Can Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s New Major, Make the City Shine Again?

Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s mayor-elect, beckoned them, one by one, to his four-story brick mansion, perched on a hill, in the city’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood.

The San Francisco supervisors, akin to city councilors, met with Mr. Lurie in his breakfast nook, a half-hour at a time. But despite the luxurious setting — his home has nine bedrooms and is worth $16 million, after all — the conversations, held over the last couple of months, centered on basic, everyday concerns.

They talked about keeping sidewalks clean. Ending illegal drug markets. Filling vacant downtown offices.

And on Wednesday, when Mr. Lurie, a Democrat and heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, is inaugurated as San Francisco’s 46th mayor, he almost certainly won’t mention revolution, resistance or sticking it to President-elect Donald J. Trump, as some liberal mayors tried to do during Mr. Trump’s first term. In fact, the name Trump never appears in the working draft of his speech, an adviser said.

Instead, Mr. Lurie, the founder of an antipoverty nonprofit, will talk about how to turn San Francisco into a well-run city — the best way, he believes, to ensure the future of progressive politics.

“I want to show the world that we can deliver on the promise of our values, that we can be both compassionate and firm,” Mr. Lurie, 47, said in an interview.

His success, he said, would depend on “if we grow our economy, if we get people off the streets and into mental health beds, if people feel safe walking down our streets again.”

His bigger ambition is to restore San Francisco’s golden-gate brand. His measure of glory: “If everybody around the world is, like, ‘I’ve got to be in San Francisco again.’”

Mr. Lurie does not seem interested in national politics or the future of the Democratic Party. For him, all politics is local. He spent his final weekend as a regular citizen clutching a trash picker and picking up litter.

Still, he is a symbol of what many Democrats say is the way forward after devastating losses around the country in November. Mr. Trump won a higher percentage of votes in 2024 than in 2020 in many liberal cities, including San Francisco — a sign, perhaps, that even in these blue bastions, voters were growing disenchanted with politics that prioritized ideology over improvement in their everyday lives.

“One of the messages from this last election is that in blue cities, people are frustrated — so frustrated, in some cases, they’re looking for other parties and other leaders,” said Danny Sauter, newly elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. “The best defense is producing a city that works.”

The question, though, is whether a man who inherited tremendous wealth, with a life far removed from most residents, and has no experience in elected office can turn San Francisco around.

Perhaps no blue city in the country suffered more than San Francisco over the past five years, in reputation anyway, drawing mockery from Mr. Trump and his allies.

The coronavirus pandemic and fentanyl crisis made for a brutal double punch to the city. Sidewalk drug markets overwhelmed some neighborhoods, and on average, two people a day were dying of drug overdoses. Some property crimes, including home burglaries, soared.

The overdose death rate and the overall rates of property crime have since begun to drop, but remain high compared with other cities.

Office towers in San Francisco are about 35 percent empty, a higher vacancy rate than in other large American cities, and tourism has not fully rebounded to what it was before the pandemic. Less tax revenue means that Mr. Lurie will have to find ways to close a budget gap approaching $1 billion over the next two years.

Despite facing these crises, San Francisco’s civic leadership has sometimes focused on ideological spats rather than practical solutions. During the pandemic, the school board seemed to spend less time trying to reopen school buildings than it did on renaming schools, including Abraham Lincoln High, over social justice concerns. The city’s district attorney at the time resisted prosecuting fentanyl dealers, considering such cases a continuation of the unsuccessful war on drugs.

Voters recalled three school board members and the district attorney in 2022. And in November, they voted out Mayor London Breed, a Democrat.

During her tenure, Ms. Breed had tried to address a few big issues, like making it easier to build housing in the city. But she was blasted by some constituents for some of her other programs, like allowing a supervised lounge where fentanyl users could smoke in a plaza near City Hall.

Mr. Lurie said he would stick with San Francisco’s long-held liberal values, like standing up for the rights of immigrants, transgender people and women seeking abortions if Mr. Trump’s administration tries to curb those rights. Beyond that, though, he said his focus would be on the nuts and bolts of local government.

His agenda, he said, amounts to “common sense.”

Others have suggested different catchphrases. It’s “practical progressivism,” said Bilal Mahmood, an incoming supervisor representing the struggling Tenderloin neighborhood.

It’s “resistance via results,” said Dan Newman, a Democratic consultant who ran a political action committee supporting Mr. Lurie.

“Eight years ago, I was in the streets wearing a pink hat,” Mr. Newman said in an interview, referring to the knit caps that anti-Trump protesters wore after the 2016 election. “Now we’re back in the same streets making sure they’re clean and safe.”

But the details of Mr. Lurie’s agenda so far are sparse. He promised to declare a fentanyl emergency on his first day in office, but has not specified what that means. He promised to eradicate drug use on city streets, but has not clearly explained the role of police officers in arresting users.

He said he would require city employees to return to the office five days a week, but has not said whether that would include thousands of city office workers in all departments, or just those in the mayor’s office.

His most concrete pledge — to build 1,500 new shelter beds for homeless people in six months — has been met with skepticism.

Mr. Lurie will have some advantages that Ms. Breed lacked, including a friendlier Board of Supervisors, which the November election tipped more toward centrist Democrats rather than far-left ones.

“People just want to make sure the grocery store stays open and their children don’t have to walk past drug dealers on the streets,” said Mr. Mahmood, whose Tenderloin district has long been known for homelessness and drug markets.

Mr. Lurie’s most useful assets are widely viewed as his friendly, high-energy personality, his deep connections with a variety of residents and his ability to persuade.

The local hotel workers’ union credited Mr. Lurie with working the phones last month to settle a strike. And he persuaded wealthy donors to give $500 million to Tipping Point Community, the nonprofit he founded in 2005 that funds groups fighting poverty.

But he does live at a high altitude. He can escape with his wife and two children to his $15.5 million vacation home in Malibu. And his most prominent advisers come from the tech and business world, including Sam Altman, the chief executive and a co-founder of Open AI.

Mr. Lurie has named Ned Segal, a childhood friend and former executive at Twitter, to be the city’s head of housing and economic development. Staci Slaughter, a longtime San Francisco Giants executive, will be his chief of staff. Kunal Modi, a partner at McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm, will lead his efforts on homelessness and health.

Many local politicians are hopeful, yet cautious, about the new mayor. Supervisor Myrna Melgar said their initial conversation was lovely, but full of generalities.

“He is new — he doesn’t even know where the bathroom is,” Ms. Melgar said. “San Francisco is a cutthroat, toxic place for politics. Well-meaning people get into this business, and it chews you up.”

Mr. Lurie said his models were Dianne Feinstein, who led the city after the 1978 assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and Michael Bloomberg, who helped rebuild New York after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Both mayors were known for their sure-handed steering through those difficult times, a no-nonsense, nonideological leadership style — and their wealth.

Ms. Feinstein was famous for calling her department heads when she spotted anything askew — a mattress dumped on a sidewalk, say — and Mr. Lurie said he had already started making similar phone calls.

Like Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire businessman, Mr. Lurie said he would take just $1 a year in pay, and forgo the rest of the mayor’s usual $383,000 salary. He is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, wealth that comes from his late stepfather, Peter Haas, a Levi’s heir and the apparel company’s longtime chief executive, who married Mr. Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas, when Mr. Lurie was a child.

Since his victory, Mr. Lurie has spoken to Mr. Bloomberg and said that the two share the belief that good government can improve cities.

“He was the ultimate New Yorker, and I’m a San Franciscan through and through,” Mr. Lurie said. “I just want to get results.”