Frank Jordan sipped a glass of pinot noir in John's Grill, one of San Francisco's most historic haunts, known to Dashiell Hammett fans as the place where his fictional detective Sam Spade dined on lamb chops, potatoes, and tomatoes after acquiring the prized Maltese Falcon. As Jordan contemplated the future of San Francisco, the city where he was born 89 years ago and rose to become police chief and a one-term mayor between 1992 and 1996, he could barely be heard over the din of the packed restaurant.
"This is a caring, compassionate city," he said. "But it needs reasonable standards of behavior and much better management. The worst of our multiple crises may be over," he said, "but everything will depend on whether the city gets good leadership."
John's Grill, a welcome retreat after a day of touring the city with Jordan during an unusual heat wave, sharply contrasts with its surrounding neighborhood. For more than 100 years, the restaurant has welcomed politicians, cops, journalists, and business leaders at the edge of the Tenderloin, the heart of the city's historic downtown, just around the corner from the equally famous Powell Street Cable Car Turnaround. But on this steamy evening in October, the restaurant was as jammed and bustling as the Tenderloin was deserted.
Few tourists could be spotted on its streets amid the rows of homeless—or "unhoused," as advocates for the homeless call their clients. Dazed men and women, many on plastic sheets and blankets, leaned against the walls of buildings along the intersection of Hyde and O'Farrell, their meager possessions stacked in front of or beside them. The sidewalks were strewn with needles, pets, and litter. Several addicts were sleeping on the sidewalks; others were chatting, smoking dope, or panhandling. A cop car passed by but did not stop.
After the Covid pandemic, San Francisco, once ranked among Americans' most favored destinations, became synonymous with urban chaos: homelessness, surging crime, closing retail businesses, and an epidemic of drug overdoses.
But homelessness is finally on the decline in the city, Jordan tells me. So, too, are car break-ins, which had risen by nearly 200 percent in 2021, along with "smash-and-grab" robberies, which prompted many retail stores to close. Most of the recreational vehicles that once housed the homeless—parked under the Central Freeway, south of Market to the Mission—are gone.
While violent crime has gone up slightly in the past year, other forms of urban mayhem are down. The city, Jordan says, is slowly recovering from the pandemic, which crushed the economy and led many San Franciscans to flee in search of better schools, safety, and cheaper housing.
"I love this city," Jordan sighed, echoing a common view among the city's denizens, "but it suffers from misgovernance." That's for sure. It's the logical result of a Kafkaesque city government structure, corruption, and a slew of misguided policies, many of which stem, paradoxically, from San Franciscans' desire to be, as Jordan asserts, "caring and compassionate."
The best of intentions, however, have not translated into effective solutions to homelessness. When he was mayor, Jordan founded a program called "Matrix," under which the police issued more than 20,000 citations to get homeless people off the streets. It didn't work, critics complained. Homelessness increased. But throwing money at countless projects run by myriad city agencies hasn't worked either, Jordan says. What it has done instead is drive up the city's deficit to $800 million on a $15.5 billion annual budget. When Jordan left office in 1996, the city had a $21 million surplus.
An effort to shelter the homeless in about 70 of the city's motels during the pandemic also failed, Jordan said, and now 30 of the motels are suing the city for property damages. "No city can solve the drug addiction and mental illness problems among the homeless alone," he said. "You need mental wards and group homes, but also supervision and access to continuing medical care. And you need judges who will insist on 60–90 days of detention and care rather than 72 hours of incarceration and then automatic release. For the past seven years, the city has spent some $2.8 billion, or roughly $700 million a year, attempting to address homelessness."
Until recently, while the homeless population was growing along with budget deficits, the city's population as a whole was declining. Between 2020 and 2023, San Francisco, which declared itself a "sanctuary city," lost nearly 62,000 residents, or 7 percent of the 871,000 people who lived there in 2020. But the number of city employees increased substantially, from 25,000 when Jordan was mayor to 35,000 today. "We were one of the only cities in America to continue hiring workers during the pandemic," he said.
