Mayor Lurie Delivers Progress Remark to Mark 100th Day In Office

SAN FRANCISCO – Mayor Daniel Lurie today marked his upcoming 100th day in office with a progress report, updating San Franciscans on the work his administration has done to make the city safer, cleaner, and more prosperous, while outlining the work ahead to continue delivering on those goals.

Here is a fact sheet with a snapshot of the work done during the first 100 days of Mayor Lurie’s administration.

Below are Mayor Lurie’s remarks as prepared for delivery:

Good morning, thank you all for being here.

Tomorrow marks the 100th day of this administration. It also marks the 119th anniversary of the 1906 Earthquake.

The earthquake is a reminder for all San Franciscans that even in the most dire of circumstances, when we work together, we can rise from the ashes.

Over the past few years, our foundation has been shaken, we lost our way. It’s not a political thing to want to feel safe walking our kids to school, open a business, or have clean streets.

San Franciscans want change. They want accountability. They need to know the people in City Hall have their back.

We started working before Inauguration Day, and we haven’t stopped since.

We helped end the longest hotel strike in city history, locking in the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, immediately followed by the NBA All-Star events and the Lunar New Year Parade—the safest on record.

That Saturday, Muni had 107,000 passenger trips in a single day—the busiest Saturday since the start of the pandemic.

These events set the tone for the momentum we’re seeing in San Francisco, and they simply aren’t possible without our Muni operators, public safety officers, street cleaners, first responders, community partners, and all of our city employees.

Thank you.

Together, we are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity for our city. But what’s happening right now is about so much more than money alone.

For the first time in five years, people feel San Francisco is headed in the right direction. We even got Charles Barkley on board with investing in San Francisco again!

I’m incredibly proud of what we’re building, but I’m not satisfied. Today is not a victory lap—it’s a progress report.

I’m out every day walking alongside San Franciscans, listening to their concerns. And I’m asking my department heads to do the same.

I want to hear what’s stopping our small businesses from succeeding. I want to understand what people actually need to get off the streets.

When I call an impromptu meeting to discuss street conditions, on site, where the problem exists, the plan we develop is more collaborative and effective. And it’s working. We’re down to the lowest number of tents in this city since 2019.

What I’ve learned in these first 100 days is you can’t solve what you can’t see. And I’m going to keep walking and talking to people each and every day, until public safety and public faith have been restored.

To get there, we must rebuild our foundation, we must create the conditions for our economic success.

That began with our very first announcement, a directive to change the structure of the Mayor’s Office.

For decades, the mayor had one direct report, a chief of staff working with 58 departments.

By appointing four new chiefs, we have made the Mayor’s Office more coordinated and accountable for delivering clean and safe streets, tackling the fentanyl crisis, building housing, and ensuring a full economic recovery.

Departments can no longer own their piece of the work. Everyone who serves this city must claim ownership of the entire outcome.

With a safe, bustling downtown, we will attract businesses and visitors. We will create jobs, generate revenue, and provide a better quality of life for everyone.

We are trending in the right direction: Street encampments are dropping, and violent crime is down 15%. Car break-ins, which account for more than half of all property crime in San Francisco, are at a 22-year low.

Convention center bookings are surging, and hotel room bookings are up 50% compared to 2024.

Databricks, just one of the world’s leading companies committed to San Francisco’s comeback, will invest $1 billion in our city over the next three years. After considering moving their annual user conference to Las Vegas, they will now remain in San Francisco until at least 2030.

We have 80 more AI office leases projected for this year alone. Nintendo is coming to Union Square alongside home grown businesses like b. Patisserie.

And in a powerful turnaround, Zara, who announced they were closing their store one year ago, is bringing a four-story flagship to the corner of Post and Powell.

People are betting on San Francisco again.

But we cannot bank on temporary fixes. We must invest in permanent solutions for our economic success as we dig ourselves out of the nearly $1 billion budget deficit we inherited.

We can’t just cut our way to change—we will learn to do more with less, because we have to.

Getting through this painful period of tough decisions requires a change in the culture of politics that has held us back for too long.

Over the last 100 days, we have started to break down the invisible wall that has existed between the two sides of City Hall for decades.

That’s how we came together for a 10-1 vote on the Fentanyl State of Emergency Ordinance. It’s how we quickly launched efforts to fix our permitting system, launched the SFPD Hospitality Zone Task Force to improve public safety in key tourist areas, and worked to end open-air drug markets and stop the sale of stolen goods.

San Franciscans gave us a shared mandate to create a clean, safe, and thriving city. Together, with the partnership of my colleagues at the Board of Supervisors, and the commitment of our department heads and frontline workers, we are fulfilling that mandate.

