By Owen Tucker-Smith
SAN FRANCISCO -- Surrounded by Democrats eager to tax American billionaires, Mayor Daniel Lurie prefers to ask them, politely, to write a check.
And in a city strapped for cash but drowning in ultrawealthy residents, the checks are rolling in.
San Francisco's mayor, a moderate Democrat, is a fundraiser by trade, arriving at City Hall last year after years running a nonprofit foundation. It helps that he is an heir of the Haas family that built Levi Strauss and has long funded local cultural and civic institutions. It also helps that he has ties to other Bay Area dynasties that have quietly influenced city life for decades.
Since his election, and facing a projected budget shortfall of more than $900 million, Lurie has solicited more than $40 million in private donations and helped build a philanthropic outpost of city government, rousing skeptics who question the mingling of city business with an elite class of locals.
One of the first six-figure payments Lurie requested for his transition committee arrived two days into his term from John Fisher, a Gap-fortune heir whose parents built a retail empire selling the denim jeans that Lurie's relatives produced. Similar checks soon came from John's older brothers and their wives, and from other boldface names of San Francisco society: the Schwabs of finance, the Swigs of real estate, the Pritzkers of hotels. Each payment came at Lurie's request but was donated to third-party nonprofits, allowing the total sums to far exceed what patrons could have given to the mayor's campaign account.
Since then, John Fisher's older brother, Bob, has helped launch a Lurie-backed group called the San Francisco Downtown Development Corporation, a City Hall-aligned entity charged with revitalizing the district. The group has now raised more than $60 million in contributions and commitments, with ambitions of reaching hundreds of millions more.
Private-sector relationships
This arrangement began with a fentanyl state-of-emergency ordinance Lurie pushed through soon after taking office in January 2025. It gave him broader latitude to solicit private donations to solve the city's problems. He has since leaned on donors to address homelessness and economic development. Now an array of deep pockets, from old-guard families to Google and OpenAI, are on board.
The philanthropy is already rippling through City Hall. When Lurie announced plans to accelerate the city's homelessness response with transitional housing and treatment beds, he name-checked the Schwabs. When he unveiled his new arts-and-culture strategy, the city's news release included Bob Fisher.
This year, Lurie hired an executive from Meta Platforms chief Mark Zuckerberg's philanthropic arm to coordinate the city's private-sector relationships; her salary is being paid by Tipping Point, the foundation Lurie used to run. In September, the development corporation hired its own chief executive, Shola Olatoye, who began pitching tech moguls on the returns of investing in an American city's downtown.
"Cities don't develop themselves without access to the private markets," Olatoye said. The mayor's office said the corporation operates outside government and that City Hall doesn't oversee it. Funds support programs that keep streets cleaner and address vacant storefronts.
Still, as antibillionaire sentiment rises, some progressives are balking at Lurie's endeavor. "The tradeoff is a blurred line between a government accountable to the goals of the people of San Francisco and the will of wealthy people," said Jackie Fielder, a city supervisor who has pushed for more transparency in Lurie's operation. "Do wealthy San Francisco families have the same interests as the vast majority of San Franciscans?"
San Francisco in 2022 placed tight restrictions on so-called behested payments, or donations solicited by officials to third-party groups they support. After Lurie succeeded in getting those regulations waived for certain causes, the payments soared, according to filings.
"Government exists for a reason. It has processes," said Sean McMorris of Common Cause California, a government-transparency group. "Behested payments can result in a lot of good things getting done, but they are also a way to circumvent campaign-finance laws that are meant to check corruption."
In San Francisco, Lurie has enjoyed high approval ratings and amassed a social-media following with his relentless boosterism and focus on cleaning up and cutting red tape. He generally opposes tax hikes on residents and companies. "A massive tax increase on San Francisco employers will threaten our recovery," he said in a statement. "We need to build on this year of momentum, and philanthropy is a critical component of our strategy to bring San Francisco and our economy back."
He has solicited more payments from San Francisco's old-money elite than from tech companies, according to an analysis of filings. The Schwabs alone sent more than $10 million at Lurie's request, primarily to address homelessness, documents show; the mayor sought another $10 million from Crankstart, a family fund started by venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife. Lurie has even solicited payments from his mother, a family foundation and distant cousins.
The mayor "is uniquely positioned to deliver one of the most ambitious public-private partnership initiatives in San Francisco history," said a report from Lurie's transition committee.
Arrival with a Rolodex
Lurie campaigned as a City Hall outsider, and much of the establishment contributed to his opponent, incumbent mayor London Breed. But once Lurie won, he had little trouble attracting financial support from dynasties his family has known for decades.
Half a century before John Fisher and his wife wrote Lurie's transition committee a $100,000 check, John's father, Gap co-founder Don Fisher, and Lurie's stepfather, Levi Strauss heir Peter Haas, discussed a daring proposal: a new retailer that would sell Levi's jeans and vinyl records. A decade later, both families had taken their companies public.
Meanwhile, other powerful San Francisco families emerged. Charles Schwab launched his brokerage from the city in 1971; Gordon Getty inherited his father's oil wealth five years later and dove into philanthropy. Warren Hellman started his private-equity juggernaut in 1984. Members of the Pritzkers migrated west.
The Haas and Fisher families bought real estate, stakes in baseball teams and a bounty of contemporary art. Cultural leaders grew dependent on them -- and their peers -- for philanthropy. The families worked closely at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where they funded a major expansion and filled its rooms with their Warhol paintings and Calder mobiles.
Don Fisher and his corporate allies advocated for pro-business political candidates and opposed taxes on corporations.
Some families developed close ties with political figures Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown Jr., all of whom, like the museum and opera, increasingly leaned on private donors. A small group of families backed Newsom's rise through City Hall to the governorship. "My deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story," the governor wrote in his recent memoir.
By the turn of the century, as tech wealth soared, cultural and civic leaders tried to draw newly rich residents into philanthropy. They hosted dinner parties with tech moguls with hopes that new billionaires would get involved. Several former museum officials said they have had little success.
"You don't see them walking around, and stopping in a gallery, and buying art, and trying to cultivate connoisseurship with their siblings or their children," said Valerie Wade, a San Francisco gallerist.
To some that makes courting the old money that much more crucial. Brown himself recently met Fisher brothers Bob and Bill for lunch at his usual seafood shack, Sam's Grill, to discuss the state of the city. He reminded them of their parents' philanthropic legacy. "I'm trying to keep them here," Brown said.
Still, "the more traditional families are smaller and being presented with greater and greater needs," Olatoye said, adding that the city needs to diversify the types of philanthropists investing in its downtown recovery efforts.
The result is a mishmash of new and old: Standing by San Francisco's 19th-century cable-car turnaround on Wednesday, Lurie and Olatoye said that Amazon.com and Alphabet's Google would help foot the bill for a new public-safety initiative.
Another day this month, Lurie disclosed a contribution from Google and one from a descendant of a local 20th-century dehydrated-potato-product fortune.
Write to Owen Tucker-Smith at Owen.Tucker-Smith@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 29, 2026 22:00 ET (02:00 GMT)
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