San Francisco Dares Daniel Lurie Not to do it Again

Quick note…apologies for the tardiness on this one: paid subscribers. I had a friend staying at my apartment because of the fires, and then the weekend, inauguration, and MLK day holiday weekend legit vanished. I promise to be back in my grind this week and onward. Hope everyone is as well as can be and safe.

"I saw corps strip farmers of water...and eventually of land. I saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people's crushed spirits, broken dreams, and emptied pockets. Corps have long controlled our lives, taken lots...and now they're after our souls! V, I've declared war not because capitalism's a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiraled outta our control. It's a war against the fuckin' forces of entropy, understand? Do whatever it takes to stop 'em, defeat 'em, gut 'em. If I gotta kill, I'll kill. If I need your body, I'll fuckin' take it! Fuckin' hell...You still don't see it.

But you will one day."

Johnny Silverhand, Cyberpunk 2077

Two weeks after the November election, I was having dinner with my mother, stepfather, my-soon-to-be wife, and her parents (San Francisco natives) at their home in Sea Ranch, north of San Francisco. Being the typical West-coast Libs that we are, enjoying a local Pinot Noir as the Pacific roared and humbled us in the background, we naturally got onto politics, specifically Daniel Lurie, the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, where most of us lived.

If you're unfamiliar, Mr. Lurie founded and has led the Tipping Point Community since 2005, an organization aiming to create a prosperous Bay Area, focusing on addressing systemic barriers and racial inequities that perpetuate poverty. It's been reported they have since raised $500 million from private donors. According to their website, "Tipping Point has invested in more than 200 organizations helping Bay Area residents on a path out of poverty" and has helped over 90,000 people. These accomplishments and others align with Lurie's future policies, from building 1,500 additional emergency shelter beds and 2,500 temporary housing units within two years, a legislative package titled the "Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance," and reducing multifamily house transfer tax to encourage building as well as streamlining the permitting process for housing construction.

Lurie is also known for being quite wealthy as the son of Mimi Haas, the wife of the late Peter Haas, who died in 2005, and the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss (whose market cap at the time of writing sits around almost $7 billion). Mr. Lurie, through his mother, will likely own approximately 11% of Levi's, valued at around $700 million as of spring 2024. In 2021, Forbes estimated her net worth was at $1.4 billion. In contrast, Mr. Lurie, with a $16 million Pac Heights home, a reported 15.5 million dollar home in Malibu (2021), and 22 different investment entities, including over $1 million in the San Francisco 49ers, is no slouch either.

So, since it was reported that his parents divorced when he was two and he primarily grew up in the Haas household, San Francisco's new mayor has always been wealthy and connected to rich things and people.

This isn't an attack - not yet, at least - but more an objective fanning out of Lurie's early exposure to wealth and philanthropy, which, as we've seen with Tipping Point and Lurie's election (he contributed $8.6 million of his own money to his mayoral campaign and ran the most expensive bid for mayor in San Francisco history, with total fundraising reaching nearly $16 million) is most of the time for a good, just cause but always done with financial, corporate strings attached. I say corporate because some of Tipping Point's largest corporate contributors are the Visa Foundation, Goldman Sachs, The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, JPMorgan Chase, the strange "Anonymous (2)", and, of course, Levi Strauss and Co.

And considering I and many others have already been noticing the unsettling trend of kleptocratic, oligarchical powers becoming the norm within national politics (at the time of writing, I'm watching President Trump's inauguration with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai all sitting side by side on their phones likely watching their stocks go up before market open) this was my main rub when I learned that he had been elected, leading me to query the dinner table that night with, "Why, was the public so eager to vote for another billionaire, with all their billionaire friends, into the highest position of power in the land, to lead?"

The details are a bit hazy now (as I said, Pinot), but my stepfather said I should schedule a meeting with the new mayor and interview him and "Ask him that and some other questions." It wasn't a bad idea, and, digging into what Mr. Lurie has accomplished and stated in the past, I found good, great, and not great things, especially on Lurie'ss comments and heavy leanings towards tech and big finance, forcing me to wonder if we were gearing up for some 2010's Tech Boom 2.0.

A month ago, Mr. Lurie sat with Kate Rogers on CNBC to "talk about bringing remote workers back, making the city safer, and diversifying business beyond tech." As a stated centrist Dem, Lurie believed voters went with him because they were looking for "common sense, change, and accountability" and a government that" works for the people," a standard populist strategy which, as noted, appears to be all the rage nowadays. Lurie went on to discuss his plans for an official state of emergency regarding fentanyl (it didn't happen, so he went with a tentative ordinance plan) and appeared stumped and stammered when Kate Rogers asked what he would tell remote workers who said no if asked to return to the office. But, at the core of their conversation (and my anxiety) was where tech and business leaders were in terms of coming back to the Bay.

