A Conversation with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie

Mayor Lurie:

This is not a job that you can do sitting behind the desk. You cannot fix what you can't see. So I have to be out seeing the issue. I'm talking to people struggling, and I'm saying, what can we do? I feel like I have to be out there doing it to understand what's working and more importantly, what's not working so we can fix it. It has changed in San Francisco. What now we need to change is in New York and in London and in Shanghai and in Dubai. We need people talking about how San Francisco is on the rise. If you do the little things, if you care just a little bit, the world is going to come rushing back to San Francisco.

David Stiepleman:

Hi everybody, we're recording our podcast. It's called It's Not Magic. It's a Sixth Street podcast, and this is the San Francisco season. Everybody say “hi” to Mayor Daniel Lurie, the 46th mayor of San Francisco, elected last November. You took office four months ago, four and a half months ago. Before that you founded Tipping Point Community in 2005. Turned that into an incredible force for good in our region, and a national leader in anti-poverty initiatives. You also headed up the Super Bowl 50 host committee in 2013, which brought unbelievable economic activity to the region, but also invested in kids and all kinds of terrific things. Born and raised here in San Francisco. Welcome, beautiful Monday morning. Thanks for spending it with us. Most surprising thing about the job so far?

Mayor Lurie:

How much I love it. I really do. And people are like, come on, tell me, you can tell me you're not on camera. And I say the same thing off camera, I say on camera. What I loved about my job at Tipping Point was that I got to meet everybody. I got to meet clients. I got to meet great executive directors, and I got to meet great people in the business world. And I got to see the best sides of people at tipping point. I see everything every single day. Like I'll be in one meeting, talking about, I've just came out of a budget meeting, then I went to my leadership team meeting just now, and then I come out here to the Presidio and I sit down with all of you. Every 30 minutes or hour is something completely different and completely invigorating and exciting. And when you love your city, like I love this city, and when you're raising your kids in this city, the idea that I get to go to work every single day, and my focus is on how do we make this the greatest city in the world. It's pretty awesome in every sense of that word. And it's also incredibly frustrating at times too. This morning, I dropped my kids off at school in the mission, which I do every day, and then came down Octavia, which I do many days. And it was not good. There were people using openly. There were people that had just slept on the street all night suffering. And so I love it, and we got a lot of work to do.

David Stiepleman:

Go back to maybe November, December, January, you built things, Tipping Point you built from scratch, very entrepreneurial organization, but you had studied anti-poverty organizations in grad school. You built it over years. You become mayor. You have to jump on a very fast train very quickly and be ready to go and you need a team. How did you do that?

Mayor Lurie:

I don't know how fast we go at City Hall. I'd like us to go faster, to be quite honest. I started Tipping Point. I learned a lot from Robin Hood from ’01 to ‘03 in New York City. And so I had a sense, and so grad school was my time to put what I wanted to do in place. And ’05 to ‘20 was Tipping Point. But Super Bowl was also pretty entrepreneurial, you know, now we have a Bay Area host committee, which is excellent and run by this incredible woman, Eileen, but there was no sports authority in San Francisco or

for the Bay Area. So when Jed York, the owner of the Niners, and Mayor Ed Lee approached me about putting together this host committee, there was nothing in place. So we had to do that. Now we obviously got to lean on the city and the Niners, but we had to start something. So I do like starting things. I put together a great advisory committee, come November, we had not thought about a transition team. We thought about winning and we had to win first. Although I did have one or two people working on a potential transition. And so then we had, you know, five transition co-chairs and we put together just, we tried to get the best of the business world, nonprofit, world government, world, you know, people like Ben Rosenfield came on board, who was the former Controller to help us. So we just got really smart people. Some with in-house experience and some just with just life experience. And I think we did quite well.

David Stiepleman:

You seem pretty calm. It has to be crazy. And like how did you, how did you ?

Mayor Lurie:

I appreciate that. I, everyone was like, oh, you don't have any experience. I mean, the fun fact that I didn't really realize that just started coming out after we won was, it's been 111 years was the last time someone without any political experience was mayor. So that's either really frightening or exciting and I think the city needed something to shake it up. But I have to say, I was never intimidated by the job or overwhelmed by it. I always worked with the mayors in my role at Tipping Point, not closely, but you know, I knew them and I saw them and Mayor Ed Lee and I worked of course on Super Bowl a bit together, but I never felt like, oh my God, it's, you know, so maybe I was naive actually. I was at the UC Berkeley graduation this weekend, and Daniel Aki, who founded KIND bar, told a story actually about something that my dad had said about Daniel. They go way back. And my dad had called Daniel naive about wanting to make change and to do something positive. And I think I walked in, you know, in some ways I had known mayors, but I was naive in a positive way where I'm walking in saying, if you say no, you better have a reason why. It better not be because, oh, we just, we've never done it that way, or it can't be done that, like, I won't accept that answer. I never walked in intimidated. I walked in like, this city needs some shaking up. That's why we got elected. People want change. They want accountability and they want transparency. And I think we're delivering on all three to a certain degree. We have a long way to go. We've had a good start, but so much more work to do.

