San Francisco Is Getting Its Own Co...

Last November, the people of San Francisco elected Daniel Lurie—one of the wealthy heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune—to be their new mayor. Now, Lurie seems to be turning to people like himself (that is, people with a lot of money) to make pivotal decisions around how to “revitalize” the heart of Silicon Valley.

The San Francisco Standard reports that Lurie’s administration has quietly launched two different (and ostensibly separate) initiatives designed to allow private, well-heeled members of the city’s upper crust to have a larger influence over the city’s political system. The first of those initiatives is a new mayoral council, dubbed the Partnership for San Francisco, that includes a host of powerful and influential Silicon Valley executives. The council will apparently include the likes of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and others, and will be headed by three women: Katherine August-deWilde, a former president of First Republic Bank, Steve Jobs’s widow and owner of The Atlantic, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

The council is designed to “present the mayor with CEO-level views on policy,” the Standard writes, noting also that it will be privately funded through dues paid by participating companies.

At the same time, Lurie’s office is launching a public-private partnership designed to infuse the city’s business development efforts with private capital. The San Francisco Downtown Development Corp, which will use a combination of public and private money to fund various revitalization efforts in the city’s business district, will involve both public taxpayer money and money from private donors. The mayoral initiatives were previously unknown to the public.

While it’s not totally clear what the council will be doing, it’s worth noting that the new organization is based on a similar one (the Partnership for New York City) that was founded in New York in the 1970s, when the city was having its own budgetary and governance crisis. That organization similarly invited wealthy industrialists to chart a brighter future for a beleaguered metropolis, and culled attention and power away from the city’s public sector in favor of private ventures. At the same time, San Francisco’s new organization can’t help but call to mind the transformation currently taking place at the federal level, where public agencies are being gutted and federal revenue stifled in favor of a more private, corporately-run approach to governance.

The Standard notes that:

The two new groups have been working under the cover of secrecy for weeks. Both have been coordinating closely with the mayor’s office, although each aims to operate independently of City Hall — and of each other. The Lurie Administration hopes to establish both as permanent civic institutions that will continue their work after the mayor leaves office, much as the New York groups they are modeled on do today.

Gizmodo reached out to the San Francisco Mayor’s office for comment.

The Downtown Development Corp, Lurie’s new public-private partnership, is to be helmed by David Stiepelman, a former Goldman Sachs official, who is currently looking for funding sources for it. The Standard writes that Stiepelman has been engaged with “multiple city financial and philanthropic players with an eye to assembling a board for the new organization.”