Mayor Daniel Lurie’s high approval ratings are being put to the test as a widening class divide, a yawning budget deficit and an ongoing housing crisis undermine his centrist approach.
during his 18 months leading a city that not long ago was a much-mocked national symbol of urban dysfunction. Lurie, an heir to Levi’s fortune with no previous political experience, has brought a little more order to downtown streets plagued by drug use andOn Instagram, where the earnest and sometimes-wonky Lurie, 49, feels right at home, he’s constantly reminding his followers that whatever doom-and-gloom stories they might have heard, the glorious city of San Francisco is back.
Elections this week brought more good news: his favored Board of Supervisors candidates cruised to easy victories. While Mayor Daniel Lurie is constantly reminding his followers that the glorious city of San Francisco is back, scenes like these show that the city’s homelessness crisis is far from solved. Yet the mayor’s sky-high approval ratings are now being put to the test as a widening class divide, a yawning budget deficit, and an ongoing housing crisis undermine his centrist approach.
His ability to manage the city effectively over the next few years will have big implications for the troubled national Democratic Party, which San Francisco has done so much to shape. It will also test something more ineffable: whether San Francisco can retain its unique identity as a refuge for those who think differently, and a destination for creatives and renegades from around the world.
As a “moderate” Democrat in a one-party town who isn’t beholden to unions and other interest groups, Lurie has managed to bridge some of the city’s fierce political divides with a straightforward, common-sense approach to the most visible problems. Police and prosecutors are taking a firmer hand with both drug dealing and drug use. They’re employing sometimes-controversial law enforcement technologies — including license-plate readers, surveillance cameras, and drones — to fight property crime.
Drug treatment programs and more homeless shelters are ramping up, too, albeit slowly.in the coming years, Lurie has bet on a rezoning plan that would open the city’s low-rise residential precincts to taller buildings and hopefully spur construction. San Francisco’s economy has been buoyed by the unexpectedly rapid rise of the AI industry, and especially its homegrown stars, OpenAI — headquartered, as seen above, in the Mission Bay neighborhood — and Anthropic.
Meanwhile, the economy has been buoyed by the unexpectedly rapid rise of the AI industry, and especially its homegrown stars, OpenAI and Anthropic. Yet the growing gap between the haves and have-nots — set to widen yet again when the two big AI companies go public — has helped shatter the local tech community’s political consensus, which once united liberals and libertarians around the idea of an empowering “new economy.
” They are now pouring money into San Francisco politics like never before — not just to defend their business interests, but to push a broader, more conservative social and economic agenda. Lurie might be a centrist Democrat by most measures, but he’s also the son of a billionaire, and his moderate faction is dominated by rich tech investors.
The more liberal among them, such as venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Ron Conway and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, are card-carrying Democrats, albeit on the conservative end of the party’s ideological spectrum. But Lurie also enjoys at least the tacit backing of the hard-right tech moguls who’ve risen to power in the Trump era, such as former crypto and AI czar David Sacks.
For San Francisco progressives, weakened but not vanquished, there’s little to love in an agenda built on more police, more surveillance, tougher sentencing, and business-friendly tax policies. Enraged by the depredations of the Trump Administration and the tech industry’s cavalier approach to the societal risks posed by artificial intelligence, even many San Franciscans who consider themselves liberals rather than progressive have very different priorities. Taxing the rich is at the top of the list, along with regulating artificial intelligence.
So is resisting change to the city’s many historic neighborhoods; NIMBYism is alive and well, on both the left and the right, and Lurie’s re-zoning is far from a done deal. The affordability crisis is now as bad as it’s ever been following an abrupt, AI-driven spike in rents and housing prices.
The service workers who staffed the famous restaurants and tourist venues — and have always been a key part of the creative economy too — have left the city in droves. The arts scene is reeling from the closure of theatre companies and music venues that can no longer draw crowds. Downtown still feels empty on most days, with the office vacancy rate stuck at 35%. Homelessness and fentanyl have hardly gone away.
The extraordinary ascent of San Francisco’s internet industry over several decades, followed by the crypto boom and now the AI gold rush, has made the city richer than it’s ever been. Now Lurie must satisfy the conventional demands of monied residents and their businesses while making the budget numbers work and somehow safeguarding the charm, the quirks, and the compassion of a city that prides itself on tolerance and marching to its own beat. It will be no easy feat.
While Mayor Daniel Lurie is constantly reminding his followers that the glorious city of San Francisco is back, scenes like these show that the city's homelessness crisis is far from solved. San Francisco's economy has been buoyed by the unexpectedly rapid rise of the AI industry, and especially its homegrown stars, OpenAI — headquartered, as seen above, in the Mission Bay neighborhood — and Anthropic.
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