On Wednesday, under a cloudless sky, newly-inaugurated Mayor Daniel Lurie stood at a podium and told the crowd a tale of visiting the neonatal intensive care unit at San Francisco General Hospital, witnessing infants hanging onto dear life — including due to fentanyl exposure.
“As I listened to nurses talk about their tiny patients, I began to hear the familiar sound of hope,” he said, to a flurry of clapping.
Every seat at Civic Center Plaza was sold out for his inauguration speech. On nearby Larkin Street, I stood with a few hundred more people, who had gathered to listen to the new mayor speak.
Lurie officially entered office as a somewhat odd figure for a San Francisco politico. He has never held a conventional job in his life, and as the son of billionaire Levi’s heir Mimi Haas, he has more wealth than any American mayor in recent memory. Unlike former mayors London Breed and Gavin Newsom, Lurie has no Willie Brown-esque mentor to guide him, either.
According to his campaign, those differences are a good thing. But in his speech Wednesday, Lurie didn’t expound on his identity as a political outsider. Instead, he focused on his agenda as new mayor: Funding hospital beds for acute mental health treatment, reforming civil service hiring, tackling drug use through policing, and ending onerous inspection requirements for businesses, among (many) other promises.
Near me in the overflow crowd were a few dozen people from the violence-prevention nonprofit United Playaz, including founder and director Rudy Corpuz Jr.
“Him alone with the good ideas, it’s a good start,” Corpuz Jr. told me. “But the more important part is gathering the right partners. And he said it: He’s going to hold accountable people who are getting city funding, and if they’re not doing the work, they’re moved out of the way. He promised action in the first 100 days. That’s the grace period he’ll get.”
When Lurie’s ceremony ended, hundreds streamed into City Hall for a reception, complete with lox bagels and a jazz band. Attendees were asked to jot down their dreams for SF and slip them inside a wooden suggestion box.
The agenda items ought to be clear. People want improvement in public safety, the homelessness crisis, the fentanyl epidemic, housing affordability, and public schools. The city has struggled to coordinate between departments on these issues, and Lurie has talked up efficiency reforms — including hiring policy chiefs to act as his eyes and ears within departments.
Those big problems have stayed largely the same for the “last three or four mayors,” James Taylor, professor and political expert at the University of San Francisco, told me. “The new mayor needs to take the baton from London Breed and run faster on the same path.”
The intractability of those problems speaks to how entrenched and long-gestating they are, but Lurie won’t have much leeway with that excuse, Taylor added.
“I always felt like Breed had five different fires burning around her, and if she had put out two of them, she would’ve won reelection,” he said. “Lurie will have to deliver, both in terms of concrete policy outcomes as well as good messaging around those metaphoric fires, even if he can’t put them out.”
On day zero of his mayorship, the messaging was working — especially in Chinatown, a focus of Lurie’s campaign. Wednesday night’s post-inauguration party took place along Grant Avenue and featured food vendors, traditional Chinese arts, and a set from SF-native DJ Zhu.
Lily Lo, a longtime community organizer who helped organize the festivities, first met Lurie while planning Chinatown’s monthly night markets, which are supported by Lurie’s nonprofit, Tipping Point Community.
“Daniel visited me quite a few times before I knew he was running for mayor. So I think he understands the Asian community, especially those who are underserved or don’t know how to speak up — a lot of them really want change,” Lo told me on the phone. “It’s a big opportunity for him.”
By 6 p.m., it felt like all of San Francisco had descended on Grant Avenue. Throngs of people shuffled shoulder-to-shoulder, as packed as a mainstage crowd at Outside Lands.
Drums and firecrackers reverberated around the Far East Cafe, where Lurie dined at a banquet organized by eight different Asian-American organizations, with guests including Olympic figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and food-television legend Martin Yan.
“Everyone probably hated each other in that room, right? This is the Chinese American political community,” Chinatown Chamber of Commerce organizer David Ho told me with a laugh the following morning. “But everyone was there, whether you were a winner or a loser in the election.”
San Francisco mayors have long sought the support of the Asian-American — and especially Chinese-American — demographic in order to win elections. But Vincent Pan, co-executive director of the progressive nonprofit Chinese for Affirmative Action, told me after the banquet that he believes that Lurie will commit to the communities he courted during the race.
“And now the hard work begins,” Pan said. “Chinatown has never been in need of a savior. It is a collective process that involves all of us — government, civil society, private sector. I’ve enjoyed my work with a variety of mayors, but there are no heroes.”
The day of celebration left me mulling the lessons of R.E. DeLeon’s “Left Coast City,” which argues that San Francisco is a melting pot of ever-evolving, always-competing constituents that lead to a kind of “hyperpartisanship.” The only way forward, DeLeon suggests, is pragmatic governance that creates trust around issues and solutions, rather than ideological loyalties.
“The city has no natural majority; its majorities are made, not found. That is a key to understanding the city's political culture: Everyone is a minority,” DeLeon wrote.
Lurie’s inauguration day, which took him from the Tenderloin to Ghirardelli Square to City Hall to Chinatown, was his first official effort to build that majority. Everyone I spoke to expects, if cautiously, major change — especially if they come, as promised by Lurie, in the first 100 days.
