving street conditions over the next year.
“He is finding out the difference between campaign promises and reality. The rubber is going to hit the road now,” Latterman said. “The policy people can care about metrics, but voters just care about what they see on the street.”
He added, “If things aren’t better by summer next year, then people are going to be pretty pissed.”