Daniel Lurie took office at the start of 2025 after a campaign full of pledges to overhaul the city’s approach to homelessness, drugs, and mental health.
Nearly 12 months later, there’s been a marked shift in policy and attitude, but it’s still early to say if the Lurie era is having the effect that he promised, or that his critics feared.
Two numbers tend to drive the city’s headlines around homelessness and health. The first is the count of people living unhoused – in shelters, on the streets, and in vehicles. In 2024, it was more than 8,000. Of those surveyed, more than half reported challenges with mental health or addiction.
The count likely falls short. The Homelessness and Supportive Housing Department says more than 20,000 people a year seek its services.
The second number is overdose deaths. In 2023, SF set an awful record with 803. More than three quarters were from fentanyl.
The total dropped to 635 in 2024, but this year the city is on about the same pace. Lurie inherited the crisis, but by those numbers, there hasn’t been progress.
Those two numbers also underscore two major pledges Lurie made to voters. He fulfilled one soon after taking office. More than 10 months ago, the Board of Supervisors nearly unanimously passed Lurie’s “fentanyl state of emergency” bill, which consolidated executive power to address drugs and overdoses faster.
His campaign promise to end street homelessness, in part by opening 1,500 new shelter beds in his first six months of office, didn’t last long.
The administration has hit other goals, but it’s these two that in large part measure the city’s progress in 2025.
‘Transfer of power’
Lurie’s “fentanyl state of emergency” allowed city departments to eliminate competitive bidding for some contracts, solicit more private donations, and hire more public safety and health workers. It won the vote of Sup. Jackie Fielder, a Democratic Socialist, even though she called it an “unprecedented transfer of power.”
The ordinance also included funds for a 24-hour “police-friendly stabilization center,” which opened at 822 Geary Street in April. The facility encourages police to drop off people with urgent mental health and substance use needs to keep them out of hospitals and jail. In the first five months, 344 people were admitted, and 88 went on to enter residential treatment programs, The New York Times reported.
Soon after the “fentanyl” package passed, the administration grouped its various strategies under the Breaking the Cycle initiative, which came with $37.5 million in private funding. Lurie said it would “fundamentally transform” SF’s health and homelessness response by forcing departments to work better together; reorganizing street outreach teams (from nine to six); and — perhaps most controversially — shift some resources away from SF’s decades-long emphasis on harm reduction and toward “sober” treatment and recovery.
This shift had already begun under London Breed, who in 2024 began blaming harm reduction for its role in the drug crisis. (This was also when the mayoral campaign began to heat up.)
Harm reduction is not one thing. It’s a series of practices to “meet drug users where they’re at,” as some practitioners say. It includes distribution of clean smoking foil and other drug paraphernalia, supervised consumption sites, a ready supply of overdose reversal medicine Narcan, and housing that doesn’t require sobriety.
For a couple years, some lawmakers including Sup. Matt Dorsey, a recovering addict, and Assemblymember Matt Haney, who represents SF in Sacramento, have called for more resources for treatment and recovery that emphasize abstinence. They have also supported some components of harm reduction, such as Narcan distribution.
Under Lurie, the city has partnered with faith-based groups like the Salvation Army to open three treatment centers. Lurie also ordered health workers and contractors to end distribution of drug paraphernalia unless users enter treatment programs.
At a September forum, top Lurie deputies doubled down on the belief that in the era of fentanyl, treatment and recovery should be the city’s main focus.
Shifting shelter
Soon after Lurie’s inauguration, he moved the goalposts of the promise of 1,500 new shelter beds by June. The administration abandoned the goal altogether in July. In an op-ed, SF chief of health and human services Kunal Modi said the plan to add 1,500 beds “was no longer the right approach.”
“Someone … hooked on fentanyl needs more than a place to sleep. They need a bed that’s connected to a system that serves their complex needs and helps them get better,” Modi wrote.
Around the same time, however, Lurie’s budget still seemed to prioritize temporary shelter. The Board of Supervisors in June agreed to shift $34 million to more single adult shelter from funds earmarked for homeless youth and families, prompting criticism from homelessness advocates and families who say they’re consistently left behind by city policy.
Lurie also blunted a push to spread homelessness services more evenly around the city. Sup. Bilal Mahmood, who represents the overburdened Tenderloin, revived an old concept: All 11 supervisor districts should have at least one shelter or other service.
In concept, it won unanimous support from the board. Then the mayor’s team lobbied to water it down, and Mahmood — a key Lurie ally — agreed.
People living in RVs were the subject of another policy flashpoint. After years of promises, SF was no closer to finding more space where owners could live in vehicles off-street and get services. The first and only site at Candlestick Point shut down.
Instead, Lurie and supervisors approved a parking ban in July. Towing began in November, with a different promise: subsidized rent, drawn from the Breaking the Cycle fund, for some RV dwellers who move into apartments.
People who are working with case managers to get off the streets are also supposed to get temporary parking permits. Last month, Mission Local reported that 400 people were covered by temporary permits, well short of the 1,442 vehicle dwellers that the 2024 point-in-time count tallied.
Trump threats
Federal threats to the city’s homelessness policy loom. In May, the Trump administration said it would end Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grants for programs that support DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), “gender ideology,” elective abortions, or “sanctuary” immigration policies. SF and 60 other local governments sued and won temporary relief, but the suit remains pending.
In a second major overhaul, HUD announced new rules last month that would limit grantees to spend 30 percent of funds on permanent supportive housing, requiring much more spending on shelter and other transitional housing.
The shift would put more than 170,000 people nationwide at risk of losing their housing, according to Tomiquia Moss, California secretary of business, consumer services, and housing. Last week, a federal judge blocked the restrictions.
A mayoral spokesperson sent The Frisc a statement attributed to Lurie that emphasized the administration’s 2025 accomplishments, including helping nearly 2,000 people enter shelter through the reorganized street teams. The administration also says it stood up 500 new beds.
Next year, the administration plans to roll out a triage center, an alternative to hospitals or jail, where law enforcement can bring people found publicly using drugs. “We know there is still work ahead,” the mayor’s statement read.
Part of that work will happen in about a month with the biannual point-in-time count. It’s an imperfect measure of San Francisco’s homelessness situation, but it gives some level of assessment — not just a top-line number but all kinds of underlying information. It takes place in late January.