San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has been basking in a glow of constructive media protection after a yr on the job.
His approval score is 73% in a single ballot.
That’s extraordinary, as actuality on the streets paints a distinct, patchwork image.
Lurie defeated incumbent London Breed final yr over rampant crime and a staggering exodus of outlets and downtown workplace tenants.
Since then, Lurie has taken to social media as an influencer, peddling positivity.
Cheering on mom-and-pop retailers, swanky eating places and frequenting cafes to feed his caffeine dependancy, he posts his visits to each nook of the town — and plenty of locals adore it.
The Insta-mayor is affecting public sentiment, bringing again optimism after years of sustained doom-loop despair.
Over the summer time, Lurie and his group appeared at each main public gathering within the metropolis.
(He loves a celebration.)
They have been at neighborhood night time markets, block events and music festivals in Golden Gate Park, repeatedly telling attendees that the town is seeing higher occasions.
However in August, the San Francisco Customary revealed that Lurie, uber-wealthy and prepared to spend, had paid $350,000 of his personal cash to a seasoned PR group.
Their mission: counter San Francisco’s adverse picture.
Lurie’s supporters noticed that transfer because the mayor utilizing his private sources at a essential juncture, steering the town away from the brink.
But others, together with long-time residents and store house owners, cried foul.
He’s peddling snake oil, it’s smoke and mirrors, he’s whitewashing, many claimed.
Since his January swearing-in, Lurie has been a relentless presence on native and nationwide TV, repeating his crafted mantra, “San Francisco is on the rise.”
However information of medicine, crime and different issues mere blocks from Metropolis Corridor retains breaking.
Citizen journalists, braving darkish alleys, publish social-media footage of slumped-over addicts within the “fenty fold” — the standard fentanyl posture.
Shootings and stabbings are once more spiking on streets a stone’s throw from main resorts, theaters, skyscrapers and the empty shopping center on the Market Avenue thoroughfare.
Drug dealing and dependancy damage San Francisco’s picture — and its taxpayers.
Metropolis officers use a good portion of the annual working finances to fund teams and applications that cope with dependancy, homelessness and psychological sickness — usually with poor to combined outcomes.
Lurie has declined to go after the drug sellers themselves, lots of whom are unlawful aliens from Honduras.
Locals are rising more and more pissed off — and broke.
San Francisco has had Democrat mayors for the reason that Nineteen Sixties, and no conservative official has served on the 11-member Board of Supervisors (our native metropolis council) for many years.
The delicate state of cooperation between average Lurie and the radicals on the board is nearly sure to disintegrate.
We’ve seen this earlier than: Whether or not the problem is housing or legal justice, training or homelessness, the left right here dominates discourse and rallies the town’s radical voters.
Native boosters level to the AI enlargement that’s driving new funding within the native tech sector.
However the AI bubble may simply be one other boom-bust financial roller-coaster.
Lurie and metropolis corridor officers unrealistically tout AI as a panacea, hoping its acceleration will carry its staff again to our neighborhoods and bolstering our nightlife.
But experiences present retail gross sales tax collections are down in almost each district within the metropolis.
Techies aren’t spending a lot domestically.
Rents are spiking once more, and with it comes resentment from the natives.
And amid a present office-space-grabbing frenzy, an AI collapse may set off one other debacle in business actual property.
AI (and tech on the whole) is fickle, and delicate to the winds of regulatory change.
Metropolis Corridor officers are reluctant to embrace the tech business — besides in relation to slapping punitive taxes on CEOs or high-value actual property transfers.
The consequence?
Many aspiring startups are skipping California on the whole, and San Francisco particularly, opting to arrange store in safer, extra business-friendly locales.
Critics will grudgingly acknowledge that Lurie and his efforts have had constructive results for San Francisco’s picture.
But regardless of his claims of victory over the town’s earlier, darker days, lingering issues quash the thrill.
President Donald Trump and federal brokers have been set to descend on the town to assist combat crime.
Lurie spoke to Trump on the cellphone, and was capable of persuade the president to press pause on that plan.
The mayor needs to scrub up the streets his personal approach.
Now it’s a ready recreation to see if the “sanctuary metropolis” of San Francisco can resolve its issues, or whether or not the federal authorities should intervene.
Finally, San Francisco has to arrest unlawful migrant drug sellers — and permit the federal authorities to deport them — earlier than any actual “cleanup” can start.
Prefer it or not, the mayor should settle for this actuality. Solely then will we see actual change.
San Francisco nonetheless has a protracted option to go.
Richie Greenberg is a longtime San Francisco activist and former Republican mayoral candidate.
