San Francisco's Urban Revival Hangs in the Balance
The Stakes of One Election
A moderate liberal majority on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has been essential to the city's recovery under Mayor Daniel Lurie. Now, a single supervisor race threatens to flip that majority — and with it, the future of San Francisco's reforms.
Smith argues that this election is about more than one district. The composition of the Board determines the destiny of the entire city.
A City in Crisis
For years, San Francisco was the poster child for progressive urban governance that failed cities across the country. In the 1990s and 2000s, pragmatic liberals like Ed Lee turned American cities into places people actually wanted to live. But as people moved back in — especially those with money — housing costs soared because cities didn't meet demand with supply.
Meanwhile, a new radical progressive ideology emerged. Hardline progressives became hostile to building more housing, drawing on anti-gentrification movements that embraced the mistaken idea that constructing new apartments raises rents. An overwhelming amount of evidence contradicts this, but urban hardline progressives refused to listen.
Simultaneously, this new ideology became extremely tolerant of public disorder — property crime, violent crime, public drug markets, and threatening street behavior. Cracking down on these social ills was viewed as unacceptably harmful to the perpetrators. Penalties for minor crimes were reduced, enforcement of drug markets was curtailed, and citizens were even forbidden from defending their businesses.
"Tent cities" were tolerated despite being riddled with violent crime, police budgets were slashed, progressive prosecutors prosecuted fewer crimes, dangerous repeat offenders were regularly allowed back onto the streets.
Poor people were most heavily impacted by the epidemic of crime and drug use that this anarchy enabled. Together, high housing costs and rampant public disorder made America's big blue cities no longer the envy of the world.
The San Francisco Story
In San Francisco, policy decisions are carried out by — or must be signed off on by — the powerful Board of Supervisors. The board writes the laws, approves the city budget, confirms mayoral appointments, and exercises veto power over almost any major reform effort.
For many years, San Francisco had a moderate liberal mayor but a hardline progressive majority on the Board. Mayors wanted to build more housing and crack down on disorder, but the progressive supermajority would not allow them to do so. Under this hyper-progressive city government, San Francisco had the highest property crime rate in the nation in the late 2010s and became one of America's least affordable cities.
The pandemic accelerated these trends — the city's population crashed, streets became open-air fentanyl markets, transit ridership plummeted, housing production crashed to almost nothing. Malls closed, businesses pulled out, and downtown felt like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Then in 2024, an election changed everything.
The Lurie Transformation
Daniel Lurie made public order his number one task. Within a year, crime had plummeted: overall crime went down by 25% in 2025, with the number of homicides reaching a level not seen in more than 70 years. Property crimes were down by 27%, violent crimes down by 18%. The mayor added that the city planned to keep hiring new officers.
On the ground, the change is absolutely palpable. In 2023, Smith would see thieves ripping pieces out of car engines in broad daylight. Almost every day he walked past throngs of drug users and probably dealers. Every woman he knew was harassed on the street or on the train. There were needles and human feces everywhere. Stores were boarded up, tent cities lined side streets and spaces under overpasses.
Now most of that is gone — the streets aren't clean, but they're closer to New York City than to a developing-country slum.
Progress on housing has been slower, due to the dense thicket of existing regulations and entrenched NIMBY interests. Lurie passed a landmark upzoning plan that doesn't go nearly far enough but is a huge improvement on anything in recent decades. Now permitting is accelerating: between January 2024 and August 2025, the timeline on permit approvals for new housing was cut by half — from an average of 605 days down to around 280 days.
It will take years for those permits to turn into actual homes. And the reforms Lurie has managed to enact are only the tip of what's needed — much of which needs to be done at the state level.
Lurie's approval rating reached 71% in November. He's added homeless shelter space, cut taxes on apartment buildings, removed anti-police activists from the Police Commission and appointed a better police chief, encouraged conversion of offices into homes, created free childcare policies and various early childhood programs, implemented policies to protect pedestrians and cyclists, cut various forms of red tape for housing and small business, streamlined business permitting, worked toward balancing the budget.
The Board Majority That Made It Possible
Almost none of this would have been possible if the Board of Supervisors had still been controlled by hardline progressives. The same election that brought Lurie into the mayor's office also changed the composition of the board. The progressive faction, which had enjoyed a supermajority, suffered a major defeat. Progressive stalwarts like Dean Preston were unseated by moderate liberals like Bilal Mahmood.
The moderate liberal faction — strongly progressive in most of America but regarded as centrists in San Francisco — gained a slim 6-5 majority on the board. Though Lurie has gotten most of the credit for San Francisco's turnaround, that slim board majority was absolutely essential. The new laws Lurie passed would not have been passed, nor would his personnel appointments have been confirmed, had the board been 6-5 in favor of the progressives instead of 6-5 in favor of the moderate liberals.
A one-seat swing toward the hardline progressive faction would mean San Francisco still mired in all of the old urban dysfunction that progressive cities have been struggling with for a decade and a half.
The District 4 Threat
District 4's supervisor Joel Engardio, an important moderate liberal voice on the board, was recalled last fall over his support for a highway closure. Lurie appointed Alan Wong to fill the District 4 spot, but now Wong is facing a special election on June 2 to keep that seat.
The other candidates in the race — Natalie Gee, David Lee, and Albert Chow — are all more opposed to Lurie's pro-housing agenda than Wong is. If Wong loses, San Francisco's reforms under Lurie probably won't be repealed — at least not immediately. But the majority on many issues would flip back to the progressives, and further reforms would become much harder if not impossible.
This would be especially harmful to the housing agenda, where upzoning efforts look promising but will require more years of sustained effort to reach fruition.
Critics might note that Smith has contributed money to a political campaign despite being personally pessimistic about the ability of donations to affect social change. The amount he's able to contribute is modest compared to the forces arrayed against reform. But in this particular case, he argues, his donation gives him a good excuse to write about the situation — and writing may be where he can have the most impact.
What Is at Stake
Smith's city has been hollowed out by its chronic inability to build sufficient housing. It's forced huge numbers of middle-class people, working-class people, and artists to move far away from the city, leaving San Francisco to the rich and the rent-controlled. It's contributed to the homelessness epidemic, forcing people onto the streets and into the arms of drug dealers.
Under Lurie and the 6-5 moderate liberal majority on the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco was just starting to address that gaping, decades-long deficiency. And now the city could throw it all away.
Over the past year, San Francisco has shown the nation a way out of the quagmire of hardline progressive governance that is hollowing out so many American cities. But if this one supervisor race goes the wrong way, and Alan Wong loses, San Francisco could become a cautionary tale about how difficult it is for American cities to reject that self-destructive approach.