Part 1: It Is Safer to Fail Quietly Than to Succeed Publicly
I am writing this somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle, on the flight home after several days spent trying to understand a city that appears to be changing in real time. Like many people, I had been watching that change from a distance. I followed Mayor Daniel Lurie as he explained his administration’s work with an earnest and occasionally awkward dad-like quality on social media. Less than two years into his first public office, he seemed to be altering the trajectory of a city that had become an international symbol of urban dysfunction.
That story became more complicated the moment we arrived. We checked into Hotel Zetta in SoMa Monday night, only a few blocks from the Tenderloin. It was late enough for the city’s contradictions to reveal themselves. Immense wealth gave way to visible desperation within a few blocks. The city that has taught much of the world to imagine the future was still living alongside suffering so familiar that people had learned to walk around it.
I will not bury the lede. San Francisco is not fixed. At least not yet.
But it is making tremendous progress on problems Seattle has begun to treat as permanent. San Francisco is confronting open-air drug markets and connecting more people in crisis with care. It is proving that public disorder is not inevitable, and that compassion does not require a city to stand by while people suffer.
That is what made the trip worthwhile. We had not come south to witness a victory lap or collect ideas that could be copied and pasted into Seattle. We came to understand what had changed and whether our city could create the same momentum. Beneath that inquiry was a question that has grown heavier for me and increasingly frustrating for people across our region.
How can a city care so deeply, spend so much tax revenue and build so many programs, yet still leave people feeling that government is absent when they need it most?
San Francisco has lived through an extreme version of that contradiction. Its streets became the setting for a debate that was nominally about compassion but too often produced neither compassion nor order. People suffering from addiction were allowed to deteriorate in public. Residents and workers were expected to tolerate conditions that no community should accept. Government agencies continued to perform their individual roles while the city as a whole failed to produce an answer.
During two days of meetings, I expected to find a new policy or program that explained the change. I assumed San Francisco had built something Seattle lacked. We did see promising efforts that deserve closer study. Yet, most of the institutions credited with the city’s progress already existed before Mayor Lurie. The people were largely there. So were the programs, authority, and infrastructure.
What changed was that the person at the top began demanding they work.
Daniel Lurie had never held elected office before becoming mayor. He came from philanthropy, where he founded and led Tipping Point Community, an organization that works to confront poverty across the Bay Area. It probably also helps that he is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. Wealth does not confer judgment or grit, but financial independence can make political risk easier to bear. It may leave Lurie less constrained by the relationships and calculations that often make disruption costly in politics.
An outsider’s background does not automatically make someone an effective executive. Recent history at the national level has given us a rather vivid reminder that wealth and political inexperience do not, by themselves, prepare someone to govern. Government exercises public power. It must protect due process, operate transparently and respect civil rights.
Yet, in Lurie’s case, his distance from politics appears to have freed him from some of its usual traps. He entered City Hall without the learned helplessness that takes hold when institutional habits harden into presumed necessities. Too often, “this is how we’ve always done it” keeps us from asking whether there’s a better way. Lurie challenged that mindset with a simple question. Why keep accepting what isn’t working?
That distinction shaped the team he assembled. San Francisco has nearly 60 departments, which creates a span of responsibility no mayor can meaningfully manage alone. The city charter also limits the mayor’s ability to appoint traditional deputy mayors with formal supervisory power over department heads. Lurie responded by creating four policy chief positions. Each one was assigned a major portfolio and charged with forcing alignment across agencies. Department leaders still formally report to the mayor, but they no longer operate without senior officials pressing them toward common goals.
Lurie recruited accomplished leaders from business, consulting, philanthropy, civic organizations and public safety. Many had not taken the traditional path through City Hall. Their executive discipline was apparent during what became our shortest meeting of the trip. The team was sharp, serious and direct. They did not spend time admiring the complexity of the problems. They wanted to know the goal, what stood in the way and who would remove the obstacle. Whatever their individual portfolios, they spoke with a common sense of purpose. It was clear that the mayor set the direction and expected his team to carry it through.
Department leaders had told them that no decision was worse than a bad decision. The mayor’s team took that message seriously. This was not a group assembled to manage process. It was a team built to move work.
That difference begins with the mayor. An executive sets the pace of an organization long before issuing a formal directive. If the mayor tolerates delay, delay becomes reasonable. If the mayor accepts meetings as evidence of progress, the bureaucracy will produce more meetings. When the mayor asks for results and returns to check whether they occurred, urgency travels downward.
We heard this repeatedly in San Francisco. Lurie was present in the work. He stayed for meetings rather than appearing briefly to welcome the group. He asked who owned the next decision. He pushed through answers that amounted to polite versions of no. The quality that came through most clearly was not ideological brilliance. It was tenacity.
