City Hall Digest: Why Breed and Lurie Aren’t #1 For Us

City Hall Digest is TogetherSF Action’s biweekly dispatch from San Francisco’s City Hall, broken into bite-sized pieces—because understanding local government is your fundamental right and duty.

In this edition of City Hall Digest, we’re expanding on our mayoral endorsement. We’ve gone into detail on the backgrounds of the three candidates who share our concerns around public safety, street conditions, the economy and the government. But we’re also in the thick of a contentious mayoral election, and news is breaking each day that can be confusing voters, including those in our community.

We remain firm in our opinion that Mark Farrell is the most qualified candidate to be San Francisco’s next mayor. We still want you to rank Breed and Lurie so Peskin doesn’t stand a chance, but it’s also worth digging into why we think neither Breed or Lurie is most suited for the difficult job.

Mayor Breed Hasn’t Earned a Second Term

Mayor London Breed has had a bad month. An investigation by the SF Standard found that the Dream Keeper Initiative, one of Mayor Breed’s signature programs, was riddled with corruption. Sheryl Davis, the head of the Dream Keeper Initiative (and close friend to Mayor Breed) has resigned, and Mayor Breed has denied knowledge of any wrongdoing. But the facts are pretty evident. Mayor Breed entrusted her friend with $120 million for the Dream Keeper Initiative, then stood by and watched as she spent the money in increasingly irresponsible ways.

Tolerating corruption and rooting it out only when convenient is a recurring pattern with Mayor Breed. Her entire tenure has been dogged by scandal and deflection. She’s been able to skate by and avoid accountability, mainly because she didn't have a competitive re-election bid the last go around. This year she might not be so lucky.

Mayor Breed likely knows this, which is why she’s gone into high gear lately talking about plans to fix some of San Francisco’s biggest problems that have gone unsolved—on her watch—for years. Just this year, she announced efforts to quickly bandage over the homelessness crisis, audit nonprofits, and reform the city’s governmental systems that we all know are broken. And if you believe the press releases coming from the Mayor’s office, suddenly crime is down and homelessness is improving.

Putting it bluntly, this is bull. None of these issues have been solved. It’s an election year, and Mayor Breed is trying to put the best spin on her administration’s failures. While there were high hopes for Mayor Breed when she was elected in 2018, she just hasn’t lived up to expectations. Now should be a time when she is sharing her results, not her plans.

No Leadership Here

Throughout her tenure, Mayor Breed has shown little interest in fixing the city’s complicated and easily exploitable nonprofit contracting system until this year—coincidentally the year she’s facing a tough reelection. Despite numerous city contractors coming under investigation for fiscal mismanagement in the last few years, Mayor Breed hasn’t attempted to implement performance-based contracting or uniform standards to the sprawling network of nonprofit contractors San Francisco relies on for essential city services, until Supervisor Catherine Stefani stepped up in her absence. Without those sorts of things in place, bad actors have been more or less guaranteed a constant source of funding.

The list of repercussions from a system that enables nonprofits to run unchecked is way too long to fully list, but here’s a few recent examples. The United Council of Human Services took in $28 million from 2017 to 2022, while CEO Gwendolyn Westbrook used funds to enrich herself. SF Safe collected $11 million over the past decade while spending money on trips to Tahoe, valet parking, and limo services. J&J Community Services created fake invoices and double billed San Francisco for expenses while pulling in $1 million in city funds.

And of course there’s the aforementioned Sheryl Davis. Davis is a friend of Mayor Breed, the head of the Dream Keeper Initiative, and the head of the Human Rights Commission. In her role at the Human Rights Commission, Davis gave $1.5 million in city contracts to Collective Impact—a nonprofit city contractor that is run by a man Davis had an undisclosed personal relationship with. That’s a clear conflict of interest, and Mayor Breed says she was aware of the relationship. Still, Breed did nothing until a whistleblower’s complaint led to news stories that forced her to ask for Davis’s resignation.

