Spotify’s choice

Spotify, the popular music-streaming company, has quietly abandoned its lease in San Francisco’s Mid-Market area after its employees reported public safety incidents and expressed concerns about continuing to work in the area.

Spotify is just one company, and it’s one with a relatively small footprint in San Francisco. (The Stockholm-based company had 30-50 employees here this year.)

But its decision to leave the long-troubled neighborhood in favor of the Financial District shows just how pressing San Francisco’s street-life problems are, and how important it is for Mayor London Breed to prioritize fixing them.

The Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods have long suffered from high rates of both poverty and crime. One of the ideas behind the city’s controversial 2011 tax break for companies willing to open offices there was that the presence of innovative and well-funded tech businesses would help disrupt entrenched patterns of chaotic behavior and illegal activity on the streets.

There are big lessons here for city officials.

One: It takes a lot more than a tax break to attract long-term investment.

Two: The voters elected Breed on her promise to reduce the suffering of the homeless and to improve public safety, and she has to make those concerns her top priority.

Making an effective dent in those problems will require a coordinated strategic plan among SFPD, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and, ideally, both the state of California and the federal government. (Local efforts will be only so successful without larger funding sources for mental health treatment and low-income housing.) It’s a tall order, but successfully completing it will make or break Breed’s tenure.