Nearly a year ago, when Macy’s kicked an already-down San Francisco by announcing it was closing its beloved flagship store in Union Square, one of the candidates running to defeat Mayor London Breed was quick to lay blame.
“City Hall insiders have destroyed a vibrant downtown many of us remember, and are now asking for a second chance,” Daniel Lurie wrote on social media just over an hour after the news broke. “We need new leadership.” He told reporters that a “failure to challenge the system” would keep the city from rebuilding and that one of the chief culprits was “layers and layers of bureaucracy upon bureaucracy,” which he intended to fix.
Lurie had a three-point plan, or at least a tweeted version of one. It entailed improving public safety, creating a “permit shot clock” so businesses would know where their applications stand, and “reforming conditional-use permits,” presumably speeding along exceptions to the city’s onerous permitting laws for businesses.
Fast-forward to last week, when Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s more glamorous corporate sibling, announced that it, too, was packing up, dealing a likely death blow to the once grand San Francisco Centre mall on Market Street.
This time, Lurie was far less emphatic about finger-pointing.
“We have historic challenges, and I am not suggesting that we’re going to fix things overnight,” he blandly told The Chronicle. Lurie’s rah-rah communications team redistributed that paper’s article, headlined “How Mayor Daniel Lurie plans to revive downtown SF amid retail exodus.”
While it’s certainly true that fixing the city’s grievous problems won’t happen overnight, it’s also true that Lurie’s “plans” to turn around downtown aren’t really plans at all — at least not yet. They’re more concepts of a plan, as President Donald Trump might put it. Yes, the mayor’s been in office all of three weeks, but he’s had two and half months since his Nov. 5 election to formulate a plan. One only has to look at the rapidity with which Trump, inaugurated 12 days after Lurie, has acted to remake the federal government in order to appreciate the contrast.
It remains early days, of course. But at some point, the chasm between campaign platitudes and governing gravitas will erode Lurie’s goodwill.
On public safety, for example, Lurie already has experienced the shortcomings of surging police activity on focused areas, as The Standard reported about the lawless mess that is Sixth Street. That permit shot clock? Neat idea, but it’s nonexistent. As for conditional-use permitting reform, Lurie has neither talked about it nor released any sort of comprehensive proposal for how to go about accomplishing it. And beyond a hiring freeze that is more of a bumper sticker than a governing framework, he has yet to say how he’ll untangle the city bureaucracy.
Part of what’s taking so long is that the mayor’s team has been slow to form. Ned Segal, Lurie’s policy czar for economic development, is a brand-new government official and was the only policy chief to report for duty on the administration’s first day. Alicia John-Baptiste, key to regional and local efforts to solve the fiscal problems at Muni and BART, doesn’t begin work at City Hall until Feb. 3; Kunal Modi, who will oversee homelessness, has also not started.
Planners with plans, planning
Into the breach has stepped the business community, which has been lobbing its own ideas into City Hall. In the fall, four downtown business-improvement districts and the big-employer group Advance SF hired ex-controller Ben Rosenfield and Katherine Daniels, a former official in the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, to write a proposal for downtown revitalization. That plan has been presented to Lurie, I’m told, though its content hasn’t been made public.
(A moment of reflection on how Rosenfield, an unelected longtime city pooh-bah, rapidly has become San Francisco’s indispensable man since “retiring” from the controller’s office. Last year he popped up as an advisor to the city’s beleaguered Board of Education. He was central to Lurie’s transition planning. And the mayor’s office confirms that he continues to advise Lurie on budget negotiations with the city’s many agencies to plug the two-year budget deficit of nearly $900 million. Every unemployed person should be as busy as Rosenfield.)
A separate group of business downtown boosters, led by real estate developer Christopher Meany, whose firm is redeveloping Treasure Island and has worked on many marquee projects, has been circulating a voluminous proposal for a “hospitality zone” meant to spiff up the areas most seen by tourists, conventioneers, and local shoppers and theatergoers.
At least two other groups — one comprising about 40 real estate investors, and another of top executives in real estate, technology, and finance — have formed. They intend to fund economic feasibility studies to support whatever policies Lurie pursues.
The irony of all this private-sector hubbub is that the city already has a well-thought-out downtown revitalization plan. That would be the document developed by the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and presented to Lurie in a Nov. 13 memo prepared for his transition team and obtained by The Standard.
It’s a good plan, and it has specific policy proposals. Noting that “years of anti-business policies” and pandemic-era setbacks “have impacted San Francisco’s ability to attract corporate investment,” it calls for “new tax incentives, financing tools, permitting reform and roadblock removal.” The plan backs up these slogans with specifics: support for refunding property taxes for conversion projects, creating a financing district targeting downtown projects, overhauling “antiquated permitting processes and systems, including paper-only applications,” and the reorganization of its own development team to speed collaboration among agencies that approve construction projects of all stripes.
San Francisco has plenty of problems but also plenty of ideas. None will be easy to execute, and all will require the mayor to put his political imprimatur on his preferred policies — the types of painful actions Lurie has discussed but not taken.
Mass transit systems with robust service will be central to any scenario that sees a rejuvenated downtown. But passing a voter measure to salvage Muni’s finances, for example, will require the mayor to persuade his constituents on the Muni-hating west side to fall into line and not block it, as they did in 2022. Tax breaks and other inducements for downtown developers — critical for revitalization and anathema to progressive supervisors — will require Lurie to flex the political muscles he developed during the campaign. And nothing will happen if the mayor doesn’t develop a strategy for staring down organized labor, which is gearing up to fight him over city budget cuts.
Lurie has proved himself to be a genuine bundle of energy in his early days in office, popping up seemingly everywhere around town and enthusiastically telling corporate bigshots across the country that San Francisco is “open for business.” During his campaign, he liked to appear with his crisp, white shirt sleeves rolled up, a fashion signal from the Levi’s heir that he planned to achieve much as mayor.
But if downtown San Francisco is to have a chance, it can’t afford any more Bloomingdale’s closures. Lurie talked a lot about accountability during his campaign. Well, now he really is accountable. It’s on him to fix this — and quickly.