That’s not all. Under Davis’s watch, the Dream Keeper Initiative has had other missing or questionably spent funds. The Dream Keeper Initiative made a bulk purchase of the children’s book that Sheryl Davis wrote, rented a $10,000 house in Martha’s Vineyard, and the whole organization is facing a whistleblower complaint over the Dream Keeper Initiative’s alleged mismanagement of money and questionable spending.

Paradoxically, Mayor Breed says so many misdeeds were caught during her time in office because her administration is exceptionally good at investigating corruption—but has also said that these systems aren’t strong enough and haven’t been around long enough? Do you trust a person who let all this happen on their watch to run a $16 billion dollar city budget? We don’t.

Half-Baked Plans End Up Spoiled

Mayor Breed says a lot of the right things. Unfortunately, that’s usually the extent of her plans. San Francisco’s problems persist because Breed doesn’t actually have a viable plan to follow through on her speeches.

A perfect example was her declaration of a state of emergency for the Tenderloin in 2021. Many hoped it was a sign that her administration was serious about fixing the neighborhood’s long-standing problems. Instead, the order came and went without much noticeable change. At the end of the 90-day period, instead of renewing the emergency, Mayor Breed left on a $25,000 junket to Europe to “boost tourism.” You know what brings visitors back to San Francisco? Clean, safe streets that don’t have sprawling open-air drug markets on them. Not a 10-day tourist trip.

And while drug overdoses deaths have skyrocketed in San Francisco, Mayor Breed’s plans for drug treatment have lagged far behind. Mayor Breed launched an ill-conceived and ineffective safe consumption site that lasted less than a year, with no followup plan when it closed. She has created approximately 400 treatment beds over the course of her tenure, but her Department of Public Health still doesn’t know exactly how many beds are actually needed. That’s led to over 3,000 overdose deaths since 2020. That’s not entirely her administration’s fault, but the Department of Public Health’s Behavioral Health Services division has a $600 million budget. There should be more to show for their efforts.

To solve San Francisco’s housing crisis, Mayor Breed promised to build 5,000 units of housing annually. San Francisco only built 2,034 homes last year, and we’ve never come close to Breed’s stated goal. While Mayor Breed consistently talks about the need for more homes, she hasn’t put forth a viable program to get them built.

And this year, Mayor Breed is promising to reform San Francisco’s city charter—only after TogetherSF Action put a measure on the November ballot that actually mandates reform. Of course, Mayor Breed’s proposal is half-baked, tossed out at the last minute to appeal to voters hungry for government reform. But her plan kicks the can down the road to 2026, and doesn’t have any way to ensure reform actually happens—it’s just more words that sound good on paper.

Again, it’s a pattern. Too often, Mayor Breed deflects blame and points the finger at others for her own administration’s failures. London Breed has had six years to prove she’s up for the job. She hasn’t done that. While the peculiarities of ranked choice voting mean you need to rank her on your ballot, she definitely shouldn’t be your number one choice.

Money Isn’t a Substitute For Experience

You can’t replace experience with cash, but Lurie seems determined to try. Lurie’s campaign for mayor is obscenely expensive, raising over $12 million dollars—but that can be expected when the candidate is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. No other candidate committee has raised this kind of money, while Lurie’s mayoral bid is funded by over $7 million dollars from Lurie, his mother, and his family alone. Lurie can self-fund his own campaign, blowing past other candidates who are limited to campaign donations of $500 per person. Just take a look at how lopsided Lurie’s campaign funding is in the chart below.

All that money pays for a lot of campaign consultants and staffers. Lurie’s been putting them to good use, buying ads and campaign mailers that portray him as an experienced outsider who can bring San Francisco together. First off, a billionaire heir who self-funds his own campaign and surrounds himself with career politicians and socialites is in no way an outsider. They’re the ultimate insider. And second, once you really dig into Lurie’s resume and record, that experience starts to look mighty thin.

Experience? What Experience?