As part of the “Breaking the Cycle” executive directive to tackle homelessness and the crisis of behavioral health on our streets, we no longer have nine different street teams who don’t communicate. Our new model coordinates seven key departments to deliver one unified neighborhood-based approach. 

We learned a lot from the mobile triage center on Sixth Street: In six weeks, we had nearly 17,000 engagements with people on the street, completed 275 shelter and housing placements, directed 1,100 people to medical and behavioral health services, and made 349 arrests.

Our new approach will proactively respond to displacement. We don’t want to move the problem from one block to another—we want to end it.

We also recognize that coordination among local merchants, service providers, and the SFPD is key to ensuring we have both incentives and accountability in place.

We will not shy away from making tough calls. In a major policy shift, individuals must now receive treatment, counseling, or be connected to services to receive drug use supplies.

We have long agreed that fentanyl has changed the game on our streets, but until now we have not changed our approach.

We need more targeted services and a variety of shelter and treatment beds to support their unique needs.

I’m excited to share that our new 24/7 police-friendly drop-off center on Geary will open on April 28th—ahead of schedule.

We have line of sight to meet our goal of 1,500 shelter and treatment beds. It won’t be easy, but I’m never going to apologize for setting ambitious goals—San Franciscans deserve nothing less. We may not always hit them, but we will never stop trying. We won’t make excuses, and we will apply what we learn.

Emergency shelter and treatment may be where our work begins, but if we don’t make it faster and more cost-effective to build housing, we risk losing control of our destiny here in San Francisco.

We can’t block housing, we must build it at all levels, or the state will do it for us, and that’s unacceptable.

But this isn’t just about meeting a state mandate. It’s about saying yes to the future of San Francisco. It’s about saying yes to becoming a city with space for more workers, more artists, more dreamers, and more families.

In February, we passed legislation to make it easier and more financially feasible to convert empty offices and commercial buildings into housing.

Our Family Zoning plan focuses on neighborhoods that haven’t added new units of housing since the 1960s. We will protect rent-controlled housing and preserve our city’s historic charm while ensuring the next generation of San Franciscans can afford to raise their kids here.

PermitSF is working to streamline approvals, cut red tape, and modernize how the city moves housing and business development from concept to construction.

Teachers shouldn’t have to wait seven years for the construction of a home that they can afford. Small businesses in Chinatown shouldn’t have to jump through a dozen hoops to add security gates or signs. And restaurants shouldn’t have to wade through weeks of approvals to put tables and chairs on the sidewalk.

In May, I will announce legislation to eliminate many outdated permitting requirements that make it too hard to build housing or launch and run a small business. And there will be more to come over the course of the year.

The people of San Francisco don’t just want change—they want to be a part of changing things. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.

I want to thank the visionary, civic-minded leaders across sectors who have stepped up in one of our greatest moments of need.

The Downtown Development Corporation is focusing on the revival of our economic core, while the Partnership for San Francisco, a council of some of the most innovative business leaders of our time, will serve as ambassadors for those in this city and around the world who are interested in bringing business back to San Francisco.

At the same time, a series of critical public-private partnerships focused on the fentanyl crisis will begin raising funds to help us end the suffering on our streets. Together, these organizations are marshalling resources for the good of our city for generations to come.

In the coming weeks, we will continue to build on our work using modern public safety tools to apprehend repeat offenders and hold them accountable.

When we’re short 500 police officers, leveraging technology and data to enhance response times and crime prevention is a force multiplier that stands to impact the safety of every San Franciscan.

As we continue to reclaim ridership on Muni, we will focus on clean, safe, reliable transportation. Our public transportation system is facing an enormous fiscal cliff, but let me be clear—there is no downtown recovery without Muni and BART.

I love this job, and I love this city. My expectations for success are sky-high. And what’s driving me is that I know yours are too.

When I went to Central Shops, where they service our 9,000-unit fleet of city vehicles and equipment, I asked if anyone had questions. A man who has been working there for 33 years raised his hand and said, “Mr. Mayor, we aren’t here to lose. We’re here to win.”

That got me so fired up.

The people who have committed their lives to this city, the families who are enrolling in our public schools, the businesses fueling our neighborhoods, the elders who want to feel safe again on our streets—they are tired of a City Hall that does things to them instead of with them.

San Franciscans want to live in a city they feel proud to call home. And we are going to deliver.

These first 100 days have taught me that we must remain vigilant about the challenges we face. We must continue to cross entrenched lines of difference. And we must boldly move toward better days ahead.

Together, we can win, and we will.

Let’s go, San Francisco. We’ve got work to do.

Thank you.