One story from the trip captured this approach. The Downtown SF Partnership had been struggling with persistent disorder near the Embarcadero. An encampment, graffiti and open drug use had taken hold as public infrastructure deteriorated. Everyone understood the problem, but familiarity had slowly turned it into part of the landscape.
Lurie came down himself and brought the relevant department heads rather than their staff. He walked the area and identified what needed to change. A wall needed paint. A dead tree needed removal. The area needed cleaning and a damaged bench needed repair. The following week, the work was done.
He brought the same instinct to encampments and debris beneath state highways. The property belonged to Caltrans, which offered City Hall a familiar excuse to say it was someone else’s responsibility. Lurie refused to accept that answer. His administration reached an agreement that now allows San Francisco crews to clear and maintain the state right-of-way, then seek reimbursement from the state for eligible costs.
Lurie did not pretend the jurisdictional boundary was irrelevant. He simply refused to let it become an excuse for inaction.
The mayor’s most important contribution was not recognizing the problem. Everyone could already see it. His contribution was making clear that the city would no longer tolerate its own failure.
Mayor Lurie established that conditions matter and deadlines are real. Department heads understand that the mayor will notice whether the work happened. He did not create a new initiative or announce another task force. He made the existing government perform its most basic responsibilities.
This is the distinction Seattle must confront. We do not lack talented administrators, committed advocates or people willing to convene thoughtful discussions. What we have lacked, for far too long, is a mayor willing to choose a direction, build a team capable of carrying it out and accept responsibility when the results fall short.
City Hall cannot be run as an ongoing coalition meeting. A mayor should listen, but listening is not leading. The mayor is not merely another stakeholder. The office exists to set direction, align government, make difficult decisions and answer for results. That should be self-evident. Yet Seattle has treated the mayor as a convener for so long that this basic expectation now sounds radical. People are not asking for another facilitator. They are asking for a mayor who will lead.
And executive leadership does not mean ignoring disagreement or treating deliberation as a weakness. It means knowing when deliberation has produced enough information to make a decision. Consensus can be useful, but it can also become an alibi. There will always be another person to consult and another concern to study. At some point, governing requires someone to decide.
The reason this remains unusual is not mysterious. Action creates visible risk. A decision has an author and a date. It can be challenged in court or attacked by an interest group. It may offend an ally. It can expose a program that has not worked or force an agency to accept responsibility it has learned to avoid.
Action leaves fingerprints. Failure dissolves into process.
A referral is made and a contract is renewed. A pilot is extended while another workgroup is assembled. Every step can be defended even as the collective result remains unacceptable. The person in crisis stays in crisis. The neighborhood continues to absorb the disorder. Public employees learn that following the approved process is safer than owning the outcome.
That was the conclusion I found myself reaching as we flew home.
It is safer to fail quietly than to succeed publicly in Seattle.
Success is politically dangerous because meaningful improvement disrupts existing arrangements. It may require telling a respected organization that its intentions are honorable, but its outcomes are insufficient. It may require changing a contract, so public dollars purchase measurable progress. It can mean moving resources away from a familiar program. A leader may have to disagree with allies and proceed anyway.
Failure makes fewer demands. It asks only that everyone continues performing their assigned role.
The people defending the current system are not necessarily acting in bad faith. Many have devoted their careers to vulnerable communities. They may fear that change will cause harm or discard protections that took decades to build. Those concerns deserve a serious hearing, but a hearing cannot become a veto. Compassion cannot become an exemption from accountability.
Progressive government weakens itself when it measures moral seriousness through intention alone. A city can speak eloquently about justice while becoming less capable of delivering it. Values are not threatened by accountability. They become credible through it. The opposite of careless government is not timid government. It is thoughtful government led by people with the courage to act and the humility to change.
San Francisco still faces profound challenges. Some problems have moved rather than disappeared. The city has not solved addiction, homelessness or the deeper failures in its continuum of care. Its progress remains incomplete and could prove fragile. Yet its leadership no longer appears willing to confuse the difficulty of the work with permission to accept failure.
This was the most hopeful and unsettling lesson of the trip.
Seattle already has many of the tools we admired in San Francisco. We have capable public employees and substantial public resources. We have programs that could deliver better results if they were better connected and held accountable for outcomes.
We do not need to abandon our values or wait for someone to invent the perfect policy.
What we lack is not another program. It is executive leadership with enough drive, tenacity and grit to make the government we already have produce better results.
Leadership costs nothing in budget terms. It is expensive in every way that matters to politics. It costs comfort and political capital. It can strain relationships. It requires a leader to accept responsibility for decisions that may be imperfect but are still better than continued paralysis.
That is why leadership is rare. It is also why leadership matters.
Seattle does not need another explanation for why the system is hard to move. It needs a mayor willing to move it.