Daniel Lurie will be inaugurated as the 46th mayor of San Francisco on Wednesday.
A political outsider with deep San Francisco roots, Lurie’s election in November punctuated residents’ desire for a City Hall shakeup following the city’s slow pandemic recovery and corruption scandals.
After unseating incumbent Mayor London Breed, Lurie now faces the real test as he takes over the mayor’s office in Room 200. But not without some festivities first.
After a walk through the Tenderloin and ride on the city’s iconic cable cars, Lurie’s official ceremony begins at Civic Center at 11:30 a.m., followed by an open house at City Hall and later a special night market in Chinatown featuring San Francisco-born electronic music producer Zhu.
Things are moving fast. Here’s a refresher on how we got here.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Lurie attended the elite Town School for Boys and University High School before heading to the East Coast for college and later to work for the Robin Hood Foundation. He founded the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point Community, which has given out grants for work in housing, health care and other social services.
Lurie has never worked directly in government or held an elected office. He did, however, work with the late Mayor Ed Lee on hosting the 2016 Super Bowl and worked with city agencies through Tipping Point on issues like homelessness.
An heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, Lurie ran the most expensive mayoral campaign in San Francisco’s history, topping nearly $16 million. Almost half of that came from his own wealth, and his mother, Mimi Haas, donated $1 million.
That financial boost afforded the political outsider plenty of advertising space in mailers, social media ads and television — even more so than opponents who raked in millions of dollars from wealthy tech donors.
Lurie’s wealth tied him to older San Francisco institutions, but he ran a campaign focused on bringing a fresh perspective to local government that resonated with both frustrated and open-minded voters. He regularly blamed so-called “City Hall insiders” for government inefficiency and problems like homelessness and street safety.
And while he trailed opponents in early polls, he remained consistently voters’ second choice in a simulated ranked-choice ballot. By November — after a grueling election season that brought out new scandals, including the largest campaign ethics violation fine in the city’s history against opponent Mark Farrell — Lurie was polling highly as both voters’ first and second choice.
“This city is poised for greatness, so let’s all come together,” Lurie told a room full of volunteers in neon vests on Sunday at a neighborhood cleanup in the Mission District. “It’s a new year. It’s a new mayor. New supervisors. Let’s get to work. Let’s roll up our sleeves.”
The new mayor’s policy platform, however, doesn’t stray dramatically from his predecessor, a fellow moderate Democrat.
Lurie has vowed to build new emergency shelter beds within his first six months of office and has said he plans to issue a state of emergency around the city’s overdose crisis. He’s also going to have to prove he can move the needle on building the thousands of approved units that are stalled in the city’s development pipeline to meet a state housing mandate.
On the campaign trail, Lurie vowed to usher in a renewed focus on accountability and ethics, but a few of his early picks have already raised some eyebrows. That included naming OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to his transition team, a temporary and largely symbolic group of advisers, while the artificial intelligence company is actively lobbying City Hall for tax breaks.
For his long-term staff, Lurie appears to be trying to strike a balance by holding on to City Hall expertise that he’ll need to rely on while also bringing in some outside experience and perspectives on longstanding issues.
In one of his first acts as mayor-elect, Lurie announced that he would have four policy directors as well as a chief of staff reporting directly to him.
Ned Segal, former Twitter chief financial officer, will be chief of housing and economic development; former SFPD commander Paul Yep will oversee public safety policy; Alicia John-Baptiste, former CEO of the urban policy research and advocacy organization SPUR, will take the lead on infrastructure, climate and mobility; and Kunal Modi, a partner at management consultant McKinsey & Co., will direct health, homelessness and family services. Former Giants executive Staci Slaughter will be Lurie’s chief of staff.
Unlike some of his opponents, Lurie hasn’t yet promised to fire and replace specific department heads — but he’ll soon have to tap someone to direct the Municipal Transportation Agency after Jeffrey Tumlin’s resignation. Lurie also told voters that city department heads would essentially have to re-interview for their jobs, and he said those conversations are ongoing.
On Thursday, the day after his inauguration, Lurie plans to meet with all of the city’s department heads, he told reporters on Sunday.
“I know they’re working hard, and as much as that work is continuing, they also understand that things aren’t working and that they need to be held accountable, and they’re excited about that,” he said. “The focus is on accountability and change.”
Several new members of the Board of Supervisors will also be sworn in on Wednesday, including Danny Sauter (District 3), Bilal Mahmood (District 5), Jackie Fielder (District 9) and Chyanne Chen (District 11). The new board leans slightly more to the center after the November election, and Lurie, a moderate Democrat, will have to work with the full cohort to achieve those changes he promised voters in areas like homelessness, overdoses and housing.
“Everyone uniformly agrees that what is happening downtown on 6th and Mission and 6th and Market is unacceptable,” Lurie said. “Every supervisor I’ve talked to agrees we need more mental health beds. We need more drug treatment beds. Everyone agrees on that and I agree on that. And that’s going to be my push.”
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