Daniel Lurie founded the philanthropic, grant-making organization Tipping Point Community in 2005 to reduce poverty in the Bay Area. On the whole, Tipping Point has done excellent work since its founding, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into anti-poverty causes across the Bay Area. But because Lurie’s work with Tipping Point Community is the main experience he says that qualifies him to be San Francisco’s next mayor, we have to look further into his record, and digging deeper raises some questions about the narrative Lurie has created.

About that: Tipping Point Community currently has 51 employees—the City and County of San Francisco has 36,600 employees. Tipping Point’s annual operating budget was about $40 million annually during Lurie’s tenure. San Francisco has a $16 billion annual budget. The difference in size and complexity from what Lurie did during his time at Tipping Point, and what he would need to do as mayor is vast.

Crucially, Tipping Point Community doesn’t do direct work in the community—they cut checks to the organizations that do. Governing across San Francisco’s bureaucracy is a difficult task, requiring strength and leadership that Lurie has never had to demonstrate. Does he have the hard won skills and temperament needed for this massive undertaking? Without any real evidence of meaningful relevant experience, it’s not a bet we are willing to take.

Tipping Point Community essentially uses Lurie’s own vast wealth and connections to elite social circles to fund nonprofits. That’s a fine thing for a philanthropic organization to do. But Lurie doesn’t have any kind of complex fiscal experience and San Francisco is facing a budget crisis. Our city can’t be a test case to see if Lurie has the management and leadership experience needed to right a $16 billion ship.

Tipping Point Community’s Questionable Giving History

While Tipping Point Community has given to many worthy nonprofits that have gone on to do good work, overall Tipping Point didn’t accomplish what it set out to do. Far from it. That’s because the entire blueprint behind Tipping Point Community’s model is flawed, reinforcing existing problems with San Francisco’s strategy to deal with poverty and homelessness. San Francisco’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing issues hundreds of contracts to deal with homelessness, with some service providers overlapping with as many as seven different city departments. That model is incredibly inefficient and discourages coordination—Tipping Point Community doesn’t disrupt that model, it promotes it.

Let’s start with Tipping Point Community’s flagship project, the Chronic Homeless Initiative. Starting in 2017, the Chronic Homelessness Initiative spent $100 million to reduce chronic homelessness by 50 percent in San Francisco in five years. Chronic homelessness increased by 25 percent instead.

Of course, this is Lurie’s signature initiative, so he’s been cagey about directly answering questions about the failure of the Chronic Homelessness Initiative. In a debate hosted by the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED earlier this month, Lurie ducked questions about how he’d manage a much larger homelessness response as mayor, given the less-than-stellar results his efforts achieved in the past.

But Tipping Point Community CEO Sam Cobbs has been more direct when explaining the Chronic Homelessness Initiative’s failure. First, Cobbs said Tipping Point overlooked how much more successful it is to help prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place than to try to lift them out of homelessness. He also said they miscalculated just how big a task building working relationships with government entities is.

Those statements are enlightening, because it reveals how flawed Daniel Lurie’s strategy was in building Tipping Point Community. Most sociology grad students likely know that homelessness stems from a broad set of societal failures, and fixing it requires buy-in from government agencies. Daniel Lurie apparently didn’t.

Tipping Point Community is Lurie’s primary accomplishment in his professional career, the main thing he says qualifies him for mayor. And it does sound compelling—until you lift the hood and see what’s really going on. It’s a remarkably thin resume for a would-be mayor, a resume largely driven by Lurie’s connections to money and power. Those connections can get you pretty far in the world of philanthropy. They won’t do much at City Hall.

As San Francisco faces an $800 million deficit, it’s more important than ever for the mayor to have fiscal experience to manage a budget, political experience to navigate City Hall, and management experience to actually get things done. Daniel Lurie’s the founder of a small, regional nonprofit. He doesn’t have that experience. London Breed hasn’t proven she’s able to effectively manage the city in the six years she’s had in office. Mark Farrell is the only candidate for mayor with the right combination of competence and experience to move San Francisco forward.

Paid for by TogetherSF Action (tsfaction.org). Not authorized by any candidate or committee controlled by a candidate. Financial disclosures are available at sfethics.org.