David Stiepleman:

I wonder if your quote unquote positive naivete has been super helpful in that. How are you talking across lines?

Mayor Lurie:

The first week or two, first month, I walked over to the supervisor's offices. I promise you, you know, a lot of 'em have either interns or some young people at the front door. And I would knock on the door and they'd look up and they'd be like, what? What are you, the mayor? They had never seen a mayor come over to their office before and they'd go knock on the supervisor's door and supervisors would be like, what, is everything okay? I'd be like, I'm just coming over to say “hi.” We're on the same floor at City Hall, so you just have to walk maybe a hundred yards around. And I just made it a point, early days to just walk over, invite them to come see me. I walked up to the fourth floor where, you know, someone in some accounting office had said they'd been there for 19 years and had never seen the mayor up there.

Mayor Lurie:

I fundamentally believe that if you go talk to, I mean, this is the most cliche thing to say, but you go and you talk to people who are going to disagree with you 80% of the time, that's fine. But if you can find common ground on the 20%, that's why we got elected. And I wanted to go introduce myself and get to know the supervisors. And I kept saying it's a new day in City Hall. I don't have the baggage of the past. I have some new baggage now. Some supervisors are get upset with me on some things, but then we talk about other things. We talk about the Warriors or the Giants, or we talk about how we're raising our kids in this city. We all have common ground, and I'm trying to go find it across the aisle by walking down my, you know, something that has not been discussed anywhere is that my wife actually put together a dinner for all the spouses of the supervisors or partners. All of them were invited. She had a dinner with six people and a few couldn't make it. I don't think that's ever happened before. And so just the little things go so far, and I believe this at Tipping Point, I believe at running City Hall. If you can do the little things well, you can do the big things. If you can't do the little things, well, forget doing the big things. Well, we as a city have fallen down on many fronts. So I want us to just start doing the little things like a clean street, a safe street, and then let's build it from there.

David Stiepleman:

Let's talk about the first 100 days. You were very clear, this is not a victory lap. We have a lot of work to do. But how did you pick the three to five things that you wanted to make sure we were working on in the first 100 days?

Mayor Lurie:

We said public safety number one. I mean, it had been an issue for the last few years in San Francisco. The previous mayor had focused on it. The campaign was a lot about public safety. It was a lot about the behavioral health crisis. And then it was around just making San Francisco a city where we could welcome business back. Being open for business is something that we say everywhere we go, because we want to be, for us to be successful, we need to build more housing. We need small businesses to grow and thrive here. We need big business to think, okay, actually the people in San Francisco want us here. The people in City Hall want us to do business in San Francisco. And we had gotten to a place where we weren't keeping people safe or at least feeling safe. The behavioral health crisis, as we all know, we still have two people a day dying of overdose in San Francisco, two people a day. That number has really not changed for a number of years now. We have to change course on that. Fentanyl changed the game in San Francisco, and we did not change with it as a city. And I'm happy to go into some changes that we've made recently. And then we're going to make it easier for restaurants and bars and nightlife to just do their thing more easily. We're going to put a shot clock on many things. It's going to take 30 days or less to get your permit through. Those are the three principles, public safety, the behavioral health crisis, and then permit reform. And I think you have to stay focused on three things, otherwise you can try to, if you try to boil the ocean as you all know, then you don't get your job done.

David Stiepleman:

There is a vibe shift. I was in Union Square – this is anecdotal – Union Square over the weekend. It was hopping. The Nintendo store was, the lines were crazy. It felt great.

Mayor Lurie:

I was down there yesterday afternoon. There was still a buzz around five o'clock on Sunday afternoon. It was good. There was a conference in town also that had started on Saturday. That helps because we still

have so many vacancies down there. I think one of the things that helped was the Nintendo store opening last week was Big.

David Stiepleman:

Zara's doing a big store. There's this vibe shift. What do we need to do to make sure that we continue passing it down the chain?

