Candidates make promises. Mayors have to keep them.
That’s the reality facing Mayor Daniel Lurie in his first 100 days in office, a milestone that will officially pass April 18.
As a candidate, Lurie lacked definition. He was everything to everyone in a way that garnered praise from across the political spectrum, like pro-housing YIMBYs and anti-development NIMBYs. It was a strategy intended to garner second-place votes, and it worked.
As a mayor, Lurie no longer has that luxury. His choices will inevitably piss people off. And they have.
“I was elected to make hard decisions, and it wasn’t to make everybody like me,” he said.
To combat the fentanyl crisis, he placed restrictions on when San Francisco can hand out drug paraphernalia for health reasons. Harm reduction experts called the move “moronic.” He tossed progressive Max Carter-Oberstone off the police commission, citing a need for collegiality. Police reformists protested. He built a homeless shelter in the Bayview, over the objections of the neighborhood’s representative, Supervisor Shamann Walton, to ensure that RV dwellers had a safe place to sleep. Walton called Lurie a racist “oligarch.”
Muni-lovers panned Lurie for granting permission for Waymo vehicles to zoom down a previously car-free Market Street, calling it “dangerous, undemocratic, inequitable, and un-San Franciscan.” In perhaps his most politically dangerous move yet, Lurie backed a plan to build taller homes on the west side. That’s a one-way ticket to ticking off much of his electoral base.
The Standard joined Lurie in his City Hall office, Room 200, to discuss his eventful first 100 days. The mayor made no apologies for taking unpopular stands.
In fact, a new mayor who’s not eliciting yowls in the first 100 days is probably doing it wrong, said Jane Kim, state director of the California Working Families Party and a former San Francisco supervisor.
It’s during the honeymoon period that a new mayor has the most political capital.
“You start on Day 1 with a certain amount and spend it down,” Kim said. “It’s the time to prove yourself.”
Lurie has spent his capital with speed. At times that has propelled him into brick walls.
Following his early efforts to tackle the fentanyl crisis on Sixth Street, the drug market sprang anew in other neighborhoods. His effort to advance resources to combat homelessness in the Tenderloin garnered instant pushback; his office told advocates he’d reduced a shelter’s planned extension from five years to one. And his directive to city departments to cut 15% of their budgets was met with a shrug of the shoulders by some officials.
The mayor is not deterred by those early setbacks.
“This is an artificial number, 100 days. I don’t measure our success in 100-day increments,” he said. “It took us a long time to get into this crisis that we’re in, whether it’s the budget crisis or whether it’s the fentanyl crisis. And it’s going to take us a long time to get us out.”
There is no doubt that voters are giving Lurie space to get things done. He has occasionally depended on that goodwill to stretch the English language to accomplish policy goals.
When he found he could not legally declare a fentanyl state of emergency on “Day 1,” a legal mechanism he promised on the campaign trail, he simply introduced a piece of legislation that he named a “fentanyl state of emergency ordinance.” When he wanted to back taller housing in the Sunset and Richmond, he dubbed it “family zoning.” Because who can argue with families?
To achieve his goal of building 1,500 shelter beds in his first six months in office, he stretched the definition of both “six months” (saying the clock didn’t start until he announced his suite of policy initiatives) and what counts as a “bed.”
One place Lurie hasn’t been willing to open his metaphorical wallet is national politics, even when the White House’s agenda has domino effects in San Francisco. As President Donald Trump chips away at the rights of immigrants, transgender people, and people of color, you’d be hard-pressed to hear Lurie even utter the word “Trump.”
Sitting in his wood-paneled office, The Standard asked Lurie to make a statement, any statement, describing his position on any policy of the president.
Lurie declined.
Instead, he said, he’s focused on what the mayor of San Francisco can control: making the streets safe, alleviating the fentanyl crisis, housing the homeless, running the buses on time, and closing the city’s $820 million budget deficit.
After all, he argued, if he fails on those fronts, the vulnerable people Trump is targeting are the ones who will feel it the hardest.
The data points already show the city shifting in the right direction, Lurie said: Violent crime is down, car break-ins are down, Union Square is attracting new tenants, and even Sixth Street has seen clearer, cleaner days than at any other time in recent memory.
“I think people are feeling the change. I think they’re already feeling a little bit better once again. I think the momentum is going in the right direction,” Lurie said.
That’s the trick.
Statistics won’t win over hearts, Lurie said. His success in the next 100 days, and the next four years, will be measured in how San Franciscans feel.