Mayor Daniel Lurie hardly mentioned affordability when he ran for office in 2024. His campaign was all about public safety.
A year later, Zorhan Mamdani ran for mayor of New York talking almost entirely about affordability, shocked the political establishment, and won.
Things change quickly in urban politics: Despite the relatively low number of cops ion the street, crime is way, way down in San Francisco. The pandemic-era concerns over car break-ins are mostly a thing of the past. Meanwhile, as the latest tech boom explodes in the city, affordability is becoming a dominant issue.
So let’s look at how Lurie is doing on that issue, and what it might mean for his future approval ratings:
Since Lurie has taken office, median rents have gone up 12 percent. That’s largely the result of the AI boom, which Lurie has encouraged (the same way former Mayor Ed Lee encouraged the last tech boom, which also drove up housing prices).
Evictions are also up, at their highest rate since 2018, MissionLocal reports, and have almost doubled in just the past year. Most of those evictions are for failure to pay rent, which makes sense: AI engineers are getting millions of dollars, but other jobs (hospitality, health care, and government are the city’s largest employment sectors) are lagging way behind the cost increases in rent.
Very little of the new housing the mayor hopes to see under his upzoning plan will be affordable to those workers. The city’s economist reports that the “high growth” in housing scenario would bring down housing prices at most by 4 percent—which is less than the increase this year alone. We are losing ground.
Muni fares and parking meters rates are rising, while bus service is getting cut. The poverty rate is rising.
Meanwhile, the mayor is planning to cut city services that help the most vulnerable by a staggering $400 million—creating the austerity programs that are so much a part of the right-wing narrative on government while doing nothing to capture the vast new wealth that is moving into the city.
I don’t see this getting any better over the next two years. If anything, it’s going to get worse.
Lurie’s popularity remains high right now. But as the main concern of the voters shifts from crime to affordability, he may be very vulnerable in 2028—if SF can find a candidate like Mamdani.
