Stark contrast between mayors of Los Angeles and San Francisco

San Francisco’s mayor, Daniel Lurie, seemingly collects a pocketful of plaudits every day. By contrast, his counterpart in Los Angeles, Karen Bass, gets new grief almost daily.

The positives about Lurie, who ousted former Mayor London Breed in late 2024, were propelled by a coalition of voters unhappy with his city’s previous status quo. Though he was better known before running for his charitable leadership as founder of the poverty-fighting non-profit Tipping Point, after getting elected Lurie immediately began focusing on crime, homelessness, housing bottlenecks and quality of life issues like the cleanliness of the streets.

Lurie streamlined housing approvals, re-organized and sped up city safety responses, launched an anti-homelessness campaign and won a 73 percent approval rating among local voters.

Bass faced some of the same issues when she took over, but did little to clean up streets and fill potholes, did not reduce homelessness by much – with tent cities still proliferating almost four years after she was elected in 2022. Most damaging of all, she absented herself during the start of the last January’s Los Angeles County firestorms which killed 12 persons and saw more than 7,000 structures burn in her city alone.

Bass still is regularly blamed and castigated for the snail’s pace at which reconstruction has moved – even though most of the responsibility for that probably lies with insurance companies issuing many payouts far below what’s needed to rebuild – even where homeowners had paid for sufficient coverage.

Not that Lurie is credited with perfect performance. One example of a criticism: The slow response to a massive December Pacific Gas & Electric power outage that left fully a third of San Francisco without electricity, shutting down museums like the Legion of Honor art museum and leaving thousands of homes and shops without electricity for more than a day.

Still, the predominant image of Levi Strauss heir Lurie is that of an earnest problem solver blending private sector agility with an ability to experiment with public policy. Very few San Franciscans would bet against his chances for reelection, even if it is rather early in his term.

Meanwhile, very few Angelenos or others would bet on Bass’ reelection chances, even if she has only one formal opponent today: Austin Beutner, a former superintendent of the city’s school system who fostered creation of many charter schools.

Bass seems to encounter a crisis a day, not even getting a break during Christmas week, when her city’s largest newspaper blasted her for asking that the last few comments she made in one video interview about the local Fire Department’s failures of last January be edited out because she thought the interview had already ended.

Perhaps Bass – a former congresswoman and ex-speaker of the state Assembly – believes she’ll get a pass on many of her clear failures because she carries a Democratic label into the 2026 non-partisan reelection campaign.

Uh-uh. A prospective repeat opponent, developer Rick Caruso – former chief of the USC board of trustees during that university’s long series of scandals – switched from Republican registration to Democratic because he knows the GOP label is locally poisonous. Beutner, a former investment banker and publisher of the Los Angeles Times, calls himself a “pragmatic Democrat,” a tag that might be appealing against Bass, who has been a party regular and is known as a staunch liberal.

Right now, Lurie clearly enjoys a stronger position at home than Bass. His high approval rating (about 73 percent positive at Thanksgiving) reflects both a rebuke of past mayors and the appeal of his problem-solving approach.

Support for Bass is more mixed, with her current record  containing many more failures than have afflicted either Lurie or any other recent Los Angeles mayor. But all Bass might need to redeem herself is a strong performance in the face of whatever might be the next crisis – if it comes before the November election.

Their public perceptions are in stark contrast, largely because of differences in how each has approached their city’s problems of the last few years, and the very nature of those problems.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.