SF Mayor Daniel Lurie Talks Tech Revival
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Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news. I want to get straight to the idea behind San Francisco Downtown Development Corporation. It seems like the burden sharing initiative is to get private capital to help you with a lot of what the city needs.

That's absolutely right. Our business community, our nonprofit community, our arts community, we want them to be partners in San Francisco's revitalization. I'm really appreciative of the leadership of David Stiepelman and that board that has formed for taking on the challenge of helping all of us bring our city back and lift it to new heights.

Is the scale of the challenge billions of dollars? And who are the big names behind it that will give you that money? Well, it's it's you've seen the board, the list of board members. But it's I don't know in terms of what they're trying to raise, if it's hundreds of millions or not, but it's going to be private and public dollars. We have to invest in small ways and in small

in big ways. Um, we are seeing momentum starting to build in Union Square. We just got news that Zara is launching a new flagship store 40,000 ft four stories. Nintendo is opening up. We just had a great local, uh, be patisserie, a bakery open up in Union Square. So we're seeing

wins happening every single day here in San Francisco and the downtown development corporations going to build on those on those on those wins. This is the first time, you know, I've spoken since your election and since taking office prior to taking office. You really put emphasis on on partners that were helping you right with the transition. Sam Altman was one name. What is your relationship like with the technology industry now and the biggest figureheads of that industry in this city?

Well, we launched the partnership for San Francisco. We have 28 different business leaders from tech, but also from McKinsey and from Deloitte and from UCSF and from the San Francisco Giants. We have the business community coming together, cooperating.

I have said to the region, I've said to the country, and I've said to the world that we are open for business again. And San Francisco is on the rise. We want business back.

And we want them to be part of the community, really focused on how they can help lift up our arts and culture, our public schools, and help us keep our streets safe, keep them clean. And we have gotten a tremendous response in our first 90 or so days, and we look forward to partnering with them, our nonprofit community, and our friends in labor.

Mr. Lurie, the main question I get for you from our audience is how you make San Francisco competitive for the technology industry. New companies coming here versus Silicon Valley. Why bring a headquarters into the city of San Francisco or require staff to be in the city of San Francisco versus the broader Bay Area?

Well, first off, we're the most beautiful city in the world. Second, the horsepower is here. The intellectual horsepower is here. We have great universities, including UCSF, around here. And young people want to be in college.

urban environments. They want to be in San Francisco. That's been proven true throughout history. And we're going to prove that again. We have great arts and culture institutions. We were just named the culinary capital of the country. So we have so much to be proud of. And

We know that workers want to be here. Our CEOs who we're talking to, they know that their employees want to be in San Francisco. No offense to my friends down in the peninsula, but people live in San Francisco and we want them to work here. And we do have to get competitive. But it starts with safe and clean streets. Our property crime regulations.

Rates have dropped 35 percent. Our violent crime has dropped 15 percent. Car break-ins in February, the lowest in 22 years. This is a safe American city and we want everybody coming back to work here, to play here and to live here.

Mr. Lurie, how is the White House and its tariffs policy going to impact your ability to do what you've just outlined, bring more of the technology industry to the city? Well, listen, we are all and you all are reporting on it mentally.

minute by minute. The uncertainty is impacting everybody around the globe. And so we have to plan for that here at City Hall. We're working with our department heads. We have a big budget deficit. We inherited one of the largest deficits in our city's history. So we're working day and night to make sure that we tighten our belts. We deliver core services to our taxpayers and to our residents, making sure that we focus on public safety.

focus on the behavioral health crisis and the drug crisis that is causing people to feel, you know, the disorder on our streets. But that is all starting to improve. And so we can only control what we can control here in San Francisco. And that's our $15.9 billion budget. We have a $1.1 billion budget deficit over the next two years.

We're going to get that under control. We're going to fix our structural budget deficit. And I'm telling you, we're then going to be off to the races. Databricks knows it. They just secured an office space, 150,000 square feet, open AI, just opened new headquarters by Chase Center. We are on the cusp of liftoff here in San Francisco, and we want everybody to come be a part of it.

The other threat of the administration is to pull federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities, San Francisco included in that threat. Your response, please, Mayor.

Our policies have kept us safe. And we have once again, our property crime is down. Our violent crime is down. We are one of the safest American cities going right now. And we need to get that out into the world. And that's got to be the narrative that people hear from us.

And so I'm focused on making sure we keep our citizens safe every single day. We're making sure that we're sending a message to those that are coming here to deal drugs.

We're no longer a city where you can come to deal drugs or to do drugs on our streets or to sleep on our streets. We had a report just that came in to me this morning. We used to have a couple hundred tents in the Tenderloin. We're down to seven as of yesterday. So we are making sure that our streets are safe and clean for our residents and for our taxpayers. And that's what I'm going to focus on.

Trade, immigration, tariffs, actions by the federal government. One way or another, how concerned are you about the reputational damage to San Francisco? In other words, if you are a tourist from any other jurisdiction, Asia, Canada, Latin America, or you're an entrepreneur, a startup founder, and you look at the situation with tariffs, are you worried about how that impacts someone's perception about coming to our city?

Well, I think we have been worried about that. And we frankly, we lost our way for a handful of years. And we took our status as a global destination for granted.

And those days are over. We are focused on clean and safe streets. We're focused on winning conferences and tourists back. We just had the NBA All-Star Game weekend. We have Super Bowl 60 coming. We have six World Cup matches coming. We had 30,000 people here for the Game Developers Conference.

We have so many green shoots in San Francisco. I can't wait to welcome more people from around the world. We're going to go visit different places in Europe and in Asia and invite people back to San Francisco because they are starting to hear the message from our administration that San Francisco is open for tourism, we're open for business, and that we are a city on the rise. Those days, that narrative, that's from...

from a few years ago. We have a whole new story here in San Francisco, and that's one of being on the rise. And there's no better place to do business or to visit than San Francisco right now.