Michael Moritz’s strange and terrible diagnosis of San Francisco

Let us start with the premise that San Francisco is a city with serious challenges and an unserious government. Let us be frank: This is a poorly governed place. You could even claim it’s the worst-run big city in the United States. And long has been.

You could garner broad agreement with a premise like this, just as you could with the premise “Klay Thompson is good at basketball.” 

Once you get into the why, though — why is San Francisco, a place that’s so rich and so replete with smart government officials, governed so abysmally? — it gets tougher. 

But along comes Michael Moritz with an op-ed in the New York Times to tell us why. 

He says it’s all those loons on the Board of Supervisors; it certainly has nothing to do with San Francisco’s 30-year string of establishment-friendly, pro-business, moderate mayors. 

We’ll get into the substance of Moritz’s article momentarily, but, for many readers, that was a challenge. Whatever Times scribe wrote the headline — “Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco” — was apparently channeling The Onion or the New York Times Pitchbot Twitter account. 

You simply can’t headline a story “Even Democrats Like Me” … when the me in question is a venture capitalist with a net worth of some $4.2 billion who supported Mike Bloomberg in the last election and has a long history of donating money to Republicans. This gets readers off on the wrong foot as surely as scattering ball-bearings atop a stairwell. As headlines go, it borders on sabotage. 

Moritz, a gifted journalist before going into more lucrative endeavors, likely can’t be blamed for the Times’ parodic editorial choice. But he can be blamed for writing that San Francisco has “been crippled by a small coterie who knows how to bend government to its will” when he’s the guy who’s put some $11 million into political donations over the last decade and a half. 

That’s parodic, too. And that’s just the money that we can easily track; that doesn’t include 501(c)4 donations and other sorts of endeavors that needn’t be disclosed. 

If you’re going to supposedly get into the nitty gritty to explain how San Francisco fails, facts matter. So Moritz navigates into the ditch when he writes things like: “The nominating committee of San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee has an impressive record in backing candidates seeking their first electoral victory as members of local transportation and educational boards. These slots put candidates on the conveyor belt to higher office.” 

First off, there is no “nominating committee” on the DCCC. Second, there is only one elected transportation board in town, the BART Board. And no San Franciscan has parlayed that into a means of ascent to higher office since Ella Hill Hutch in 1977.

Are these the most important points? Not really. But a lack of subject-matter fluency leads to the quick evaporation of one’s credibility. Even a nuclear physicist loses the confidence of the bar room when he talks about kicking a touchdown. Same goes with an ace journalist turned VC going on about nominating committees in the nation’s paper of record. 

Now, when it comes to billionaire inveterate political donors, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Michael Moritz. He is a long-haul San Franciscan. He has put tremendous amounts of dough into funding school summer programs, funding good journalism at the San Francisco Standard, and funding the University of California, San Francisco. In 2020, Moritz and his wife put $2 million into Right to Recover, which gave much-needed funds to low-income workers stuck at home with covid. 

So it’s disappointing that a deeply intelligent and committed San Franciscan out-and-out wanders through the looking glass when he writes that “mayors have been stripped of much authority while remaining convenient heat shields for the” Board of Supervisors.

This is a statement akin to the former editor of the Chronicle claiming that they simply had to retain Willie Brown’s column because Willie Brown is an everyman.  

Simply put, it’s hard to make a less accurate statement than this. 

The mayor of San Francisco, let alone its present mayor, has not been “stripped of much authority.” There are lowly aides in the mayor’s office fresh out of Public Policy grad school with more input and influence on the city budget than all 11 elected supervisors combined. The amount of money the supervisors and mayor fight and claw over during the budgetary add-back process is scores or hundreds of millions of dollars out of a budget approaching $14 billion — around 7 percent of the discretionary portion of the general fund and 1 percent of the overall budget.

Far from being “stripped,” Mayor London Breed has, in her five and a half years in City Hall Room 200, managed to coalesce more and more power. She was able to appoint new department heads after the Federal Bureau of Investigation swooped in and arrested her longtime allies. That led to her being able to appoint a new City Attorney. She also appointed the District Attorney. And three school board members (voters retained two of them). And the Public Defender, too, if you go back that far. 

Two of our current supervisors were originally appointed to office, and three others beat appointed incumbents — meaning five of the 11 supes could have been mayoral appointees if not for those meddlesome voters. 

When a mayor disagrees with the Board, he or she can opt simply to not spend the money underlying the Board’s legislation. In 2020, for example, all 11 supervisors voted that the city obtain 8,250 emergency hotel rooms and Breed blew it off, veto-proof majority be damned. That’s how the system works, and that’s how it was designed to work. 

None of this seems like any rational description of circumscribed mayoral power. What’s more, most every issue most worrying San Franciscans — crime, filth, drug-use, homelessness — is under the aegis of the mayor. And that’s long been the case: When San Francisco had a moderate board under moderate Mayor Ed Lee, the city also had a homelessness crisis, a drug overdose crisis, filthy streets, a property crime crisis, a failing public transit system and an even worse affordability crisis than the present. 

None of this is to excuse the governance of our board or our mayor. The purpose of this article isn’t to say San Francisco is well-governed when it’s clearly not. But the board, despite what you’ve read from VCs on Twitter and in the Grey Lady, plays a circumscribed role.

If San Francisco is a presentation of “Hamlet,” then the Board is Rosencrantz or Guildenstern. Maybe Polonius. 

The mayor is Hamlet. 

There are plenty of troublesome kicking-a-touchdown type passages in Moritz’s short op-ed. 

His dismissal of ranked-choice voting seems, for all the world, to imply that the system can be “gamed” after the votes are in. His bemoaning of businesses fleeing this city doesn’t note that, as terrible as San Francisco’s business climate is, those companies often relocated to states with tax burdens less onerous than California’s. His complaint that voters enacted too many business taxes also neglects to mention that voters obediently enacted the gross receipts tax that Ron Conway and the city’s political moderates told us to — and our city government handed out the Twitter tax break and stock options tax break.

His swipe at the Chronicle as contributing to bad government seems like a cheap shot, considering the paper is doing some stellar investigative work and has certainly seen leaner and badder days (a certain everyman’s column was, indeed, cashiered).  

But let’s look at the more elemental issues. The problems beguiling San Francisco — a middle-class exodus, affordability issues and property crime, drug use, homelessness and more — have been decades in the making. They have worsened under the watch of both liberal and moderate city officials (and 30 consecutive years of moderate mayors).

Moritz bemoans that San Francisco is a one-party town. But so is virtually every major American city; of the 20 largest American cities, only two are led by Republicans. And, more to the point, what tenets of the modern GOP would possibly contribute to a better-run government, especially on the municipal level? 

San Francisco’s problem is not liberalism. It’s incompetence. It’s sloth. It’s poor governance, dysfunctional bureaucracy, and casual corruption enabled by vast and steady torrents of wealth. 

Well, it was fun while it lasted. And now Even Democrats Like Me are Fed Up with San Francisco.