Nearly a year after taking office, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie offered a frank diagnosis of the city’s recent woes: City government has become a rival to the economic engine it relies on. speak at the meeting Fortune Brainstorm Artificial Intelligence At the meeting in early December, Lurie acknowledged that the city’s political class had previously operated under the assumption that businesses would tolerate endless obstacles.
“We take our business community for granted,” Lurie told wealth Editorial Director Andrew Nuska. “We said ‘We can keep punishing you … and you’ll stay.'” Well, that didn’t happen. People ran away. ” (Until 2024San Francisco has lost population every year since 2020, and 2025 census data has not yet been released but is expected to stabilize over the past year. The total net population loss ranged from 30,000 to 55,000 people, while the wider population was approximately 834,000. )
“San Francisco’s elected class takes people for granted,” from artists to restaurants to entrepreneurs, Lurie said. “We won’t do this again.”
Lurie noted that City Hall has historically acted as “somewhat an adversary” to small businesses due to bureaucracy and red tape, and is now trying to reverse that by positioning government as a partner. Yet while the mayor is eager to modernize the city’s aging infrastructure with Silicon Valley-style innovation, he has explicitly rejected the tech industry’s famous mantra of “move fast and break things.”
“I don’t think we should be breaking the rules in government,” Lurie warned. He acknowledged the need for the city to adopt “tools that are well-received,” but stressed that implementation must always keep safety and regulations in mind.
Safety first, innovation second
This cautious but forward-thinking approach is most evident in Lurie’s approach to public safety, which he considers to be his absolute priority.
“If you can’t keep people safe, nothing else matters,” he said. To that end, the city has deployed new technology, including drones and license plate readers as first responders, to track criminal activity without the need for dangerous high-speed chases.
The strategy appears to be bearing fruit. Lurie reports that crime is down 30 percent citywide, with crime in the Financial District and Union Square down 40 percent. Additionally, he noted that the city’s current homicide rate is the lowest it’s been since the 1950s.
“We are a very safe American city,” Lurie said, noting that there are still major issues that need to be addressed, chiefly the “behavioral health crisis on our streets.”
The fight against “red tape”
An important part of Lurie’s “partners, not adversaries” strategy involves dismantling the city’s notorious bureaucracy. He highlighted the absurdity of San Francisco’s governance structure, noting that the city Maintain 150 commissions—That number is nearly three times larger than Los Angeles, despite the fact that the city has ten times the population.
To simplify operations, the government has introduced “LicenseSF”, a digital initiative that aims to replace paper forms with a unified digital system. The goal is for business owners to fill out one form and send it to all necessary departments, rather than visiting separate windows for fire, planning and health approvals.
Return to the office: attraction trumps empowerment
As for downtown revitalization, Lurie said he’s taking a soft power approach, including a return to the office.
“As mayor of San Francisco, it’s not my job to tell people to stay in the office five days a week,” he said. “This is about creating the conditions for people to think Go to the office. “
He believes that by ensuring clean streets and reliable public transportation, the city can naturally attract workers back, citing the seven-day-a-week office culture of major artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI as evidence of the city’s revitalization, and mentioned how “996” culture Word has spread throughout Silicon Valley.
Define narrative
Ultimately, Lurie said he believes the city’s biggest challenge is psychological, specifically the “mood” of its citizens.
“The hardest problem seems to be the way San Franciscans feel about themselves…You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you,” he said.
He said his top goal for his remaining three years in office is to restore San Francisco to its status as “a world-class city that is the envy of the world,” ensuring it is no longer defined by outside critics but by its own residents.
“When we’re at our best, this is the greatest city in the world,” Lurie said. “I think people are starting to see that again.”