San Francisco Mayor Taps Billionaires for Homeless Shelter Beds

(Bloomberg) — San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has turned to some of the country’s wealthiest philanthropists to advance his agenda on homelessness while the city faces a daunting budget deficit.

The $37.5 million fundraising haul includes $10 million from Charles and Helen Schwab’s foundation and another $10 million from Crankstart, the personal foundation of billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, has made philanthropy a key part of his tenure, saying the city’s business leaders and ultrarich should play a key role in addressing the homelessness crisis. Earlier this year, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors gave the mayor permission to raise as much as $10 million from individual donors even if they have business before the city.

“This work is about so much more than money alone,” Lurie said in a statement. “It’s about breaking away from failed strategies and building more effective systems and services to break the cycles of homelessness, addiction, and government failure — and reclaim San Francisco’s place as the greatest city in the world.”

The money will be used to meet a key campaign promise: staffing 1,500 shelter beds to help bring people off the street and into drug and mental health treatment.

Lurie is turning to the wealthy as San Francisco faces a more than $800 million budget deficit over the next two years, which could force cuts to jobs and programs throughout the city. His homelessness fundraising also includes $11 million from Tipping Point, the anti-poverty non-profit that he founded; $6 million from prominent San Francisco philanthropists Keith and Priscilla Geeslin; and $500,000 from the New York-based Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

For Moritz, a former Sequoia Capital leader, the donation is part of more than $300 million in spending since 2020 in civic and political causes.

Lurie was elected in large part due to public anger over homelessness and public drug use. Dissatisfaction with the city’s downtown spaces permeated San Francisco’s tech and financial elite, who found common cause with small business groups and many middle-class residents. The mayor poured more than $9 million of his own money into his campaign.

“This fundraising effort is an encouraging indicator of the collective will in our city to make progress on a crisis that has afflicted our communities for too long,” said Bilal Mahmood, a district supervisor who unseated the board’s most progressive member last year. “I look forward to continued progress to address our homelessness and behavioral health crisis.”

–With assistance from Biz Carson.

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