Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie enters San Francisco mayoral race to make people ‘love’ city like he does
Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie wants to save his native San Francisco from its hellish descent as the political novice announced his bid to run for mayor.
Lurie, a philanthropist and anti-poverty crusader, announced Tuesday he plans to take on fellow Democrat and incumbent London Breed in next year’s election.
“We are facing a crisis of leadership,” Lurie said. “This moment demands a new era of leadership from the outside.”
Lurie added he’s “deeply concerned that the next generation will not love San Francisco as we do.”
Representatives for Lurie did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The once-shining City by the Bay has faced mounting problems that include retailers fleeing over theft, homelessness taking over the streets and addicts overdosing in so-called “dens of death.”
Lurie, 46, has never run for office but his wife, Becca Prowda, is no stranger to California’s public affairs.
Prowda, who married Lurie in 2006, currently works for Gov. Gavin Newsom as the Golden State’s director of protocol and also served under Newsom when he was San Francisco’s mayor.
Lurie has made a career in philanthropy at New York City’s Robin Hood Foundation, which alleviates poverty in the Big Apple, and founded the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point in 2005.
He’s the son of Rabbi Brian Lurie and billionaire Miriam Haas, who divorced more than four decades ago, when Daniel Lurie was 2 years old.
Lurie’s mom went on to marry Peter Haas, the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, the business mogul behind denim giant Levi Strauss & Co, which was founded in San Francisco in 1853.
Beloved for their Levi’s brand jeans, the publicly-traded company has a market cap of more than $5 billion. Lurie’s mother Haas has the largest individual stake in the business, valued at about $570 million, according to Bloomberg.
It’s unclear how much Lurie has earned from the family fortune, though he’s reportedly living in the upscale Potrero Hill area with his wife, 9-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter while their house in Pacific Heights — the posh neighborhood where he grew up — is being renovated.
Breed, a moderate Democrat, faces a tough battle to win a second term as San Francisco’s problems include a homeless population that has spiked to around 8,000. Its growing drug crisis has come to include fentanyl trafficking and an increased number of overdoses associated with the highly-addictive opioid.
The city’s once-trendy downtown area has turned into a hellscape where around 20,000 rooms in about 500 hotels in the Tenderloin neighborhood have turned into roach- and vermin-infested “Single-Room Occupancy” housing for vagrants, as the Post reported.
Many of the century-old buildings are now overrun with drug-addled “zombies” high on fentanyl and the flesh-eating animal tranquilizer dubbed “tranq,” residents told The Post during a tour last month.
Meanwhile, in the trendy Union Square district, at least 22 big-name businesses have closed or announced plans to flee the area since January 2022, including popular retailers like Anthropologie, Banana Republic and Crate & Barrel, as well as the investment firm that owns two of the city’s biggest hotels.
Since 2019, 47% of businesses in the area have closed, according to the San Francisco Standard.
