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Since taking office in 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has been on a mission to shake the city out of a post-pandemic economic slump.
A political outsider, Lurie was once known as the heir to the Levi Strauss family fortune and a philanthropist focused on anti-poverty initiatives.
Now, Lurie is using his industry connections to boost the city’s reputation and economy after a slow recovery. Years after the pandemic, downtown San Francisco still struggles with high vacancy rates and faces long-term issues of open-air drug markets and homelessness.
Lurie is a vocal advocate of urban renewal and has long championed bringing new business to the city. As chairman of the city’s host committee in 2013, Lurie convinced the NFL to host the Super Bowl in the Bay Area when Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara was under construction. Now, as the city’s leader, Lurie hopes lightning strikes twice.
As football fans prepare to descend on Sunday’s Super Bowl LX, the entire Bay Area is bracing for a major economic downturn. San Francisco is expected to be the center of tourism traffic, giving Lurie a chance to give sports fans a taste of what to expect this summer when the FIFA World Cup follows this summer. He hopes it will herald all the progress made under his back-to-business approach.
Bring back the business
A native San Franciscan, Lurie founded Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty nonprofit, in 2005. The organization has invested more than $440 million in services for housing, early childhood, education, and employment throughout the Bay Area. He led the organization until he started running for mayor.
Peaceral is inappropriate quality of life of the city and bringing business back to the city’s downtown, which disappeared during the pandemic.
The region is expected to experience an economic impact of $370 million to $630 million, including up to $440 million in San Francisco, according to a Boston Consulting Group study commissioned by the host committee. The game is also expected to attract 90,000 visitors from outside the Bay Area and support about 5,000 jobs.
“We’re ready to showcase our restaurants, our small businesses, our parks,” Lurie said at a press conference Monday. “There will be a lot of traffic this week, but I think with the future economic effects, I think it will be well worth it.”
Last year’s NBA All-Star Game in San Francisco generated a $328.2 million economic impact, according to a study by the Temple University Sports Industry Research Center. Nearly 143,000 people from 40 states and 44 countries attended the event.
Don’t take people for granted
San Francisco’s economic struggles since the pandemic have been well documented. Before the pandemic, office activities accounted for more than 75% of the city’s GDP. With stay-at-home orders giving way to a strong preference for remote work, commercial real estate tanked, and the office vacancy rate is still at about 35%.
Large retail stores such as Uniqlo, Nordstrom Rack, and Anthropology close their doors.
“We take our business community for granted,” Lurie said to luck Brainstorm AI conference in December. “We said, ‘We can continue to punish you… and you stay.’ Well, that didn’t happen. People are fleeing.”
Between 2020 and 2024, the city’s population will decrease by about 50,000 people, according to census data. The proposed billionaires tax threatens to drive many businesses out of the Bay Area and has already led to the departure of longtime Bay Area residents, such as Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and investors David Sacks and Peter Thiel.
After avoiding comment on the proposal for weeks, on January 26, Lurie joined Gov. Gavin Newsom on his opposition in taxes. Lurie said against the tax because he believes it will drive people out of the city, which is already facing a budget shortfall due to federal cuts in food aid and health care.
“Everybody has to pay their fair share,” Lurie said. “But if people can get up and run, I’d rather see something done at the national level.”
Lurie said luck the city should “remove the red tape” for small businesses and see the government as a partner to businesses.
Last year, Lurie brought it business leaders—including former First Republic Bank President Katherine August-deWilde, philanthropist Laurene Powell, and President and Chief Investment Officer for Alphabet Ruth Porat—to launch the nonprofit Partnership for San Francisco to leverage “private sector expertise and resources to help solve the city’s most pressing challenges.”
Lurie also quietly met with Powell Jobs, ex Apple designer Jony Ive, and gup CEO Richard Dickson to work on a branding campaign for the city, The San Francisco Standard reported. Ives’ design firm LoveFrom previously worked on a civic pride campaign funded by San Francisco business leaders, including Gap Chairman Bob Fisher and tech executive Chris Larsen.
Since Lurie took over, the city has seen its vacancy rate drop by 6.5%, and its tourism from the pandemic, even before the Super Bowl and World Cup boom. AI startups are flooding San Francisco, and 85 of the 133 AI companies signing leases in the city by 2025 are early-stage startups, The Standard reported.
“This is the greatest city in the world when we are at our best,” Lurie said luck. “And I think people are starting to see that again.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
