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| Angelika/Mike Schilli |
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Angelika I'm a big fan of our new mayor, Daniel Lurie. As attentive newsletter readers know, he surprisingly won the city election as an underdog in November (Rundbrief 10/2024) and has now been in office for almost a year. Nowadays, people hardly have any expectations of politicians, but I must say, the man is doing a really good job so far. With his calm, thoughtful, and pragmatic manner, he often finds a reasonable middle ground. According to the latest surveys, 71% of citizens agree with me and say they are satisfied with his work. An astonishingly high approval rating in a city where everyone loves to endlessly debate and many are convinced they know everything better.
You can really tell that Lurie genuinely cares about San Francisco. What I find particularly pleasant is that he doesn't constantly put himself in the spotlight and doesn't engage in low-level exchanges with Trump on the platform X, like some other politicians do. On the contrary, he was even able to convince Trump not to send the National Guard to San Francisco because the city itself has initiated measures to improve public safety. The tent cities on the sidewalks have visibly decreased, and open drug use is declining because drug dealers are being arrested more consistently, and more pressure is being put on drug addicts to accept help such as withdrawal and therapy. The dirt is piling up a bit less in certain corners. I was really amazed recently when I entered the subway station at 24th Street; the forecourt was sparkling. And the typical urine smell that usually greets you there was completely absent.
Lurie has also set out to straighten out the bureaucratic madness so that things can be implemented more quickly, such as making more beds available for the homeless. Of course, many problems cannot be solved overnight. The number of fentanyl deaths remains alarmingly high (in October alone there were 27 deaths), and downtown is recovering very, very slowly from the effects of the pandemic. Still, there's too many empty shops, too many abandoned offices, too little life on the streets downtown. Here, too, Lurie is trying to counteract and help smaller businesses in particular by reducing bureaucracy and fees. It is said that Lurie is out and about in the city every day, engaging in conversations with residents, listening to their concerns and suggestions. I'm waiting for him to stop by us in Noe Valley, because I would also like to have a chat with him.
San Francisco has always been a city that continually reinvents itself and must keep doing so. This began with the gold rush and continued after two major earthquakes in 1906 and 1989, through the AIDS crisis, the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and finally the pandemic. At the moment, it almost feels as if the city is experiencing a small renaissance. Self-driving taxis are zipping futuristically through the streets, new ideas are emerging, and many residents are once again looking at their city with optimism. And as we know, such optimism is a bit contagious.
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