![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/GettyImages-2197311905.jpg?w=2048\")
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Since taking office in 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has been on a mission to shake the city out of a post-pandemic economic slump. <\/p>\n
A political outsider, Lurie was previously best known as the heir of the Levi Strauss family fortune and a philanthropist focused on poverty-fighting initiatives. <\/p>\n
Now, Lurie has leveraged his connections across industries to boost the city\u2019s reputation and economy following a slow recovery. Years after the pandemic, San Francisco\u2019s downtown is still struggling with a high vacancy rate and facing long-term issues with open-air drug markets and homelessness. <\/p>\n
Lurie has been a vocal advocate of change in the city and has long championed bringing new business to the city. As chairman of the city\u2019s host committee in 2013, Lurie convinced the NFL to host the Super Bowl in the Bay Area when Levi\u2019s Stadium in Santa Clara was still under construction. Now, as the city\u2019s leader, Lurie is hoping lightning strikes twice. <\/p>\n
As football fans get ready to descend for Sunday\u2019s Super Bowl LX, the entire Bay Area is preparing for a major economic windfall. San Francisco is expected to be the hub of tourism traffic, giving Lurie an opportunity to give sports fans a taste of what to expect this summer when the FIFA World Cup follows this summer. He\u2019s hoping it advertises all the progress being made under his back-to-business approach.<\/p>\n
A native San Franciscan, Lurie founded Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty nonprofit, in 2005. The organization has invested more than $440 million in services for housing, early childhood, education, and employment across the Bay Area. He led the organization until he began running for mayor. <\/p>\n
Lurie has focused his mayoralty on improving quality of life in the city and bringing back business to the city\u2019s downtown, which emptied out during the pandemic. <\/p>\n
The region is expecting to experience an economic impact of $370 million to $630 million, including up to $440 million in San Francisco, according to a Boston Consulting Group study commissioned by the host committee. The game is also expected to attract 90,000 visitors from outside the Bay Area and support about 5,000 jobs. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are ready to show off our restaurants, our small businesses, our parks,\u201d Lurie said in a press conference on Monday. \u201cThere will be a lot of traffic this week, but I think with the economic impacts coming, I think it’s going to be well worth it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s NBA All-Star Game in San Francisco generated $328.2 million in economic impact, according to a study by the Temple University Sports Industry Research Center. Nearly 143,000 people from 40 states and 44 countries attended the event.<\/p>\n
San Francisco\u2019s economic struggles since the pandemic have been well-documented. Before the pandemic, office activities accounted for more than 75% of the city\u2019s GDP. With stay-at-home orders giving way to a strong preference for remote work, commercial real estate tanked, and the office vacancy rate is still at about 35%. <\/p>\n
Major retail stores such as Uniqlo, Nordstrom Rack, and Anthropologie shut their doors. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe took our business community for granted,\u201d Lurie said at the Fortune<\/em> Brainstorm AI conference in December. \u201cWe said, \u2018We can just keep punishing you\u2026 and you\u2019re going to stay.\u2019 Well, that didn\u2019t happen. People fled.\u201d <\/p>\n Between 2020 and 2024, the city\u2019s population decreased by about 50,000 people, according to census data. A proposed tax on billionaires threatens to drive more business out of the Bay Area and has already led to the departure of longtime Bay Area residents, such as Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and investors David Sacks and Peter Thiel. <\/p>\n After refraining from comments on the proposal for weeks, on Jan. 26, Lurie joined Gov. Gavin Newsom in his opposition to the tax. Lurie said he is against the tax because he believes it will make people leave the city, which is already facing a budget shortfall due to federal cuts to food assistance and healthcare. <\/p>\n \u201cEverybody should be paying their fair share,\u201d Lurie said. \u201cBut if people can up and flee, I\u2019d rather see something done at the national level.\u201d<\/p>\n Lurie told Fortune <\/em>the city must \u201cstrip away the red tape\u201d for small businesses and sees the government as a partner to businesses.\u201d <\/p>\n Last year, Lurie brought together business leaders\u2014including former First Republic Bank President Katherine August-deWilde, philanthropist Laurene Powell, and President and Chief Investment Officer for Alphabet Ruth Porat\u2014to start the nonprofit Partnership for San Francisco to harness \u201cprivate sector expertise and resources to help address the city\u2019s most pressing challenges.\u201d <\/p>\n Lurie has also quietly met with Powell Jobs, former Apple designer Jony Ive, and Gap CEO Richard Dickson to work on a branding campaign for the city, The San Francisco Standard<\/em> reported. Ives\u2019 design firm LoveFrom previously worked on a civic pride campaign funded by San Francisco business leaders, including Gap Chairman Bob Fisher and tech executive Chris Larsen. <\/p>\n Since Lurie took over, the city has seen its vacancy rate decrease by 6.5%, and its tourism is up from the pandemic, even before the Super Bowl and World Cup boost. AI startups are flooding into San Francisco, and 85 of the 133 AI companies that signed leases in the city in 2025 were early-stage startups, The Standard reported.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the greatest city in the world when we\u2019re at our best,\u201d Lurie told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAnd I think people are starting to see that again.\u201d<\/p>\n This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/p>\n #Levi #Strauss #heir #Daniel #Lurie #helped #lure #Super #Bowl #Levis #Stadium #construction #hes #mayor #million #windfall<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since taking office in 2025, S… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[11628,2863,11626,11622,1075,10343,5039,701,11624,11629,5179,11627,6844,913,3764,2810,11630,11625,1815,11623,5913],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18519"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}