Daniel Lurie has now been Mayor of San Francisco for just over 100 days. While most of the world’s attention has been on the catastrophic, chaotic, cruel and destructive first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second presidency, it is useful to reflect on Lurie’s first 100 days in office as well. In many respects, the biggest change in San Francisco since the new mayor came to office is one of narrative more than reality. In some respects, this is good because a better narrative means more tourists, a healthier business environment and just generally better vibes that are good all around.

It may seem like I am asserting that the change in narrative obscures that things are still bad in San Francisco, but that is not what I am suggesting. Rather, my point is that conditions in the city were never as bad as the doom loop fanatics suggested, and sought to use for their own political and financial gain.

The new narrative did not just happen but was caused primarily by two things. First, Lurie seems to understand that an important part of his job is to be a cheerleader for the city. A good mayor must be an ambassador for the city they lead and tell the world why it is a great city and why people should visit it or do business there. 

Lurie is much better at this than his predecessor London Breed. Breed was a more charismatic and better natural politician, but she made the mistake of hitching her political future to those who were telling the world how terrible San Francisco was. Not surprisingly, while that worked for a while for Breed, ultimately it hurt her because no incumbent can get reelected by telling the voters how bad things are.

The second thing driving the new narrative around the city is that the media has begun to tell a different story. A charitable explanation of this is that they want to give the new mayor a honeymoon period. A more sober explanation is that wealthy conservative (moderate if you prefer the misleading local parlance) San Francisco, a community in which Lurie is deeply embedded, now has a mayor and a Board of Supervisors friendly to their interests, so is telling a different story about the city. All it takes is a quick look at Lurie’s transition team major donors — conservative mega-donors the Fisher Family, Republican rent-control foes Tom and Linda Coates, and major Air BnB investor Ron Conway and his family, among others — to understand where some of his allegiances lie. 

While the changing narrative around the city since Lurie took office is clearly a good thing, it should not obscure the policies the mayor is pursuing. A shift towards heavy policing and away from scientifically-proven harm-reduction policies to “deal with” San Francisco’s homeless population  has led to accidental overdose deaths surging 50% since Lurie took office. Crafting city policy, including city budget, is best done when there is an understanding of on the ground realities in the city as well as a commitment to policies that work rather than those that sound good or are based in campaign rhetoric.

Lurie’s task has become even more difficult because the Trump administration’s attack on cities means the city could lose up to $2 billion. This only makes it more essential for the city budget to reflect reality rather than campaign talking points. 

One of the most important examples of this is the police budget. Lurie has made policing a center-point of both his campaign and his mayoralty thus far. This has occurred in a city that is, with regards to violent crime, one of the safest in the country and where crime was declining when Lurie took office. Increasing police funding in this policy and budget context reflects tough on crime campaign posturing rather than actual need. That is the mayor’s right, but it is not good governance.

The mayor is both a captive and promoter of the illogic of police budgets that goes something like this: 

“When crime is up, we need more money for the police because, you know, crime is up; when crime is down, we need more money for the police because, you know, crime is down.” 

Parenthetically, a similar dynamic, to which Lurie also seems to subscribe, has occurred in the housing discourse in San Francisco, articulated most aggressively by the neo-effective altruists promoting the abundance agenda. That illogic is something like: 

“If the population is growing, we need to build more market-rate housing because the population is growing; if the population is declining or stable, we need to build more market-rate housing so the population can grow.” 

Both these approaches are policy Catch-22s where no matter what happens there is a rationale for more police and building more de facto luxury housing.

San Francisco, the fading away of the excessively negative narrative notwithstanding, is facing real problems. Some, such as figuring out how to stand up to and push back against the fascistic, bigoted and anti-urban administration in Washington, or preparing a coastal city for the impact of accelerating climate change, are extraordinarily difficult to solve. Asking Lurie to magically make those problems go away is unrealistic and unfair to the new mayor.

On the other hand, there is another battery of problems including homelessness, the fentanyl epidemic, the lack of affordable housing and the enormous wealth inequality that is leading to a very different lived San Francisco experience for the wealthy and the less fortunate, that can be, if not eliminated, than at least ameliorated. 

The first step to meaningfully addressing those problems is moving away from the tough talk and platitudes about police and “common sense” that were so beneficial to Lurie during his campaign and instead moving towards research-backed solutions, including things like harm reduction, investing in preventing homelessness and insisting that San Francisco’s wealthiest pay taxes they can easily afford. These may not sound as tough, but will be more effective.