I inaugurated The Lash in March, convinced that San Francisco’s ills could be explained by examining two longstanding problems: the stultifying warfare between progressives and moderates and the culture of dysfunction created by the self-interested City Family.
As the year draws to a close, and with a new regime headed for City Hall, I’m reflecting on what I’ve learned these past 9 months and what I’m expecting from 2025.
Here’s the spoiler: San Francisco has a lot of hope at the moment, but its problems are bigger by orders of magnitude. Shuttered stores and empty offices have exacerbated a bevy of woes, from plummeting tax revenues to fiscally bereft schools. Despite an undeniable vibrancy in many neighborhoods, an all-around ickiness persists in the city’s core.
Change is unmistakably afoot. A new, inexperienced, yet eminently likeable mayor takes office Jan. 8, promising to make tough choices for the good of the city. Daniel Lurie has the purposeful air of a golden retriever bounding about to meet all of his new constituents. He displays a lack of ideological fervor. Time will tell if his enthusiasm endures and his pragmatism translates to results.
At a minimum, Lurie likely will have a more collaborative Board of Supervisors than Mayor London Breed repeatedly confronted, if not the solidly moderate one he might have hoped for. The conventional wisdom is that Breed’s contentious relationship with the supes prevented her from governing adequately. Lurie brings none of that baggage to City Hall, and he even has the farthest left of the new supervisors, Jackie Fielder, pledging to work with him. That’s a good sign.
It will take more than an era of good feelings, though, to cure San Francisco’s ills. After nearly a year of scrutinizing the patient, I have three diagnoses for the incoming surgeon, er, mayor to consider.
We still have far too much democracy
From the unwieldy system of commissions and advisory committees to each agency’s commitment to allowing citizens to gum up the gears of governance with endless opportunities for public comment, San Francisco tolerates too much talk. The electorate whiffed at an opportunity to fix matters with Proposition D, instead choosing to kick the governance can down the road with Prop. E, a measure intending nothing more than to study the topic to death.
Our kvetchocracy was evident when the San Francisco Unified School District tried closing a handful of schools, a badly needed reform, and was browbeaten into rescinding its plan, bringing down the superintendent with it. City Hall doesn’t technically run SFUSD, though its new superintendent, Maria Su, was sent in as a kind of viceroy to oversee it.
Su hasn’t committed to closing schools, though she has floated an early-retirement scheme for teachers to thin the ranks and save money. I grimaced when I saw that a union leader complained that schools already are understaffed and that parents are upset by the presence of temporary or noncertified teachers. I doubt the parents see the irony that they themselves put the kibosh on school closures, which would have addressed the issue of threadbare staffing — fewer schools, after all, require fewer teachers.
Government by those who scream the loudest pervades in San Francisco. It was evident in the 7-3 Board of Supervisors vote on Dec. 10 to reverse a painstakingly crafted effort by the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency’s Streets Division to nudge residents of recreational vehicles into shelters. The board acted in response to well-organized homeless advocates — and perhaps as a parting insult to Breed.
Lurie needs to develop the political skills to ensure votes like this don’t happen. For the mayor to succeed, his policies need to be implemented. Lurie’s proposal to have policy chiefs advise him on the administration of specific agencies is a good start. Let’s see if Quentin Kopp — champion of a long-ago measure, meant to stymie the mayor, that has made the city so difficult to run — follows through on a threat to sue over Lurie’s plan. Litigation could be clarifying.
There’s too little adherence to the law
I groused this year that if the police would simply write tickets for motorists — and yes, cyclists, like me — who run stop signs, people would stop running stop signs. In fact, cops did step up enforcement, but only up to 2020 levels. No one would argue that San Franciscans take traffic laws all that seriously.
That’s because we live in a place where everyone understands the law is fungible. San Franciscans don’t pay their fares on Muni, take over intersections with dangerous sideshows, ingest every drug imaginable in public squares, and take stuff from pharmacies like they’re Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics. The list goes on and on.
Even our holiday celebrations veer toward the criminal. I have complained, in admittedly killjoy fashion, that the city ought to enforce its blanket law against citizen fireworks. Yet certain neighborhoods turn into war zones, with all the peril that implies, each New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July, among other opportunities for lawlessness, with cops standing by as if this were normal. Which it is.
I had a similarly cranky thought every time I went by the deafening drum-banging and whistle-blowing of striking hotel workers in and around Union Square this fall. I support their right to strike (a three-month action which finally ended this week), but I was not OK with them ruining everyone else’s Christmas by obviously violating the city’s noise ordinances.
Yet we act as if this is acceptable. I at least plan to judge Lurie on his willingness to enforce these laws.
There is too much coddling of city employees
As I wrote in my first column about the City Family, the entrenched municipal workforce of San Francisco is like a standing army, living off the fat of the land, with the ultimate disincentive to ever leave their posts.
At the time, I had a sense that a city of around 800,000 people that employs 35,000 likely was out of whack. I now understand the situation is worse than I thought. According to a deep analysis by a former private-equity investor who has been investigating San Francisco’s budget on his own time, city employment rolls have risen since 2018 by about 8% — precisely the percentage decline in the population. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the problem: As our city shrinks, its municipal workforce grows.
Obviously there are many able people doing honest, important jobs for city government. Yet everyone knows about the bloat. And make no mistake: Labor — and by this I mean the organized kind — is the problem. Personnel costs, including salaries, wages, and benefits, make up 47% of the city’s fiscal 2024-25 general-fund budget of $6.9 billion. The general fund is the portion of the total that excludes the “enterprise” departments like the airport, the port, and the water utility, which fund themselves through fees to customers.
The only way the new mayor realistically can cut the budget is by issuing pink slips and otherwise doing battle with the city’s powerful labor unions. It is unclear if Lurie intends to do this. The mayor-elect issued the following statement when his predecessor released data on the nearly $900 billion, two-year budget deficit: “We can’t simply cut our way out of this nor can we balance the budget on the backs of working people.”
The first part of that statement — “can’t cut our way out of it” — is a corporate bromide. It’s what CEOs say to Wall Street to indicate they won’t shrink their companies. But our government, if not our city, needs shrinking. And there’ll be no way to do that without placing some of the burden “on the backs of working people,” also known as city employees we may not need and definitely can’t afford.
Lurie’s job won’t be easy. One path to success is to spend his political capital all at once by doing the right thing, then taking the next four years to earn it back. To do that, he’ll need to convince the electorate to let him lead, to follow the law more often than not, and to accept a leaner government. I’ll say it again: It won’t be easy.