When San Francisco voters dumped an experienced politician, London Breed, for an affluent newbie, Daniel Lurie, the expectation was that he’d use his connections with rich people and CEOs to revitalize the city, particularly its ailing downtown.
It took Lurie all of two months to begin to deliver on that promise. Last week, 15 local CEOs of big companies and another 11 muckety-mucks of similar stature unveiled their membership in Partnership for San Francisco, a new group that hopes to be the arbiter of what’s good for business — and what’s good for City Hall. (The announcement confirmed my reporting on the new entity from several days earlier.)
It isn’t altogether evident what the new group will do. I have a hunch that even its members — who include Sam Altman of OpenAI, Larry Baer of the Giants, investor Ron Conway, iPhone designer Jony Ive, Chris Larsen of Ripple, Patti Poppe of PG&E, Ruth Porat of Alphabet, Laurene Powell Jobs of Emerson Collective, and Tony Xu of DoorDash, among others — are not crystal-clear on its remit.
But based on conversations I’ve been having — including with the president and CEO of Partnership for New York City, on which San Francisco’s entity is based — I think this group of oligarchs is a fine idea, with an important caveat. In its haste to assemble an Avengers-like squad of suits, the Lurie administration hasn’t made clear how it will bring along the other factions of civic life that are crucial to its success. These include organized labor, other special-interest advocacy groups, and elected officials, all of whom remain in the dark about what the Partnership for San Francisco intends to achieve.
Still, after taking the pulse of people involved, I am cautiously optimistic that this group of heavy hitters will be a force for good. At a minimum, if they simply rally their peers, employees, and business partners to give a damn about San Francisco, it will be a step in the right direction.
To understand what the new entity might achieve, I met last week in New York with Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City. She hosted me at her office in an unglamorous tower all the way downtown, blocks from Wall Street and City Hall. Wylde, who has been with the partnership since 1982 and became CEO in late 2000, explained that the group was in a unique position to help organize the response to 9/11, having been formed in the economic crisis of the 1970s. (The state’s governor and senators met in her office after the World Trade Center buildings came down; City Hall wasn’t an option because Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudy Giuliani were bickering over who’d be in charge of the disaster response.)
Her group retained seven global consulting firms, working for free, to determine the uninsured economic impact of 9/11: $23 billion. The partnership, she said, was a “neutral body” that could advise on how funds from the federal government, which was footing the bill, would be spent, leading to the creation of a state-city agency, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.
Federal money isn’t on the table today for San Francisco, not with Donald Trump in charge. But the Partnership for New York City does illustrate some possibilities for San Francisco, particularly in the way it acts as a go-between for commercial and government interests. In the early days of the pandemic, for example, it mobilized CEOs to get ventilators to area hospitals. “If you go bottom-up from the government-relations people, that can take forever,” Wylde said. “If you’re going top-down from the CEO, it takes the length of an airplane flight.”
Wylde told me about various projects the New York partnership has spearheaded more recently, each designed to assist a municipal bureaucracy “that can’t get out of its own way” and whose departments “are biased toward legacy systems.” (Sound familiar?) For example, her group sponsored a competition to help New York’s building department find and choose new technology vendors. It also has a well-funded research staff that writes reports intended to help the city administration, like what San Francisco’s SPUR does, but with broader interests and better connections.
Rob Speyer, one of two co-chairs of Partnership for New York City and CEO of the Tishman Speyer real estate empire, told me the broad base of business executives involved is key. “It isn’t about one industry or one group or one person,” said Speyer, whose company is a major landlord in San Francisco, too. “It’s about what’s best for New York City.”
I buy this. Looking over the list of initial Partnership for San Francisco members — including the CEOs or top executives of Williams-Sonoma, Gap, Dodge & Cox, Deloitte, Visa, Sephora, McKinsey, and DocuSign — it represents a group of companies that, by and large, don’t base their success on doing business with the city, as opposed to, say, local real estate developers. For now, at least, let’s give these CEOs the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to uplift San Francisco for its citizens, as opposed to pressuring its government for tax breaks or lobbying for contracts.
Wylde is particularly optimistic about Partnership for San Francisco for a reason I admittedly wouldn’t have considered: that the top three people involved: former First Republic President Katherine August-deWilde, who is the new group’s president and CEO, and her co-chairs, Powell Jobs and Porat, are women. “You can’t afford the testosterone effect dominating these efforts,” she said. “Women just want to get things done. They don’t think they are the smartest man in the room.”
The longtime head of the New York partnership has been the recipient of so many how-do-we-do-this phone calls from San Francisco over the years that she knows the local environment surprisingly well. In recent years, Wylde has spoken to venture capitalist Conway, when he was advising Mayor Ed Lee; Noah Wintroub, a JPMorgan vice chairman who took Lurie’s place as head of the sporting-event-promotion group Bay Area Host Committee; and Hamid Moghadam, CEO of real estate giant Prologis, who is well known to be thoroughly, and understandably, pissed off with conditions in San Francisco. All three of the above are founding members of the new outfit.
(Anyone else notice the weirdness that the head of New York’s partnership is Kathryn Wylde, who goes by Kathy, and the organizer of San Francisco’s version is Katherine August-deWilde, who goes by Katherine? But I digress.)
As it happens, I’m not the only San Franciscan who dropped in on New York’s civic CEO group last week. The day after I met with Wylde, she was visited by Supervisors Myrna Melgar and Matt Dorsey, as well as Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority. They were in New York to discuss transit, not business groups, and they appeared at an event with Gov. Kathy Hochul to support the city’s congestion pricing plan that’s under attack by the Trump administration.
The supervisors told me they haven’t been briefed by Lurie’s team or the partnership and that they aren’t in the know on the yet-to-be-unveiled San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., whose existence I also reported on last week.
The latest I’m hearing about that group is that it plans to sidestep a number of state and city authorization and funding mechanisms and instead focus on raising money from wealthy individuals, corporations, foundations, and, potentially, labor unions, which have discretion over how their pension funds are invested.
As one example of where the mayor might be going with this, he met in early February with John Goldman, president of the John & Marcia Goldman Foundation, according to an official calendar obtained by The Standard. Goldman, like Lurie, is a member of the Haas family, heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune. The topic of their chat, according to the calendar: “Business engagement.”
Whomever he ropes in, Lurie will need permission from the Board of Supervisors to personally solicit funds for the downtown development group. To do that, he’ll need to clue them into the plan, which conceivably could include projects like speeding up improvements to Market Street or planting oodles of trees downtown. And we haven’t even begun to hear the full howls of dissent from those who think rich people are bad and are only out to make more money.
Come to think of it, it’ll be on Lurie’s Pacific Heights crowd to prove them wrong. I wish them luck.