Levi Strauss heir to challenge mayor in 2024 city election

Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss clothing fortune, announced Tuesday that he would run against Mayor London Breed of San Francisco next year, at a time when the city is struggling to overcome a number of crises in its downtown core.

Lurie, 46, planned to launch his campaign Tuesday at a community center in the city's Potrero Hill neighborhood, a longtime working-class area now dotted with multimilliondollar homes and upscale shops. His entrance in the race signals that Breed may be vulnerable in her bid for reelection and may have lost the support of some moderate allies.

Lurie said in an interview that he intended to campaign on solving the city's quality-of-life problems, and that he blames Breed for doing too little to tackle them.

Lurie is the founder of Tipping Point, an antipoverty nonprofit. He said that he decided to run for mayor when he was walking his 9-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter to school, and they saw a man stumbling down the street, naked and screaming.

Noting that nobody did anything about the situation, himself included, he said he was troubled that city leaders and residents had apparently grown numb to such scenes.

“Our kids have come to a place where they're inured,” he said. “It's almost like they accept it, which is not OK.”

Although many San Francisco neighborhoods came through the pandemic relatively unscathed, the city's downtown has suffered. Offices have been left vacant while employees work remotely at home. Retailers have struggled, while homeless encampments, fentanyl overdoses and property crimes have endured as serious problems.

Lurie said Breed had accomplished little, even though voters approved higher taxes to finance homeless services and low-income housing. He said that as mayor, he would add more psychiatric beds to the city's hospitals, expand the shelter system and pay homeless people to clean the sidewalks.

He also said he would place more police officers on the streets and compel more people who are severely mentally ill into treatment, even if they refuse care. San Francisco is one of seven counties in California that will begin a court program this fall with the authority to force people with severe mental illness to be hospitalized if they refuse treatment.

Maggie Muir, a spokesperson for Breed's campaign, said Lurie's platform did not depart from what the mayor was already trying to do. The only difference, she said, was that Lurie lacked government experience.

Breed, 49, and Lurie are both San Francisco natives and Democrats but have very different backgrounds. Breed, the first Black woman to lead the city, was raised by her grandmother in public housing near City Hall, and now rents an apartment in the Lower Haight, a lively neighborhood popular among young tenants for its restaurants, nightclubs and colorful Victorian homes.