Lurie's first 100 cleaning up the SF mess—a European perspective
Daniel Lurie picking up trash in San Francisco. Image by Xueer Lu
The Times of London takes a look at the new SF mayor's initial moves to pull our troubled neighbor to the north back from the brink—and sees qualified successes.
In his first 100 days in office Lurie has begun to tackle the filthy encampments that threatened to consume entire neighbourhoods, declared a state of emergency over fentanyl and made tentative steps to lure back businesses to the city centre.
Major brands are already returning. Zara made headlines last year when announcing it was closing its store in Union Square but this month the retail giant announced that not only was it opening a new store in the area but that it would be almost twice the size of the old one.
Lurie hailed the deal as proof that San Francisco was “on the rise”.
There are other indicators that better times lie ahead.
Car break-ins are at a 22-year low, according to the mayor.
Since January 8 when he was inaugurated, police have made 1,762 arrests for drug-related crimes, including dealing and public use, compared with the 1,052 arrests made over the same period last year.
City-funded charities are now banned from handing out drug paraphernalia such as pipes and foil to addicts unless they agree to treatment.
A new crisis centre in the troubled Tenderloin neighbourhood, set to open in the coming days, will operate 24/7 and treat addicts with urgent mental health needs, keeping them off the streets. Lurie plans to create 1,500 new shelter beds, with the potential to make a significant dent in the number of people sleeping rough.
There is still plenty of squalor on display in the city, with addicts doubled over in alleyways, a startling amount of human excrement on pavements and overdose deaths starting to creep up again.
Critics argue that he has simply swept the homeless population from one neighbourhood to another and called it progress.
Andrew Wickens, an entrepreneur who lives in the Mission District, posted a video to social media showing his three-year-old daughter riding a scooter on a pavement filled with homeless people and drug addicts.
While the neighbourhood has always had a problem with vagrancy, Wickens, 40, says the issue has dramatically worsened since problem areas in the Tenderloin were cleared.
“They just pushed all the drug addicts here,” he said. “Our neighbourhood has turned into Skid Row.”
There are other serious looming problems too, most obviously how to deal with a projected budget deficit of about $1 billion, which may entail job cuts and a battle with powerful unions.
Even so, a February poll released by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce found that 43 per cent of San Franciscans now think the city is heading in the right direction, up from 22 per cent last year.
Tom Wolf, a recovering addict who is now a prominent critic of the city’s previously permissive approach to drug use, agreed that Lurie has made a promising start.
“I would give the mayor a B+,” he said.
He argues it took at least a decade of poor political decisions to take San Francisco to the brink, and Lurie cannot fix everything overnight.
“The vibes are better, people are hopeful,” Wolf said. “With that said, if he’s not producing results within a year of his administration, people are going to start turning on him. There’s no question.”
Last month the number of homeless tents reached its lowest level since at least 2019, with 222, following a crackdown on vagrancy in which the city recorded 119 arrests for illegal lodging in March, the highest of any month over the last seven years.
The tougher approach began under Breed last summer following a US Supreme Court ruling that local authorities can ban people from sleeping on the street.
“What I’ve learnt in these first 100 days is you can’t solve what you can’t see,” Lurie told supporters outside City Hall. “I’m going to keep walking and talking to people each and every day until public safety and public faith is restored.”
After years of struggle, he is determined to convince the world that Tony Bennett’s “city by the Bay” is on the way back.
Read the whole thing here.
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