Ed Koch, when he was the canny and quirky mayor of New York City, made a catch phrase of asking constituents, “How’m I doin’?”
Daniel Lurie, an equally gregarious if far less experienced mayor of San Francisco, has made it his habit to emerge from his armored SUV to ask some of his city’s homeless residents how they are doing, typically offering to help them get off the sidewalk and into shelter.
It’s a telling example of the tone Lurie has set in his first 100 days in office. Derided by opponents as a rich kid who’d never held a real job and as being woefully unprepared to run such a complicated and fractious city, the mayor instead has shown himself to be compassionate, ubiquitous, and, at least initially, admirably effective at governing. He also seems to know a thing or two about being a politician.
It is barely more than three months, of course — a sprint that has amounted to a honeymoon period for a mayor with an easy smile and a likable personality. And his biggest challenge — making the undoubtedly painful decisions it will take to fix the city’s $800-million-plus budget deficit — lies just ahead.
Yet in words and deeds, Lurie is off to a fast and promising start. Crime is down, a continuation of a trend begun under his immediate predecessor, London Breed, who amped up policing in an election year. It is too soon to say if Lurie’s efforts are making a difference in the parts of the city that are plagued by open-air drug use and homelessness. Already, though, he and the highly credentialed team around him have been bold and decisive in their actions.
Take the city’s new Sixth Street triage program, an attempt to clean up one problematic area that has had mixed results because it has pushed the problem elsewhere; namely, to the Mission. Sharky Laguana, a member of the city’s Homelessness Oversight Commission, praised the mayor’s health and homelessness policy chief, Kunal Modi, for posting data on the Sixth Street project to his Twitter feed, an example of the transparency Lurie promised in his campaign.
“I find it reassuring that people are paying attention, monitoring the outcomes, and then changing the policy,” said Laguana, a Breed appointee who did not support Lurie for mayor. “I’m struggling to remember a time when the data was so transparent on something that’s so sensitive and so new.”
In his campaign, Lurie griped about the city’s bloated bureaucracy and slow decision-making. On this front, too, his early moves are promising. Naming four policy chiefs to deputy-mayor-like roles overseeing departments is looking like a smart way to inject new blood into the city’s administration. His PermitSF initiative might be a sly way of placing the troubled Department of Building Inspection under the control of the Planning Department. He addressed the controversial policy of “harm reduction,” a progressive euphemism for handing out drugs and injection paraphernalia, not by eliminating it but by requiring drug users to seek city-sanctioned indoor sites instead of shooting up on the streets. Lurie even cleverly attacked the malaise of Market Street by allowing Waymo robotaxis, which San Franciscans and tourists alike have come to understand are safer than distractible rideshare drivers, to operate there.
“He has found a way to activate Market while still keeping it safe for pedestrians and bikers,” said Laguna, a self-described fearful e-bike rider. “The solution was right there under our nose.”
Hands-on leadership
The mayor also has achieved a number of political victories, large and small. He has charmed the Board of Supervisors, who supported his first major public-safety legislation by a 10-1 vote, even though they surrendered some contract-approval authority. He also carried the day in a lesser-noticed 9-2 board vote on a plan that makes it easier to convert offices to housing, including by removing affordable-housing requirements — long a sacred cow of San Francisco politics.
And what is likely the first instance of Lurie making a tough decision that disappoints a political bloc that supported him, his Planning Department issued a density-increasing upzoning recommendation — the mayor cheekily branded it a “family zoning” plan — that mirrors what Breed had proposed and already has enraged west-side NIMBYs who helped elect Lurie. According to conversations I’ve had, Lurie personally handled the details of the upzoning proposal, a plan that, if approved this year by the Board of Supervisors, will please some and annoy others, and shows the mayor is willing to make tough calls that he thinks are right.
Speaking of doing what he thinks is right, Lurie has been an unabashed booster of the business community. He has willed into being two brand-new civic groups, the Partnership for San Francisco and the San Francisco Downtown Development Corp., which, if nothing else, promise to recruit well-resourced and prominent business leaders to the city’s cause.
There are two big unknowns with this emphasis on rich people. The first is whether the mayor’s minions can raise the kind of philanthropic funds needed to sustain these and other efforts. The second is whether the mayor will become too beholden to the corporate and wealthy interests that are funding his projects. I’m hearing genuine concern within philanthropic circles about the former. On the latter, my gut tells me to believe Lurie when he says that he owes nothing to anyone and that the combination of a watchful news media and skeptical progressives will keep him in check if necessary.
All this early progress could grind to a halt, of course, if Lurie is less adroit in how he handles the budget crisis, which, thanks to President Donald Trump, could become even worse than anyone had expected on Election Day. It is widely assumed that Lurie will trim the budget with layoffs and cuts to the city’s long list of nonprofit organizations that provide services to residents. If Lurie does what he said he’d do — make painful cuts — there will be howls of protests from the labor unions that represent city workers and the legions of nonprofit employees and aid recipients.
While City Hall has been mum on details regarding how it will address what everyone understands has become an out-of-control spending problem — San Francisco’s budget has grown from $9 billion to $16 billion in the last decade, even as its population has stagnated — there are encouraging signs it plans to act.
At an event to reveal a comprehensive report on homelessness sponsored by Crankstart — the philanthropic foundation of Michael Moritz, chairman of The Standard — Modi addressed what everyone who focuses on San Francisco’s homelessness industrial complex knows to be true. “We don’t have a money problem,” the policy chief said, noting the billions that have been spent to battle homelessness. “We have a prioritization problem and an alignment problem. I think it’s important to say that out loud.”
That could be dismissed as mere talk in a city with an abundance of talkers. It’s more likely, however, that Modi’s comments foreshadow a serious, thoughtful reckoning for an overly permissive system that doled out $404 million in the last fiscal year via 291 contracts spread across 73 organizations. It is a culling that must happen, no matter how traumatic, if the taxpayers’ money is to be spent wisely.
Lurie’s first days in office have been marked by substantive, if incremental, changes that haven’t pleased everyone but have made him a popular and credible politician at a time of uncertainty and instability beyond our city limits. The city should wish for more of the same in the difficult days ahead.