Approaching one year in office, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie is offering a candid analysis of the city’s recent difficulties: The municipal government became an adversary to the very economic engine it depended on. Speaking at a conference in early December, Lurie acknowledged that the city’s political leadership had previously operated under the assumption that businesses would tolerate endless obstacles.
“We took our business community for granted,” [Lurie said]. “We thought, ‘We can just keep making things hard for you… and you’ll stay.’ But that didn’t happen. People left.” (San Francisco has lost residents every year since 2020; 2025 census data is not yet available, though population is projected to have stabilized over the past year. Total net population loss ranges from 30,000 to 55,000, against a broader population of around 834,000.)
“San Francisco’s elected officials took people for granted,” Lurie stated, referring to its artists, restaurants, and entrepreneurs. “We won’t do that again.”
Lurie, who noted City Hall historically functioned as a “sort of opponent” to small businesses due to excessive bureaucracy and red tape, is now working to reverse that dynamic by positioning the government as a partner. However, while the mayor is eager to modernize the city’s outdated infrastructure with Silicon Valley-style innovation, he explicitly rejected the tech industry’s famous mantra of “move fast and break things.”
“I don’t think we should be breaking things … in government,” Lurie cautioned. While acknowledging the city needs to adopt “well-regarded tools,” he emphasized that implementation must always consider safety and regulations.
Safety first, innovation second
This cautious yet forward-looking approach is most evident in Lurie’s handling of public safety, which he identifies as his top priority.
“Nothing else matters if you can’t keep people safe,” he said. To address this, the city has deployed new technologies, including drones as first responders and license plate readers, to track criminal activity without engaging in dangerous high-speed chases.
The strategy appears to be yielding results. Lurie reported crime is down 30% citywide and 40% in the Financial District and Union Square. Additionally, he noted the city is currently experiencing its lowest homicide rate since the 1950s.
“We are an incredibly safe American city,” Lurie said, while noting there are still major issues to address, primarily a “behavioral health crisis on our streets.”
The battle against ‘red tape’
A significant part of Lurie’s “partner, not opponent” strategy involves dismantling the city’s notorious bureaucracy. He highlighted the absurdity of San Francisco’s governance structure, pointing out the city —almost triple the number in Los Angeles, despite LA having ten times the population.
To streamline operations, the administration has launched “,” a digitization initiative aimed at replacing paper forms with a unified digital system. The goal is for business owners to fill out a single form that is routed to all necessary departments, rather than visiting separate windows for fire, planning, and health approvals.
Return to office: attraction over mandates
Regarding downtown revitalization, Lurie said he is taking a soft-power approach, including on the return-to-office issue.
“My job as San Francisco’s mayor is not to tell people to be in the office five days a week,” he said. “It’s to create conditions so people want to be in the office.”
He argued that by ensuring clean streets and reliable public transit, the city can naturally draw workers back, citing the seven-day-a-week office culture of major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI as evidence of the city’s returning energy, alluding to how [trend] has spread across Silicon Valley.
Defining the narrative
Ultimately, Lurie said he believes the city’s greatest challenge has been psychological—specifically, the “sentiment” of its own citizens.
“It seems like the biggest challenge was San Franciscans’ view of themselves … you’ve got to love yourself before anyone else will love you,” he said.
He stated his overarching goal for his remaining three years in office is to restore San Francisco’s 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.
“This is the greatest city in the world when we’re at our best,” Lurie said. “And I think people are starting to see that again.”