San Francisco was once America's poster child for urban dysfunction. Now it's showing the nation how to fix that -- and a single supervisor race could derail everything. Noah Smith documents a remarkable turnaround: crime down 25%, homicides at levels not seen in seventy years, and the city's first meaningful upzoning reform in decades. But the moderate liberal majority that made it all possible hangs by one seat.
The Rise and Fall of Progressive Urban Governance
To understand where San Francisco is now, you have to understand what broke before. In the 1990s and 2000s, American cities experienced an urban revival. Pragmatic liberal leaders like Michael Bloomberg in New York City and Ed Lee in San Francisco recognized that cities needed business tax bases and public order to function. They were imperfect. They failed to build enough housing, setting the stage for the housing crisis of the 2010s and 2020s. But they successfully turned American cities back into places people wanted to live.
As people with money moved back into cities, housing costs soared. Cities didn't respond by building more. Simultaneously, America sorted itself politically -- big cities leaned increasingly left. And that shift enabled a radical new progressive ideology to take root.
This progressivism was hostile to housing construction. It drew on the anti-gentrification movements of previous decades, embracing the mistaken idea that allowing new apartment buildings raises rents for everyone already there. The evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this -- allowing new housing reduces rents for everyone -- but urban hardline progressives refused to listen. They allied themselves with old-money NIMBY interests that wanted to freeze cities in amber through development restrictions.
The ideology also became extremely tolerant of public disorder. Property crime, low-level violence, public drug markets, and threatening street behavior were viewed as acceptable. Cracking down on these problems was considered harmful to the perpetrators. Hardline progressives came to view anarchy as a form of welfare policy.
Penalties for minor crimes were reduced. Enforcement of drug markets was curtailed. Citizens were forbidden from defending their own businesses. Tent cities riddled with violent crime were tolerated. Police budgets were slashed. Progressive prosecutors prosecuted fewer crimes. Dangerous repeat offenders were regularly released back onto streets.
In San Francisco, this hardline progressivism didn't come from the mayor's office. Most policy decisions were carried out by -- or required sign-off from -- the powerful Board of Supervisors. The board writes laws, approves the city budget, confirms mayoral appointments, and exercises veto power over major reform efforts. 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 crime, but the progressive supermajority wouldn't allow it. London Breed often took the blame for the city's descent into unaffordability and chaos, but the prime culprit was always the hyper-progressive Board. Under that governance, 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 population crashed and didn't recover. Streets became open-air fentanyl markets. Transit ridership plummeted. Malls closed. Businesses pulled out. Downtown felt like a post-apocalyptic wasteland long after most other cities had recovered.
Then in 2024, an election changed everything.
The Lurie Transformation
The change everyone knows about is the election of Daniel Lurie as mayor. Lurie made public order his number one task. Within a year, crime had plummeted: overall crime went down by 25% in 2025, with homicides reaching levels not seen in over seventy years. Property crimes were down by 27%, violent crimes by 18%. The city planned to keep hiring new officers following an executive directive he signed in May.
The change on the ground was absolutely palpable. In 2023, San Francisco residents witnessed thieves ripping pieces out of car engines in broad daylight. Drug users and probably dealers congregated in visible throngs every day. Women were harassed on streets and trains. Needles and human feces covered ground 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 that must be navigated to actually get new housing built. 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. San Francisco's infamously slow building permit process may be getting faster. A city study found that 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. Permit applications filed within that nineteen-month window had even shorter turnaround times, at 114 days on average.
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 the iceberg -- much of which needs to be done at the state level.
Lurie's approval rating reached 73% half a year into his mayorship, compared to 28% for his predecessor. In November it was still 71%. Everyone loves Daniel Lurie. He's not perfect, but no mayor has ever been perfect. His successful policies range far beyond crime -- 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, and more.
But here's the real point: 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 centrist in San Francisco -- gained a slim six-to-five 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 wouldn't have been passed, nor would his personnel appointments have been confirmed, had the Board been six-to-five in favor of the progressives instead of six-to-five in favor of moderate liberals.
A one-seat swing toward the hardline progressive faction would have meant San Francisco still mired in all of the old urban dysfunction that progressive cities have been struggling with for a decade and a half.
And now that one-seat swing may actually happen, and San Francisco's recovery might be derailed.
The District 4 Threat
District 4 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 second to keep that seat. It's a crowded field, and some of Wong's rivals are very well funded.
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.
Smith decided to give ten thousand dollars to GrowSF, a political advocacy organization that focuses on local elections in San Francisco. They're going to use the money to support Alan Wong in the upcoming special election. Smith doesn't live in District 4, and he's sure the opponents are very nice people. But this election is about more than just District 4 -- the composition of the Board of Supervisors determines the destiny of the entire city.
The Outer Sunset will benefit from a moderate liberal majority on the Board, but so will the rest of San Francisco. The city's chronic inability to build sufficient housing has hollowed it out. 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 streets and into the arms of drug dealers.
Under Daniel Lurie and the six-to-five moderate liberal majority on the Board of Supervisors, they were just starting to address that gaping, decades-long deficiency. And now they could throw it all in the trash.
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 end up being a cautionary tale about how difficult it is for American cities to reject that self-destructive approach.
Critics might note that California Proposition 47, which reclassified certain crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, contributed directly to the public disorder problems Smith describes -- though proponents argued it reduced prison overcrowding. Additionally, attributing the entire turnaround to Lurie and the Board understates the role of state-level policy changes and broader economic recovery in driving crime reduction.
If Wong loses, San Francisco's reforms probably won't be repealed -- but the majority on many issues would flip back to the progressives, and further reforms would become much harder if not impossible.
Bottom Line
San Francisco's turnaround under Mayor Lurie is real and measurable -- crime down 25%, housing permits accelerating. But it's fragile. The six-to-five moderate liberal majority on the Board of Supervisors was essential to passing reforms, and a single supervisor race could flip that majority. The threat is real, the stakes are high, and the lesson applies to any city trying to escape hardline progressive governance.