Mayor Lurie:

We need the vibe shift. It has changed in San Francisco. What now we need to change is in New York and in London and in Shanghai and in Dubai. We need people talking about how San Francisco is on the rise. So if you're listening, if you're the two or four people listening to this podcast, please know that this city, you know, crime is down, violent crime is down close to 20%. Car break-ins in February versus last February, down to a 22-year low. So we are making progress. It is still not good enough. I am not satisfied. We are winning conferences back. We won Databricks. Their conference was expected to go to Vegas. We won them over in the early days. We had a great JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. They were not sure if they were coming back. They're coming back. I was at Stripe’s conference last week. They have just recommitted for at least the next two years, and they were thinking about going to another city. So we keep winning business back. Now we have to win some headquarters back. Now we have to win some office locations back, office relocations back, people that left for Austin, they're coming back. People that left for Miami, they're coming back. AI, you can't not be in San Francisco if you want to do anything related to technology or AI.

David Stiepleman:

When you think about downtown 20 years from now, what do you like? Would you riff on that? What’s our vision for that? What do you think of?

Mayor Lurie:

I think it's a place where you are living, you're working, you're playing. I was in New York City on September 11th, 2001, and I was literally a block from the World Trade Center. That morning. I saw everything. And I'm telling you, for the next few years I worked at Robin Hood. No one was like, oh, I want to go back downtown. Now you go downtown and New York is hopping down there. Mm-hmm . Hopping because it's got housing, it's got arts and culture, it's got hotels, it's got movie theaters, and it's got everything. That's what downtown should look like. It should no longer be, you come in at nine and you leave at five. It should be housing and arts and culture and nightlife and street fairs, and we have to reimagine Market Street. We have a design competition this summer. People from around the world have already put in designs. We have a great group of judges that will be judging that. We have to reimagine downtown. And it has to be living, working and playing and having fun.

David Stiepleman:

Yeah.

Mayor Lurie:

People tell me, oh, this is what you do in the Westfield Mall and this is what you do in that building and this is what you do at Macy's. Like, that is not my job. My job and our job at City Hall is to create the conditions to allow great ideas to emerge. Because if we get out of the way, if we put guardrails in,

we get out of the way, we let our entrepreneurs, our innovators, our artists, our culture leaders take over, then we win. Yeah.

David Stiepleman:

why do you think San Francisco, you're from here, we all live here. We love it. Why is it such a destination for innovators? What are we doing? Is it what's in the water?

Mayor Lurie:

We're going back a couple, almost a couple of hundred years now. Let's do it. It's where you make your dreams come true. We have this thing that it, you know, you're naive, like, you have to be naive to start a poverty organization. You have to be naive to think you're going to start an AI company or a database company, whether you're talking about Anthropic or Salesforce or OpenAI. You come here and it's in the water and it's been built over time. I think we have UC Berkeley, we have Stanford. What goes also unsaid a lot is that we also have UCSF, a premier global healthcare institution that has driven so much change. The universities here, the culture of not being afraid to take risks. It’s unparalleled around the world. You cannot go anywhere around the world and get what you get here in San Francisco.

David Stiepleman:

You've been very emphatic about public-private collaboration and partnership. What does that look like? Why is that important?

Mayor Lurie:

Because the private sector, our creative class, our entrepreneurs, they are the ones dreaming big and we have to invest in that. And government is always sort of a step behind that for good reason. You have to protect taxpayer dollars and you're not going to take as many risks. But private philanthropy, private investment, like what you all do here, you all get to take shots. You get to take big bets. And those big bets are what make United States the dominant player in the world. And I hope we stay that dominant player in the world. It's the ecosystem that has been built up from Sandhill Road to where we're sitting here in the Presidio that government should support. It is a partnership. It's not just between philanthropy or business. It's also the arts and culture. That's what gives our city the soul. It's what gives our country the soul. And we have to make sure we create the conditions at the government level.

David Stiepleman:

Federal government's a little bit of the elephant in the room, depending on what people do, it can sway outcomes for all of us. How are you thinking about that?

Mayor Lurie:

I'm trying to not think about it except in the budget context. It's something that we're preparing for. They are going to do what they're going to do. And I don't have control over it. That's how I think about it. I think, okay, what can we control? And what we can control is the $15.9 billion budget, making sure that we protect our values, that we protect our people. We are going to always live up to our San Francisco values under my watch. So that's where my focus is right now.

David Stiepleman:

On social media, you're creating the impression that you're everywhere. It's unbelievable. And I actually was in a Waymo the other day. I was on my phone, and then I looked up and there you were walking down Post Street, like near 11. I feel like you're in my dreams or something. It's very strange.

Mayor Lurie:

I’m so sorry for you.

David Stiepleman:

No, no, no. It's . That seems intentional. Why is that important?