Yet, Mayor London Breed did not initially hire more cops to ensure public safety. Jordan says that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) remains understaffed by about 500 cops, partly because the force has been so demoralized by a perceived lack of support from Breed and other city officials.
In 2020, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests and demands for defunding the police, Breed cut $120 million from the SFPD and the Sheriff's Department, directing the funds instead to programs to address "disparities" in the city's black community. This year, however, facing an election and growing public fury over crime, she reversed her stance. In June, she proposed a record-high $821.6 million budget for the SFPD and an increase in police staffing.
"There has been a definite change of attitude in San Francisco," said Jordan. "Suddenly everyone is pro-cop."
The past few years of rising crime and urban flight deepened the downtown retail crisis. Anchor hotels like the Hilton closed. So did once-popular businesses—Nordstrom, Old Navy, Whole Foods, Williams Sonoma, and AAA. Macy's has announced its intention to leave. Fisherman's Warf has high vacancy, and most famously, Elon Musk pulled up stakes and moved X to Texas. But according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the city has slowly begun growing again, another indication that the widely predicted "doom loop" is not inevitable.
The city's 35,000 small businesses, Jordan says, are its financial "life's blood," but they, too, are now drowning in taxes and regulations. "We must stream-line city government," he said.
On November 5, San Franciscans will have a chance to do so. On the ballot is Proposition D, which would reduce the number of city commissions that oversee municipal departments from a jaw-dropping 130 to no more than 65 (which still sounds like a lot). Among other things, the commissions are responsible for hiring and firing many department heads—even those who supposedly report to the mayor. Commission members are appointed by the city's Board of Supervisors, which traditionally has been hostile to the mayor. And many of these commissions have competing or duplicative missions. No less than five commissions, for example, oversee homelessness.
The current system, wrote David Broockman, a board member on the political non-profit TogetherSF Action, has produced not only a deeply dysfunctional bureaucracy but also "perverse incentives."
"Imagine trying to run a company with a team of executives hand-picked by your biggest competitors who serve at their pleasure not yours," Broockman said.
Since the current system ensures that the mayor cannot legally control the complex web of city commissions and department heads, Jordan agrees, it has also produced a city government that is virtually unaccountable.
Changing San Francisco will require voter stamina. City residents are being asked to decide on 15 local ballot measures, ten statewide ballot measures, a mayor, a supervisor, a Board of Education, and many more elected offices—about 35 issues and offices in all.
The mayoral race has also suddenly become competitive. While Breed has toughened her policies in response to overwhelming public sentiment that San Francisco is on the "wrong track," she faces allegations of corruption in the Dream Keeper Initiative, her signature program aimed at helping San Francisco's black population, which constitutes less than 5 percent of the city. Earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Standard, a relatively new online news outlet that has done excellent reporting on the city, revealed that Sheryl Davis, head of the Human Rights Commission and one of Breed's close friends, allegedly mishandled Dream Keeper Initiative fund disbursements and awarded $1.5 million in contracts to a man with whom she shared a home. Davis subsequently resigned after Breed said she was "appalled" by the allegations. Breed faces stiff competition from several rival candidates—among them Mark Farrell, a wealthy former interim mayor of San Francisco, and Daniel Lurie, an anti-poverty nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir whom Jordan has endorsed.
Jordan is encouraged by what he perceives as a shift in mood among San Franciscans, as well as by the growing signs of economic recovery. Despite the continued high retail vacancies downtown, San Francisco-based companies attracted $34.3 billion in venture capital funding last year, more than any other market in the world. The tech industry, boosted by the possibilities of AI, also saw two months of consecutive job growth for the first time since 2022.
Even if San Franciscans make long-needed changes in the structure of city government and those who run it, Jordan predicts that it will still take five to six years to rebuild the city. "But don't bet against San Francisco," he says. "We may have been a model of what not to do. But we'll be successful in spite of ourselves."