We rail a lot against America’s deteriorating big blue cities and the incompetent socialist mayors who run many of them.

So we’re pleased to point out an outlier, which is San Francisco.

Few American cities are as Democratic as San Francisco (Donald Trump won only 15% there in 2024), but residents have nonetheless turned toward practical governance.

Last year Daniel Lurie, a businessman and philanthropist with no ties to the city’s Government-Industrial Complex, became mayor. He said the city had “lost its way” and voters agreed.

To that end, he invested in more police while reducing government payrolls by 2,000 employees.

Lurie says his biggest accomplishment has been forcing officials to recognize reality. He said that street drug use and shoplifting had become normalized. “We got so entrapped in our progressive values… we weren’t taking stock of what was happening on our streets,” he told CNN last week.

“We had 810 people die of overdose in San Francisco three years ago. There’s nothing progressive about that,” Lurie says. “There’s nothing progressive about 30,000 car break-ins. Everyone had to deal with whether or not their car was going to be broken into.”

There has been a 90% drop in car break-ins under his administration and organized gang shoplifting is now being vigorously prosecuted.