Mayor Lurie:

I think it's important. We talked about this in the office the other day. We did this on the campaign. There was just only a couple of thousand people that were following us. Now we have more. And so people are like, oh, what you're doing is so innovative, but it's just a way for us to communicate with the people of San Francisco and actually with the country and the globe to get that message out that there's a lot of good stuff happening in San Francisco. That we are the culinary capital of the world. I mean, we have the greatest restaurants in the country. We have the greatest coffee. I've been accused of drinking too much coffee. I want to highlight what makes our city so amazing. And we are out and about, so why not tell people about it? And we're getting a great response. We're not trying to do too much. I just talk into the phone and it takes 30 seconds. It's definitely exciting to see the reaction. And I think people feel like they get to see their elected official out and about. This is not a job that you can do sitting behind a desk. That is something that I've learned very quickly. Like, you just sit there. You cannot fix what you can't see. So I have to be out seeing the issue. So I get out of the car multiple times a day, and I'm talking to people struggling with addiction. And I'm saying, what can we do? And we've had some good outcomes. We've also not had good outcomes because I see some of the same people there every single day. But I got a guy into the emergency room quickly. He was complaining about something in his leg, largest hernia this doctor had ever seen at SF General. We got another guy that was sleeping on the street into a place in the Castro called Lyric, and now he's in stable housing. So we are getting people off the street and into help when I'm out talking to people and I'm able to figure out how to talk with our outreach teams, which we have now consolidated. We have neighborhood outreach teams, before we had nine different outreach teams run by nine different departments. We now have five neighborhood outreach teams and one citywide team. And they all report to one conductor runs each of these six teams. It is much more coordinated, much more collaborative, and I'm able to pick up the phone and call that conductor, and I'm seeing progress on the streets. I feel like I have to be out there doing it to understand what's working and more importantly what's not working so we can fix it.

David Stiepleman:

How do you make sure you're taking care of yourself? How do you balance?

Mayor Lurie:

Well, I exercise every day. Meditate. Although I didn't this morning, it's probably a bad thing. I got an amazing supportive spouse in Becca. And my kids are amazing and doing well, and I get to see them every day, which is great about this job. It's not one where you have to fly off and do things. I don't really leave the city much, if ever. So exercise, a little meditation and loving the job helps too.

David Stiepleman:

Yeah, that definitely helps. What do we expect from the next six months?

Mayor Lurie:

A relentless focus on safety, clean streets, getting as many people off the street and into the right beds. We're not just going to stand up. Our goal is 1,500 beds. They're not just caught somewhere. Depending on the level that someone is suffering from, we want to get them into the right bed, so you're going to see us stand up a lot of the right beds to get people off the street. Sorry to get boring. But it's those three things over and over again. And then a lot more on the permitting side. And housing. We put together a family zoning plan, and that should be passed by the fall.

David Stiepleman:

Amazing. Is there a moment that you can recall over the first four months where you're like, this is why I'm doing this?

Mayor Lurie:

Yeah, I get it every day. I was on Friday, we had a press conference at Pier 39 and around entertainment zones. So, bring more nightlife and ability for bars and restaurants to do well in five different parts of the city. And I had a 15-minute window, and I went to Francisco Park kind of near Ghirardelli Square, and it's a new park that was built I think five, six years ago. And it's gorgeous. It took forever to build, by the way. And when you do hard things, it's usually worth it. And the city did a great job doing this park. And I'm sitting on, there's these really tall stairs that go down to the park, but it's got this amazing view. And I was watching this Parks and Rec employee cleaning the park, and it's 8:15 in the morning and he's sweating like he's been out working, and the park looks amazing and he's just taking such care. And I went over to talk to him and thank him and just get his story. And he talked about how much passion he has. He keeps four different parks clean. He's been doing it for eight years. And he was like, if you just care this much about what you're doing, it goes so far. He's like, you don't have to care this much. And he like, if you just care just a little bit, it goes so long. And that goes hand in hand with what I always say. Like, if you do the little things, if you care just a little bit, the world is going to come rushing back to San Francisco.

David Stiepleman:

I love that. Mayor Lurie, awesome to have you. Here we are. Very long San Francisco. Go Giants. And, uh, just saying and . It's amazing to have you here. You're welcome.

Mayor Lurie:

Listen, I appreciate your belief in San Francisco, and I appreciate what this firm is building. And just tell everyone that you know, whenever you're traveling, many of you get on planes and go far and wide. You all are our advocates and you are our cheerleaders and we need you out there. So just tell everybody San Francisco is on the rise and we're going to be back at full strength faster than anyone realizes. I love it. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Thanks.