The Metropolis by the Bay will quickly have a brand new chief, as Democrat Daniel Lurie was elected the following mayor of San Francisco on Nov. 7. Lurie, a political newcomer, beat a fellow Democrat, incumbent Mayor London Breed, to earn the town’s prime job. He gained the mayoral race by a big margin; Lurie led via all 14 rounds of the town’s ranked-choice voting system and beat Breed by greater than 26,000 votes within the closing spherical.
Whereas Breed, the primary Black lady mayor of San Francisco, was seen as among the many most progressive leaders within the metropolis’s historical past, Lurie took a extra average, centrist strategy all through his marketing campaign. Having survived allegations of shopping for the race, Lurie will now look to implement a sequence of modifications when he takes workplace on Jan. 6.
Who’s Daniel Lurie?
Lurie was born in San Francisco in 1977. By way of his mom Mimi Haas and stepfather Peter Haas, Lurie is an inheritor to one of the crucial recognizable clothes manufacturers in American historical past: Levi Strauss & Co. Each the “Levi’s identify and Haas household philanthropic foundations are deeply embedded in San Francisco’s historical past and identification,” stated CBS Information. Lurie’s organic father additionally has well-known connections throughout the metropolis.
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Lurie graduated from Duke College and labored on Democratic policymaking earlier than beginning his best-known enterprise, Tipping Level Group. This nonprofit group has “invested $440 million over greater than 200 organizations serving to Bay Space residents on a path out of poverty,” based on its web site. Lurie introduced his mayoral run final yr and invested almost $9 million of his personal cash within the marketing campaign, serving to him surge to victory.
What’s going to he do as San Francisco’s mayor?
Although he was new to politics, Lurie “delivered a transparent message” that might broadly resonate with dissatisfied residents craving change and finally assist win him the election,” stated the San Francisco Chronicle. Beneath Breed’s tenure, issues continued to plague San Francisco, with “open-air drug dealing, brazen retail thefts and empty downtown workplaces tarnishing the town’s popularity,” and Lurie argued that an outsider was wanted to deal with these points.
Lurie’s mandate is to “present how authorities should ship on its guarantees: clear and secure streets for all, tackling our drug and behavioral well being disaster, shaking up the corrupt and ineffective forms,” the mayor-elect stated in his victory speech. He additionally pledged to construct extra reasonably priced housing and revitalize the town’s companies.
Considered one of Lurie’s predominant plans is to “declare a state of emergency on fentanyl on his first day in workplace in January,” stated The New York Instances. This included a pledge to “shut down the open-air fentanyl markets that had proliferated within the metropolis’s Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods.” He vowed throughout his marketing campaign to “construct 1,500 new shelter beds in his first six months in workplace, make drug remedy accessible to anybody who needs it and use ankle screens to trace first-time drug sellers.”
His election is not a complete shock, as Lurie’s win “marks the most recent in a push, not solely in San Francisco however throughout California, to extra average candidates and tough-on-crime insurance policies,” stated USA At present. Equally, Los Angeles’ progressive district legal professional was additionally ousted in favor of a extra average candidate.
However whereas Lurie has pledged to scrub up San Francisco, some have questioned how efficient he might be. Lurie would be the metropolis’s first mayor in additional than 100 years to not have prior authorities expertise — although “his decades-long ties to the town’s political, philanthropic and social elite via his anti-poverty nonprofit, Tipping Level, do not precisely make him an outsider both,” stated The San Francisco Customary.
