If you have a television, a computer, or a cell phone, you’ve no doubt seen mayoral candidate Daniel Lurie attacking his competitors for being “City Hall insiders.” Well, it turns out Lurie isn’t as much of an outsider as he claims. In August, the Levi Strauss heir launched his first commercial featuring “former first California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris,” who discusses Lurie’s nonprofit Tipping Point investing early in her ideas. Burke Harris is also the founder and former CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness and started the Bayview Child Health Center with Lurie.
So how did the two meet? During my never-ending research on Dwayne Jones, I stumbled upon an 11-year-old video of Lurie speaking with longtime City Hall insider Suzy Loftus in front of a journalism class for a presentation by Fostering Media Connections. “Dwayne Jones, who worked in the mayor’s office, called me one day and he said, ‘you got to meet this woman … she’s thinking about starting a clinic.’” That’s right, Jones had Lurie on speed dial in 2013. Is it possible Lurie didn’t know Jones had a history of corruption and grift? Only if he was living under the gold-plated “50” statues placed around San Francisco in commemoration of the Super Bowl’s golden anniversary (more on that later).
As I’ve written before, in 2004, during his State of the City address, then-Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the Communities of Opportunity program to help families living in public housing projects with after-school tutoring, job placement, health care, and addiction treatment. Newsom also ponied up $370,000 in city funds to cover the cost of providing a top mayoral deputy to oversee the program. His name? Dwayne Jones.
In 2008, after things didn’t pass the smell test, then (and current) president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and current Lurie mayoral rival Aaron Peskin ordered an audit of Communities of Opportunity. According to then-budget analyst Harvey Rose, the eight programs operated by a dozen nonprofits had spent nearly $4 million in private foundation and grant money on parties, concerts, comedy shows, and personal expenses. Newsom and sponsors soon pulled the plug on Communities of Opportunity, steering over 1,200 families at the housing projects into services the city already offered. You would think Newsom would have fired Jones and blocked him from working with the city in the future, but Jones continued to serve in Newsom’s office until 2010.
In 2011, the late Mayor Ed Lee appointed Jones to serve on a subcommittee that monitored contracts (you can’t make this stuff up) under the San Francisco Human Rights Commission. Two years after that, Lurie was taking calls from Jones. “If you want more of the same, there will be plenty of people on the ballot that have been in city hall for a decade, 20-plus years,” Lurie said when he announced his candidacy.
An October 2021 column I wrote about Jones is mentioned in a federal indictment, which in August 2023, charged him with 59 counts of fraud, including bribery, misappropriation of public funds, and aiding and abetting a financial conflict of interests in a government contract. In another six degrees of Dwayne Jones moment, the Human Rights Commission is now under fire for the corruption-plagued Dream Keeper Initiative, which was cosponsored by Jones’s good friend and mentee, District 10 supervisor Shamann Walton, along with incumbent mayor (and Lurie rival) London Breed.
How did Jones get Lurie’s number? Likely through his relationship with ultimate City Hall insider Mayor Lee, who was targeted in the infamous “Shrimp Boy” investigation and accused of using officials in his administration, including former Human Rights commissioner and Jones pal Zula Jones, to help solicit and launder bribes using straw donors. In 2012, phone calls caught Jones telling an undercover agent posing as a real estate developer, “You pay to play here. We are the best at this game … better than New York.” (Is it just me, or does there seem to be a pattern with the Human Rights Commission?)
One year later, in 2013, Lurie spearheaded the city’s successful effort to host the 50th Super Bowl, after which Mayor Lee tapped him to chair the Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee. Press releases touted that Lurie “helped raise $13 million to invest in lower-income communities.” That sounds super, but the Super Bowl festivities helped to create much of the visible homelessness we see in San Francisco today. In less than a month, Lurie and Lee built a city for fans to party in and tore it down as if it never existed — a fantastic feat. Yet, driving down Division Street a few days after the hoopla, my friend Steve and I counted more than 130 homeless-occupied tents. “It looks like a Hooverville,” Steve said, referring to the shantytowns built by homeless people during the Great Depression and named for President Herbert Hoover. “We should call these ‘Leevilles’ after Mayor Lee.”
In February 2016, Lurie penned an opinion piece for Fortune Magazine titled “The Huge Problem Super Bowl Host Cities Can’t Ignore.” In it, he praised the big spectacle for making big business and generating economic activity extending far beyond the stadium or the arena. “As the Chairman of the Host Committee for Super Bowl 50, I’m excited to welcome a million fans and visitors to the Bay Area for the biggest single-day sporting event in the world. Visitors from around the world who explore my native city of San Francisco will enjoy the renowned food and wine, progressive mindset, and breathtaking views the Bay Area is known for,” Lurie gushed. “But as the full-time CEO and founder of Tipping Point Community, an organization that funds anti-poverty programs in the Bay Area, I am not proud of something else these visitors are going to see: the legion of the homeless … as we gather for this 50th-anniversary celebration, and the eyes of the world turn to our city and region, we must not look past our neighbors in need. They will be here when the game is over, and the visitors are gone. We must shine the global spotlight both on the competition on the field and the challenges on our streets.” He also said “25 percent of every corporate sponsorship dollar” would be contributed to the 50 Fund, the Host Committee’s 501(c)(3) arm, established to manage and allocate funds to “deserving non-profits” in the Bay Area. “Fan experiences, entertainment, and civic events are all part of the foundational planning when hosting a Super Bowl. Why shouldn’t taking care of the surrounding community be part of that planning, too?” Lurie asked with an odd mix of arrogance and naïveté.
The reality, however, was much harsher.
Before wealthy revelers came to celebrate a football game played 45 miles south in Santa Clara, Mayor Lee told the press he would give the homeless “alternatives,” but they would have to leave the streets. San Francisco hastily prepared giant warehouses on the outskirts of town to hide the destitute. At first, unlike swanky Super Bowl City, the plumbing wasn’t even working. Why Lurie — CEO of an organization focused on poverty and chairman of the Super Bowl 50 Host Committee — didn’t play a leadership role, putting his considerable fundraising skills and personal resources toward a real solution for a problem he was so keenly aware of, remains a mystery.
In that 2013 journalism class presentation, Lurie boasted that Tipping Point was able, in one place, to raise millions in just minutes. “We actually had a donor who said, ‘I’ll put up the $500,000 if you can match it,’ and we matched it so quickly that he came up and whispered to one of our staffers and then yelled up at me and said they’re in for a million if you can raise it,” Lurie explained. “So, he added another $500,000 right there, and we raised that, and all together, we came up with $4 million, and that’s sort of how it got launched.”
On the personal side, Lurie’s mother, Mimi Haas, a billionaire who owns around 15 percent of Levi Strauss & Co., inherited from her second husband Peter E. Haas, the late great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, has dropped millions on his 2024 mayoral campaign, bringing his family’s donations to over $6 million. Surely, she would have helped fund a less haphazard, more dignified solution for housing the homeless displaced by Super Bowl 50.
Nearly a decade later, as Lurie runs for mayor on his reputation as a City Hall outsider and innate problem solver, reminders of his relationships with City Hall insiders and his inability to solve “the huge problem Super Bowl host cities can’t ignore” remain, including those Division Street LeeVilles.
