Mission Local is publishing campaign dispatches for each of the major contenders in the mayor’s race, alternating among candidates weekly until November. This week: Daniel Lurie. Read earlier dispatches here.
Much of Daniel Lurie’s time is spent speaking. In candidate debates and forums, and in talks with merchants and residents on the campaign trail, Lurie can hold forth during in-depth pitches about his various policy prescriptions for what he calls a mismanaged San Francisco.
He knows how to do this. Increasingly, Lurie has become comfortable articulating his views on how the city should be run, speaking to reporters, and shooting the breeze with San Franciscans.
But on Thursday morning, Lurie listened. For the better part of an hour, he sat silently through a women’s roundtable with some 20 community leaders at his Irving Street headquarters. Lurie’s wife, Becca Prowda, also joined the meeting.
They sat around the wooden tables, looking across a spread of scones from Arizmendi Bakery next door. But the real issue on the table? Gender equality in San Francisco.
Housing was first on the list. There are not enough safe shelters for unhoused women to move into, said Yves-Langston Barthaud, the chief advocacy and policy officer of San Francisco SafeHouse, a nonprofit organization supporting women and LGBTQ+ people who are experiencing housing instability and sexual exploitation or trafficking.
“Women who are unhoused have a different experience than unhoused men,” Barthaud said. Many of them have escaped domestic violence, rape, sexual assault or trafficking. That means they may not readily choose to enter shelters because they do not feel safe enough.
“They would rather take their chances on the streets than try to be in a situation where they don’t feel safe,” Barthaud added.
Minouche Kandel, the senior staff attorney in the LGBTQ, gender and reproductive justice project at the ACLU of Southern California, suggested the importance of permanent housing as an end goal for helping unhoused women get back on their feet.
Another attendee, who preferred to remain anonymous, quickly added that, for some unhoused women, transitional housing with case management is necessary. Barthaud agreed, adding that, for some women who have experienced trauma before or those who are undocumented, the transition might take even longer — up to five to six years — until they are ready for permanent housing.
Before Lurie spoke, he was asked about his plan on representation at City Hall.
“We have three very cis-Jewish men representing us in our Board of Supervisors. Fantastic,” said Mahsa Hakimi, the city’s arts commissioner and LGBTQ+ and women’s rights advocate.
Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston, and Rafael Mandelman are all Jewish, and the Board of Supervisors also has three gay men as members: Joel Engardio for District 4, Matt Dorsey for District 6, and Mandelman for District 8.
“But LGBTQ plus is L, G, B, T, Q, plus. It’s not just G,” Hakimi said. The attendees laughed lightly. “So as a queer person, I’m asking: What do you plan for the — “
“I’m gonna work with you,” Lurie interjected. In a Lurie administration, from the mayor’s office to all city departments, there will be representation “seats at the table,” he said, adding, “I’m making a commitment.”
And then, again, he sat back and listened.
Jacqueline Flores, a transgender woman of El/La Para TransLatinas, a nonprofit fighting for rights for Latina trans women, pointed to inequality in hiring for trans job applicants. Flores recalled her first job-hunting experience — she got turned down solely because the managers and workers did not like the way she dressed or spoke.
“Thank you for sharing that,” Lurie said. “We can definitely take that down.”
Roma Guy, a long-time LGBTQ+ and women’s rights activist, mentioned street homelessness and the fentanyl crisis plaguing the city.
“We blame homeless people for our drug problems,” Guy said. “I mean, this is the most ridiculous thing in the world.” Guy pointed out that those who died of fentanyl in their homes are “not recorded, statistically.”
Lurie nodded along. He didn’t bring up his plans for the drug crisis or homelessness.
Agua Bracho, the program coordinator at Horizons Unlimited of San Francisco, a nonprofit dedicated to mental-health and substance-use treatment, gender-affirming care, and substance-use prevention education among teenagers.
Bracho suggested looking beyond this roundtable and thinking about how to be more inclusive, opening up the discussion like this one to more women and LGBTQ+ people, who have been “silenced throughout their entire lives.”
“It’s not just about inviting someone into a space,” Bracho said. “It’s how you help them also rebuild their ways of being in that conversation with you, and participating in that conversation as well.”
Lurie acknowledged his privilege. “By sheer the nature of my background, I’ve always been able to be at the table,” said Lurie, who is, after all, the Levi Strauss heir and a multi-millionaire. His mother has poured $1 million into a political action committee backing his candidate, and wealthy donors have poured in several millions more. That PAC has raised more than $5.2 million total.
But he quickly underscored his other role, as the founder of anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point, which he created in 2005 as a means to cut chronic homelessness in San Francisco.
“We need to build these tables,” he said. “And then you need your elected leaders to make sure they are listening to the tables. And then not just listening, but then putting action and plans in place.”
That antisemitic dogwhistle in there was weird. This is who our arts commissioner is??
Disturbing to say the least.
Several weeks ago, I saw Aaron Peskin handing out his campaign flyers at the Montgomery Station. As commuters were filing by him after exiting the train, I heard & saw a younger guy sneer at him with only one word: “Jews”.
I was completely taken aback and I think I even gasped out loud. The well dressed dude continued walking with his work backpack and I continued to stare at him. He caught my eye and gave me a creepy smile, clearly pleased with himself, he’d made an impact, a pathethic, ill-intentioned one.
I wanted to go back to Peskin and tell him I was sorry that that bit of meanness had happened, and to wish him luck. I should have..
Reading Mahsa Hakimi’s comment, I’m troubled again. I want to ask her what she, as Arts Commissioner, is doing to bring people together, and if she realizes, with comments like that, that she might be coming off rather anti-semitic.
So glad I’ve never wanted to run for office. If someone told me they didn’t get a job because “they didn’t like the way I dressed or spoke,” I’d roll my eyes and think, “Maybe they didn’t hire you because you were, say, unqualified? Unpleasant?”
Unless, of course, the rejection letter cited “solely because of the way you dressed or spoke” as the reason. What a letter that would be! Can you show it to us?