Like the little red labels on the pockets of Levi’s jeans, the heirs to the Levi Strauss fortune are woven into the fabric of Bay Area philanthropy.
The Sterns, as in Stern Grove, the 12-acre park in San Francisco that hosts free summer concerts. Haas, as in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Haas Pavilion, where the university’s Golden Bears play basketball. Goldman, as in the Goldman Environmental Prize, called the Green Nobels.
The families have been a backbone of Bay Area civic life for decades, funding the arts, museums, schools and even professional baseball teams. Without them, the San Francisco Giants might be playing in Florida, and the Oakland Athletics might have skipped town much earlier than last fall.
Now, the expansive family tree has extended into city politics. San Francisco’s new mayor, Daniel Lurie, is a wealthy philanthropist himself, his fortune coming from his late stepfather, a Strauss heir and longtime Levi’s chief executive.
His rise has inspired optimism in a city desperate for change, but also questions about whether a political neophyte, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, can run San Francisco. At the same time, institutions all over the region are arguably beholden to his family.
Mr. Lurie ousted a fellow Democrat, London Breed, after spending $9.51 million of his own fortune on the race — $52 for every vote he received, one of the biggest outlays of personal wealth by a mayoral candidate in American history.
Mr. Lurie’s mother, the billionaire Mimi Haas, a longtime benefactor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, spent an additional $1 million on his campaign.
The mayor and his supporters say his wealth means that he owes no favors in a city that has grappled with widespread corruption.
“I don’t owe anybody anything except you, the taxpayers and the residents,” he said during the campaign, later saying he would take just $1 of the mayor’s $383,000 salary.
And Mr. Lurie points to examples like Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, as his guiding lights.
Skeptics, though, question whether Mr. Lurie’s approach to his new job — which focuses heavily on tapping benefactors and hiring aides from the business world — could hand the rich too much say.
Justin Dolezal, a bar owner who founded Small Business Forward to help mom-and-pop shops get attention from City Hall, said he believes Mr. Lurie has good intentions, but the mayor’s wealth and connections make him nervous.
“A deep obsequiousness to big money, big power and big tech has caused a lot of the problems that we experience day to day in San Francisco,” Mr. Dolezal said, citing homelessness and the pushing out of the middle class.
“Being raised in that world does color your view,” he said.
In a city awash in new money, Mr. Lurie comes from wealth that is just about as old as San Francisco itself.
His stepfather, Peter Haas, was the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, an immigrant from Bavaria, one of a wave of German Jewish men who fled antisemitism in the 1850s and made their way to San Francisco seeking riches.
But Strauss found his wealth in bluejeans, not gold nuggets. He patented the use of rivets at the points of strain on denim pants, making them a durable favorite of workers. He became one of the “merchant princes of San Francisco” who were “mining the miners,” as the local historian Gary Kamiya put it.
Strauss, who was childless, died in 1902 and left his fortune of about $6 million, worth roughly $220 million in today’s dollars, to four nephews. Today, the publicly traded company is worth more than $7 billion, with the Haas family retaining majority control. Mr. Lurie’s mother is its largest shareholder.
Strauss himself was a philanthropist, supporting several local Jewish organizations and funding 28 scholarships at U.C. Berkeley, which still exist. His heirs — the Haas, Goldman and Stern families — have continued his giving through their numerous foundations. Their mark is everywhere once you start looking, from Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy to the hilltop Walter Haas playground and dog park with views of the city skyline.
Walter Haas Jr. rescued the struggling Oakland Athletics baseball franchise from a move to Denver in 1980 and turned the team around. It won the World Series in 1989, years before John Fisher — an heir to the Gap clothing store fortune — bought it and eventually yanked it out of Oakland.
The Goldman family helped keep the San Francisco Giants from moving to Florida. “It would be hard to spend any amount of time here in this community without being touched by the institutions the family has helped bolster,” said Larry Baer, the Giants’ president, who has known the family for decades.
The city’s tech titans have been less reliable donors than older generations of wealthy residents. Mr. Baer said some tech leaders think that “San Francisco is just where my company is,” whereas Mr. Lurie’s focus, he said, is squarely on making his hometown better.
The tech world, though, helped fund Mr. Lurie’s splashy inauguration festivities, with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective group, the angel investor Ron Conway and Kyle Vogt, the co-founder of the driverless car company Cruise, among the contributors.
Another Strauss heir has gotten into politics. Daniel Goldman, a cousin by marriage of Mr. Lurie’s, just began his second term in Congress, representing New York. He, too, poured money into his first campaign, spending $4 million in 2022.
Mr. Goldman, who vacationed with Mr. Lurie when they were children and shared a Manhattan apartment with him as young adults, said their interest in politics was an extension of the family’s commitment to public service.
“We have been incredibly blessed to be the beneficiaries of the American dream,” Mr. Goldman said. “We are very much committed to making sure that every American gets access to it.”
So far, Mr. Lurie’s lack of government experience has proved more notable than his riches. He vowed he would declare a state of emergency on fentanyl on his first day in office, hoping to clear bureaucratic hurdles. But the city’s lawyers had to tell Mr. Lurie’s team that only sudden, unforeseen disasters like earthquakes and the Covid-19 pandemic qualified as emergencies.
Mr. Lurie instead introduced regular legislation, which he simply branded an emergency. It was passed by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday and will speed along contracts related to the fentanyl crisis and allow the city to accept private donations to build more homeless shelter beds or fund other solutions.
But the notion of asking rich people to pay for the regular operations of city government is different from tapping them for a one-time museum exhibit or college building.
Ben Rosenfield, a former controller who advised Mr. Lurie after his election, said it was “reasonable and responsible” to raise private money for the crisis, especially as the city faces a budget deficit of nearly $1 billion over the next two years.
But turning to wealthy people to pay for homeless services could come with strings, said Jane Kim, a former supervisor who worked with Mr. Lurie and his anti-poverty nonprofit, Tipping Point, to build affordable housing in her district.
“Who gets to decide how to spend those dollars?” Ms. Kim asked. “Is it the billionaire, or is it based on what the people of the city would like to see?”
Philanthropy will surely not refill the office spaces and retail shops that are still empty five years after the pandemic’s onset. After hammering Ms. Breed during the campaign for leaving a once-vibrant downtown neglected, Mr. Lurie got bad news of his own just days into his new job. Bloomingdale’s is leaving its giant downtown location, and Walgreens is closing 12 stores.
Mr. Lurie has said he has called chief executives around the country, pitching them on moving to the city. One company he will not need to woo is Levi’s. Its headquarters remain where they began — in the heart of San Francisco.
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