In the process of researching and writing an article on the mayoral race, The Urban Legend reached out to the campaigns of Asha Safaí, Mark Farrell, London Breed and Daniel Lurie. Of the four, Lurie, chief executive officer of the nonprofit Tipping Point Community and an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, responded. The interview touched on public safety, downtown real estate and supervisor gridlock. He made promises he has never made before in public, including plans about what to do with San Francisco’s downtown and how to hire more police officers. Questions and answers have been edited for grammar and clarity. 

Why are you running for mayor?

I’m running because I’ve always loved this town. I’ve always been proud to call San Francisco my home. I worry that you, my kids and my friends’ kids won’t have that same sense of pride that I’ve always had if we allow the city to continue down this path. 

I fundamentally believe that this is not a crisis of resources that we’re facing. It’s a crisis of leadership. I have a proven track record of getting big things done. Whether it’s starting and running Tipping Point, bringing Superbowl 50 to the Bay Area, getting housing built or standing up the Emergency Relief Fund after the North Bay fires, I know how to bring people together to serve the people of San Francisco. 

You have talked a lot in your interviews about public safety. What separates you from Mark Farrel, Asha Safaí, and the mayor on this issue?

I think you can’t just be for public safety during an election year. I think the mayor announced that she was going to defund the police. When you do that as the leader of a city, it’s very hard to get the police force back. I don’t care if you’ve reinstituted the funding. It’s not just the mayor; all 11 supervisors voted to defund the police. People will say well, the funding is back at normal levels. Yeah, but our staffing is down 600 police officers since she took office. Since the time she announced that she wanted to defund the police, we’re down over 500 police officers. 

My point is you have candidates now saying these things, and it goes against their track record. I don’t think you can put Asha in the same bucket, [he’s] been out front on this. But I think what I will focus on is aggressively recruiting police officers. I will focus on retaining officers who are at risk of retirement. 

We have some innovative ideas around getting our police officers living in the city again. Let’s have childcare subsidies, let’s have housing subsidies and not just for police but for firemen, for teachers, for nurses, the people that help make this city function and run and take care of all of us. We need to build housing for those four professions. So I’m committed to doing that. 

Actions speak louder than words and the police officers know that. Some of who I’m running against haven’t always been supportive.

What do you think is the biggest problem that will be your biggest focus if you get elected?

Public safety is my number one priority. So just make sure that’s clear. I think then the second thing is the drug and mental health crisis on our streets and making sure that we build mental health and drug treatment beds. 

And I think, you know if you want to go philosophical and like, top level, we gotta believe in our city again, we gotta have hope. We’ve been beaten up. We’ve been beaten up so much that people really believe that we can’t come back. And I totally disagree. 

That’s why I’m running. I’m so excited because I know that the best days of our city are ahead of us and we’ve got it all come together. We’ve got to work together. We can’t be so divisive. And so making sure that we have a culture from the top and city hall that says, “We in this building at City Hall, we’re going to stop thinking about ourselves. We’re going to start thinking about the people of San Francisco and we’re here to serve you right now.” The way that the mayor and the supervisor act is that it’s the opposite. It’s how everybody feels. 

The point is, we need leadership. We need to hold people accountable. The residents, the taxpayers and the voters of San Francisco gotta know that the people that they elect are looking out for them because right now, there are many people out there who don’t believe that. We have to have supervisors and mayors working together instead of pointing fingers constantly and making excuses about why they’re not getting the job done.

Last quarter the downtown office vacancy rate was at 35.9%. A lot of people I’ve talked to have said downtime real estate is one of the biggest and certainly the most under-talked-about issues in SF right now. So what is your plan? How do you want to deal with this?

It’s a fair point. I do think the focus is on public safety, and I think for downtown first and foremost you make people feel safe, and you clean the streets. You do it like we did for [Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation], Dreamforce [and] the JP Morgan health conference, you clean the streets every single day, 365 days a year, because we all saw it was possible. It can get done and I will do it 365 days a year. You clean them, you make people feel safe. 

Then you’ve got to incentivize companies to come back. Help our small businesses by cutting the red tape and we diversify what’s going on downtown. I like the idea of converting those handful of buildings that can be converted from commercial to residential. You know, that’s on the March ballot. I’m supportive of that to get rid of the 6% transfer tax for residential conversions. It’s not going to be a huge driver, but it’s something and we should do that. So I support that. 

We’re seeing [artificial intelligence (AI)] really blossom and where they innovate. We’re the home of AI and we should embrace that clean tech green tech. We need to be creative; I like the idea of bringing a university downtown and fusing it with students and having that energy I think would be wonderful. But it starts with safety and it starts with cleaning streets.