Mayor of San Francisco, a philanthropist elected in 2024. He is one of a clutch of centrist Democrats determined to break with the party's traditional clientelist politics, alongside Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, and Mike Duggan, the mayor of Detroit. He has identified three reasons families flee San Francisco: "safety, affordability and our public schools."
When fentanyl hit the west coast and covid-19 shut down everyday life, parts of downtown San Francisco turned into an unsanctioned but tolerated drug market. Lurie believes in harm reduction but argues that handing out supplies "with no consistent process to get people into treatment" amounts to enabling people. Under his administration, city-funded groups may still distribute smoking supplies but cannot do so in public and must try to nudge people into treatment. Recovery, rather than just safe drug use, is the city's goal.
Lurie is using the threat of state intervention under California's SB 79 to convince local NIMBYs that his own housing plan is tame by comparison.
The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim.