San Francisco’s mayor, now in office for 16 months, has insisted that his hometown was a city on the rise, and that its dystopian days of rampant homelessness and public drug use were behind it.
On Tuesday, he had some imperfect data to support his claims.
Mayor Daniel Lurie stood on Sixth Street, a stretch long known for residential hotels and sidewalk misery, and said the number of people living on the city’s streets had dropped to its lowest number in 15 years.
Many people living in tents or on the sidewalks, he said, had moved indoors into homeless shelters, treatment centers and other facilities.
“Homelessness and addiction are not just challenges we have in San Francisco, but for several years they defined our city,” Mr. Lurie said at a news conference outside a new sober-living homeless shelter. “That narrative didn’t always capture the full story of our city, but it also wasn’t entirely wrong.”
He was referring to the drumbeat of attacks on San Francisco from Fox News, conservative politicians and others who asserted that the city was proof that liberal governance could not succeed. Much of that talk has subsided as Mr. Lurie, a moderate Democrat, has taken a middle-of-the-road, business-friendly approach and the city’s street conditions have improved.
He has emphasized opening facilities geared toward people in recovery, required counseling in exchange for clean drug supplies and encouraged police officers to take people having public breakdowns to crisis centers. He has also benefited from having a moderate district attorney and Board of Supervisors who support his approach.
The city’s new count found that 7,973 people were homeless in San Francisco, a 4 percent drop from two years ago. The number of people living in the open dropped 22 percent, according to the survey, while those living in facilities, such as homeless shelters, rose.
Mr. Lurie’s data came from the biannual point-in-time count that San Francisco conducted in January as part of an effort mandated by the federal government to track homelessness across the nation. City employees, nonprofit workers and volunteers fanned out to tally the number of homeless people living in the open, such as in tents, on sidewalks or in cars. They also counted people with no fixed address but who were living in shelters, jails, hospitals or treatment centers.
The city released the preliminary results on Tuesday, and the mayor’s office acknowledged that they were not a perfect comparison to the 2024 count.
This year, the counters worked in the early morning, rather than late at night, so they had better visibility. They also tried to survey homeless people rather than guess at whether they had homes through observation.
The most striking figure touted by Mr. Lurie was that the number of people living in tents had dropped 85 percent since 2024. While tents seem far less visible in San Francisco than they were two years ago, it is hard to know how accurate that figure is.
Kunal Modi, the city’s chief of health and human services, said the count was just one measure of many that City Hall uses to track homelessness, and he was confident that more people are moving off the streets and indoors.
Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, agreed that fewer people were living in tents in San Francisco, but she disapproved of the mayor’s methods.
After the Supreme Court in 2024 gave cities authority to enforce bans on public camping, San Francisco officials swept tent camps and moved homeless people around with the priority of keeping them out of sight of wealthier people, Ms. Friedenbach said. She said the jail system, with its population up about 50 percent since 2021, had become a “revolving door” for homeless people accused of misdemeanors such as illegal camping and possessing drug paraphernalia.
“This is definitely a tried and failed strategy,” she said. “I’d say we’re going back about 20 years.”
But San Franciscans overall have given Mr. Lurie rave reviews, with a recent Sextant Strategies poll sponsored by the San Francisco Chronicle showing that he enjoys a 74 percent approval rating. And about half expect the quality of life in the city to get better in the next few years.
Del Seymour, who gives walking tours around the Tenderloin, a low-income neighborhood near City Hall that has been plagued with drug markets for decades, said that he has seen the area improve under Mr. Lurie.
“Everyone on the tours says, ‘We’ve heard about this being a tent city, but we don’t see it,’” he said. “They’re so impressed, willing to come back, willing to stay longer.”
A couple of blocks away from the mayor’s news conference, Rose Snow, 33, sat on the sidewalk, with bags, coffee cups and takeout containers spread around her. Nearby, a few people were bent over at the waist, a common sign of fentanyl use, and police officers handed out citations.
“There’s certainly been a big crackdown,” she said. “We’re being targeted by cops.”
When they ask her to move, she said, she complies. Again and again.
Caroline Soler contributed research.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
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