San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: ‘We Are a Town at the Upward push’

I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco’s newly minted mayor, about 5 mins earlier than we walked onstage at WIRED’s Large Interview match, held in his town final week.

Lurie’s group let me know forward of time that his window for this dialog used to be tight: He’d simply come from pronouncing a brand new town police leader, and had about part an hour for me earlier than he had to be directly to the following factor. Which used to be? “No thought,” Lurie quipped, in a while earlier than we have been foisted from behind the scenes and into our dialog in entrance of a number of hundred attendees—a neighborhood crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie’s each phrase, are a number of the 73 p.c of San Franciscans who approve of the activity he’s finished since taking place of work in January of this yr.

To Lurie’s credit score, the tale of San Francisco at this time is in large part a favorable one. The town is certainly the worldwide hub of AI innovation and the billions of greenbacks that accompany it, with firms like Anthropic and OpenAI, together with smaller startups, buyers, and various younger, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco house. Sure, that suggests rents are up and housing inventory stays precariously low. However place of work emptiness charges are losing, stores are coming again to the town’s downtown, and as Lurie’s place of work is fast to tout, a number of key metrics measuring municipal crime—together with homicides and automobile break-ins—are at historical lows.

I sought after to speak to Lurie about all of that, however I used to be additionally curious concerning the larger image: his management’s dynamic with the government, specifically within the context of President Trump’s October plan to ship the Nationwide Guard into San Francisco—an enterprise that Lurie controlled to thwart, in step with The New York Instances, by way of recruiting a formidable coterie of generation executives to paintings the telephones in his desire.

Lurie wasn’t precisely approaching there, in step with his diligent efforts to focal point conversations on San Francisco, and most likely keep away from attracting the eye, or the ire, of the present management. It’s a special tack than different Democrats governing modern portions of the rustic have taken, from New York Town mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But when the reaction within the room final week used to be any indication, Lurie’s native enthusiasts don’t appear to thoughts his “say much less” technique—no less than for now.