As a candidate for mayor last year, Daniel Lurie touted his unique abilities to provide shelter for the city’s neediest residents. As proof of this elusive skill, he pointed to a project spearheaded by Tipping Point Community, the anti-poverty nonprofit Lurie founded, which amassed a $100 million war chest and wrangled a coalition of affordable-housing organizations to build a 146-unit apartment building at 833 Bryant St.
Now, according to an internal presentation obtained by The Standard, Lurie plans to solicit the exact same amount — $100 million — from private individuals and foundations in order to pay for 1,500 new shelter beds. The presentation, titled “Breaking the Cycle” — the same name as Lurie’s recent executive directive to address the city’s homelessness crisis — was written under the direction of Kunal Modi, the mayor’s health and homelessness policy chief. The nine-page deck has been circulating among organizations and wealthy individuals who fund such projects, according to several sources with knowledge of the plan.
The plan, expected to be officially unveiled in the coming weeks once the mayor’s team secures financial commitments, brings into focus the administration’s aim to fulfill a significant campaign promise for Lurie: a 1,500-bed increase in shelter capacity for the homeless within six months.
It is also the latest expression of what might come to be known as the “Lurie doctrine”: a top-down focus on energizing and involving San Francisco’s wealthiest inhabitants to address the conditions of its poorest. To execute the doctrine, the mayor and his aides are seeking to assure potential donors of the administration’s organizational competence and to encourage a sense of noblesse oblige that appeals to the wealthy familial network from which the Levi’s heir has emerged.
The scheme, which comes on the heels of two other new Lurie-driven initiatives that tap the money and influence of San Francisco’s ruler class, the Partnership for San Francisco and San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., has obvious virtues — and a few drawbacks. The biggest among the latter is whether there are enough philanthropic dollars to go around, especially given that building shelter beds isn’t the mayor’s only ask of the city’s richest. It also comes at a time when city efforts to cut the $840-million budget deficit will force numerous nonprofits to turn to philanthropists to keep them afloat. And the fundraising effort raises a ticklish question: What makes Lurie think that throwing yet more money at the homelessness problem will yield different results?
As has been the case with other nascent efforts to involve the monied set in San Francisco’s civic affairs, designs to raise funds to pay for new temporary shelter have been going on behind the scenes, even as Lurie has been publicly promoting the broad contours of his plan. On March 18, he issued the executive action, a detailed list of policy initiatives, that signaled an intention within 100 days to “mobilize philanthropic capital to support initiatives.”
That mobilization included the preparation of a deck to woo potential donors that looks a lot like what might have been built by a management consultant at McKinsey, which is what Modi was before joining City Hall. The presentation is simultaneously a rallying cry that describes its mission and a road map for achieving it.
“Our current approach hasn’t delivered,” it declares. “San Francisco has spent billions on homelessness over the last decade. Simply adding more resources has not created better outcomes.” Yet it claims that with “bold changes to our existing $1 billion homelessness and behavioral health system,” notably through commitments by City Hall and “strategic use of philanthropy,” the city can improve effectiveness with a broad range of approaches.
Much of the document mirrors the initiatives laid out in Lurie’s executive action. The part that’s specific to prospective donors is the amount of money it is targeting and for what purposes. An “immediate” first phase of $25 million would go toward securing interim housing with 500 beds that “could include procurement of modular units, [single-room occupancy hotels] and warehouse conversions.”
A second, $55-million phase, envisioned to be in the “next 3-6 months,” would go toward another 1,000 beds. The plan stipulates that philanthropic funding would cover one-time expenses while the city would be on the hook for ongoing operations.
A third funding element, representing another $20 million, would go to what shelter-focused policy types call “enhanced systems,” also known as services like helping people leave interim housing, designing new street teams, and improving case-management systems.The deck for donors excitedly notes that of the immediately needed $20 million, $11 million has already been raised. That number refers to already-announced funding from the mayor’s old organization, Tipping Point, to grant financial assistance, employment support, and other services for homeless families. (Lurie stepped down as CEO of Tipping Point and left the board in 2023.)
The involvement of Tipping Point and the Housing Accelerator Fund, whose name and logo appear on the “Breaking the Cycle” deck’s title page alongside the mayoral seal, is Lurie’s way of bringing his housing band back together again. Tipping Point raised $100 million in 2017 for a “chronic homelessness initiative,” whose signature project was the 833 Bryant Street permanent supportive housing building.
That project has had its ups and downs but nevertheless is a symbol of Lurie’s can-do coalition building. The Housing Accelerator Fund acted as a financial intermediary on that project by providing rapid financing that wouldn’t typically be available to a development that isn’t seeking market-rate returns. It would play a similar role for the mayor’s shelter-bed initiative by being the recipient and disseminator of philanthropic funds.
Representatives from the mayor’s office, Tipping Point, the Housing Accelerator Fund declined to discuss the ongoing initiatives.
Finding all this money is going to be a challenge, even for a fundraiser as prodigious and well-connected as the mayor. Already, he’s behind the effort to inject funds into the central business district that will rely initially on philanthropic dollars, the yet-to-be-unveiled Downtown Development Corp.
Brokerage titan Charles Schwab and his wife Helen kicked in $65 million to jump-start the earlier Tipping Point fund. Schwab, along with Tipping Point and Crankstart Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Standard Chairman Michael Moritz, were name-checked recently as potential donors by Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing Executive Director Shireen McSpadden, according to The Examiner.
Lurie’s platform as San Francisco’s mayor is infinitely bigger and louder than it was at Tipping Point. Case in point is the impressive rapidity with which he has convened the types of deep-pocketed donors he promised as a candidate. I’m told the newly formed Partnership for San Francisco group of CEOs and other powerful business leaders meets for the first time today, March 28, and that Lurie intends to address them.
The members shouldn’t be surprised if the mayor hits them up for money.