Newsom has increasingly been moonlighting as a quasi-city executive of his hometown and approaching its woes as a litmus test for his success in Sacramento.
Newsom is sensitive to what many locals dismissively refer to as the “doom-loop narrative,” where negative news media coverage of closing businesses and high-profile crimes reinforce a sense of freefall. But all the unwanted attention on San Francisco could one day become political kryptonite for Newsom, whose name is synonymous with the city.
He’s taken on a more active role this year in confronting the drug crisis. After dispatching California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard to a multi-agency operation focused on targeting fentanyl trafficking, he directed the state Department of Justice to assist in prosecuting complex cases. There was some grumbling locally, with Supervisor Dean Preston writing to Newsom to vent about being left out of the loop.
“When he swore an oath to be the mayor of the city and county of San Francisco, it wasn’t for the seven years he was there,” said Steve Kawa, who spent decades as a powerbroker inside City Hall, including as Newsom’s chief of staff. “For him, it was a calling, and that calling never goes away.” San Francisco does not hold a monopoly on his attention. The governor has shown a willingness to insert himself into other localities; his administration sued Huntington Beach for violating state housing law, and he recently deployed the California Highway Patrol to combat crime in Oakland at the mayor’s request, and to Los Angeles to help crack down on organized retail crime.Still, no place has seen the same degree of scrutiny as his hometown.
He draws a sharp contrast between himself and his predecessor, four-term Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, a master politician who largely viewed housing and homelessness as matters to be dealt with at the local level, though he did sign bills to“I’m 180 degrees different from Jerry Brown, who has said you can only do one or two things [at once]. You know what, we balanced the budget. We have record reserves. We paid down pensions. We did all that and all of these other things.
The housing shortage and acute nature of homelessness coming out of the pandemic are in many ways worse than when Brown took office in 2011. They elicit more visceral reactions from Californians, who lump them in with crime and quality-of-life issues that are souring their views on the state, and driving some residents out entirely. Taking on these issues carries immense political risk, but ignoring them may have been riskier in the long-term.
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