Mayor Lurie went on to name-drop the likes of Jamie Dimon, the commissioner of the NBA, and "leaders and supervisor elects" being all on the same page regarding "welcoming the world back to San Francisco." This was around when my alarm bells started ringing. The discussion then led to AI mastermind Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI and now appointed co-chair of Mayor Lurie's transition team. Then there was Ned Segal, Twitter's former Chief Financial Officer, from 2017 to 2022 until Elon Musk fired him, now the chief of housing and economic development under Lurie. "He (Altman) wants to put down roots here in San Francisco, and we want to lean into being the home of AI."

Of course he does because, according to the IDC, Global AI spending will more than double to reach $632 billion by 2028, making it clear that Mayor Lurie, stating triumphantly in the interview that "San Francisco is open for business," is touting support and granting very important seats at the very important table of his team to major tech leaders…but doesn't that feel a little tech-boom 2010? Don't Lurie's business partnerships with tech and corporate giants raise concerns for anybody else? While these relationships will likely pump industry growth and job creation, they may also lead and contribute to inflated tech sector salaries, create a supply-and-demand imbalance in urban housing markets, and trigger, once again, all-out bidding wars that, fifteen years ago, led to widespread gentrification in a never-ending merry-go-round of soaring property values and rents that ended up displacing long-standing communities forever.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is undoubtedly a duck, but maybe I'm not giving Mayor Lurie the benefit of the doubt.

Later on in the conversation, he addresses this very same "tech lash," believing the city needs a "balance” and feels that "we went through a tough time, and he worked closely with Salesforce during that time of backlash to make people understand that you have to be invested in the community." I wasn't sure what Lurie meant by "tough times," but maybe he was referring to Salesforce laying off a massive number of employees after pressures from activist investors to enhance profitability in 2023. Or maybe contributing to San Francisco's highest office vacancy rate in the nation, at 37% as of mid-2024 due to remote work or, back in 2010, when the S&P Case-Shiller San Francisco Home Price Index went from 128 as of November 2010 to the index reaching 359, reflecting a 258.83% increase from the baseline according to Alfred and the St. Louis FED.

I laughed out loud when Lurie mentioned bringing back "arts and culture" to the city but then referenced no specific plan. Instead, he excitedly circled back to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and how he wanted to put his "roots down" and make San Francisco the "home of AI."

To be fair to Mayor Lurie, he was on Cramer’s show, which is predominantly focused on business, finance, corporate blah blah blah…and really no place, I guess, to go into his plans for arts and culture in SF. If you’d like to read his questionnaire about the subject, you can find it here, though the link to his arts plan from that link doesn’t appear to be working right now.

Onwards…a month later, Lurie sat down with Jim Cramer, and Mayor Lurie reiterated his same points about public safety and, this time, the hiring freeze. He stressed that it would not be law enforcement or public health though, but the "least effective programs" which, according to SF Standard, he "did not respond to a list of questions about which departments would be exempted from the hiring freeze or the criteria for halting programs and contracts." All that, and of course, SF being the home of AI. But as Jim Cramer feverishly giggled and Lurie again pronounced San Francisco as the most fantastic city in the world, sounding more desperate than confident, my initial anxiety of Lurie's crush on the likes of Jamie Dimon and others was all but confirmed when he mentioned Jonathan Gray, president & COO head of Blackstone, the largest commercial landlord in history with horror stories of rent overcharges, the Motel 6 fiasco (Blackstone ended up paying $19.6 million for illegally sharing guest lists with ICE without warrants) and many, many other controversies.

Much of what Mayor Lurie has planned looks and sounds good on paper…it's just the fanning over big tech/corporate/private equity that gets me and hopefully others, especially as many are weary (and worried) about the nation and a world that continues to see massive divides of wealth and asset inequality. Do we really want to bend the knee to these overlords when the highest-earning 20% of Americans have increased their share of national wealth to 71% by 2022, up from 61% in 1990? Do we really want to be directed and governed as the top 1% alone now controls 26% of the country's wealth, an increase from 17% in 1990? Is that really the answer, again?

If I were to return to that night in Sea Ranch, wine, food, and debate flowing freely as it should with family - free and open, unmitigated and challenging but always returning to a place of love and freedom; and if I were to ask Mayor Lurie some questions right then and there, I suppose I would ask him this:

Why do you feel compelled, Mayor Lurie, to curry favor with the world's wealthiest individuals, especially as our nation, on both sides of the aisles, continues to lean towards and resemble an oligarchy? And if this is truly your only path forward…if there are no other options that you and your team can go with regarding the cities debt, bringing businesses back, housing scarcity, and on and on…how can San Francisco's residents not expect more of the same? Or, even worse, what if we see an exacerbation of 2010 from this pseudo-trickle-down economics that is set to put the ones with even more money and even greater tech in power and in chart to reshape the city again?

Or, as Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Welsh Labour politician and the chief architect of Britain's National Health Service (NHS), put it, "How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political power to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."

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