Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration has been quietly recruiting a murderer’s row of Silicon Valley and Wall Street luminaries to lead a pair of initiatives meant to revitalize San Francisco’s hollowed-out downtown and moribund economy, according to sources with knowledge of the plans.
The first initiative, which has not been previously reported, involves three women at the highest echelons of tech and finance: Katherine August-deWilde, a former president of First Republic Bank; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective and one of the country’s top philanthropists; and Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Like the mayor who assembled them, all three are fabulously wealthy, own lavish homes in San Francisco, and have had scant involvement in the city’s governmental affairs.
Dubbed Partnership for San Francisco, the group is being organized by August-deWilde, a board member of Tipping Point Community, the anti-poverty nonprofit Lurie founded 20 years ago. The former bank chief is modeling the consortium after Partnership for New York City, which was formed in the dark economic days of the late 1970s.
In addition to naming Powell Jobs and Porat as co-chairs, August-deWilde has been recruiting a roster of high-powered members in recent weeks. The list of CEOs set to join includes Sam Altman of Open AI, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Richard Dickson of Gap, Michelle Gass of Levi Strauss & Co., Tony Xu of DoorDash, and 20 or so others, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
A second group, also being revealed for the first time by The Standard, is a public-private entity to be known as the San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., which aims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the beleaguered central business district. Like Partnership for San Francisco, the group echoes a concept pioneered in New York, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., created in the aftermath of 9/11, which Lurie has signaled he’d try to emulate.
Its leader will be David Stiepleman, co-president of investment firm Sixth Street, which Lurie’s chief of staff, Staci Slaughter, advised after leaving the San Francisco Giants. Stiepleman, a lawyer by training, previously worked for Goldman Sachs at the same time as Ned Segal, Lurie’s head of policy for economic development and housing, who was an investment banker. As the mayor’s emissary to the business community, Segal has been instrumental in organizing both entities.
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Taken together, the groups represent Lurie’s latest efforts to attract well-heeled individuals into civic affairs and to try new approaches to reversing the city’s economic malaise. San Francisco officials across the political spectrum have long lamented the lack of involvement by local business titans, particularly those from the tech world.
August-deWilde, Stiepleman, and representatives for the mayor’s office all declined to comment.
The initiatives are likely to rankle at least two sets of local political players: business-focused organizations like Advance SF, which represents large employers and may feel muscled out by the Partnership for San Francisco, and progressive officials and activists, who have long objected to efforts by the wealthy that are perceived to benefit their own interests.
The formation of both groups was anticipated by a report prepared this year by a group of business interests calling itself the Downtown Economic Core Collaborative, which includes Advance SF. That report, obtained by The Standard, was authored by Ben Rosenfield, former city controller, and Kat Daniel, a former official in the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development. It recommended the establishment of a “civic table” of leading executives and the creation of a quasi-public development agency funded by the city and philanthropic sources.
The two new groups have been working for weeks under the cover of secrecy. Both have been coordinating closely with the mayor’s office, although each aims to operate independently of City Hall — and of each other. Lurie hopes to establish both as permanent civic institutions that will continue their work after he leaves office, like the New York groups after which they are modeled.
The mayor’s team has been discussing something like the Partnership for San Francisco at least since a week after his election in November. That’s when a group with that name incorporated itself with the California secretary of State’s office.
Partnership for San Francisco will be a dues-paying organization funded by the companies whose leaders are participating; membership is expected to be passed on to succeeding CEOs. It is designed to present the mayor with CEO-level views on policy, as opposed to being simply a booster for the city and its top politician.
It is unlikely that members will commit a significant amount of money to the partnership; its heft and prestige are expected to outweigh its finances, say sources. Partnership for New York City, for context, had a 2023 budget of $8 million.
The new group treads on the turf of Advance SF, a collection of the city’s top employers. Sources say that Segal, Lurie’s economic development chief, asked Advance SF and other business-focused groups to stand down on any competing initiatives. So far, said sources, such groups appear willing to back the Partnership for San Francisco, hoping to stay on the good side of a popular new mayor whose mantra that “San Francisco is open for business” they widely support.
The contours of the new San Francisco Downtown Development Corp. are less clearly defined because of key unresolved issues, including how much money it will raise and from whom.
Presented confidentially to the mayor’s office in January, the Rosenfield-Daniel report suggested initially financing a development agency with $600 million, about a third of which would come from the city’s general fund. That amount of city funding now seems unlikely given San Francisco’s $840 million, two-year budget deficit, leaving open the question of how much Stiepleman and his team could raise privately.
Like August-deWilde, Stiepleman has been meeting with financial and philanthropic players with an eye toward assembling a board for the new organization, which has a “launching soon” website and has filed articles of incorporation with the state.
According to sources, any private donations to the development corporation might trigger the need for so-called behested payments waivers, which give the mayor’s office permission to seek donations, including from entities that have business before the city.