“I feel like I’m being pulled back to being mayor,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an interview.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The city’s troubles are stretching beyond the Tenderloin and South of Market neighborhoods Newsom sought to clean up as mayor and where he recently brought his Cabinet. Viral images circulating around the globe show shattered glass from car break-ins and chains fastened over drugstore refrigerators to ward off retail thieves.

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.

“If you hate San Francisco and you hate San Francisco politics, it’s easy. You show photos and videos: ‘San Francisco is a failed city.’ It’s over,” said Jim Wunderman, chief executive of the Bay Area Council, who with others joined Newsom for a May meeting at his office in Sacramento.

“He’s really concerned about it and I think he should be,” Wunderman added. “He also has political aspirations of a higher level and San Francisco is not speaking well of that. It’s just the reality.”

‘Mayor of California’

This spring, the activist group TogetherSF Action started running an ironically cheerful ad campaign called “That’s Fentalife!” to draw attention to the grim reality on the streets and spur politicians to act. Their push garnered widespread media attention and was featured on “Fox & Friends.” Newsom hated it. And he chafed at how the ads’ lighthearted nature gave ammo to right-wing critics to embarrass and batter Democrats. At one point, Newsom’s advisers contacted people with ties to TogetherSF to privately complain, according to two people familiar with the outreach.

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. One yardstick for the program is numbers, and the governor’s office has been pleased with the arrests and citations since its involvement started in April. The other is more ephemeral: helping create a sense of hopefulness where there’s been little.

San Francisco’s violent crime rate is below cities of its size in Florida and Texas. It still attracts tourists and conventions and is leading the growth in an artificial intelligence boom. Despite that, Newsom described San Francisco as “the story of two different cities” — where many neighborhoods are thriving, but commercial areas with high vacancy rates downtown “are just not. We have to own that,” he added.

Amid the broader recognition of its problems, he is protective of San Francisco. It’s where he was born and where he opened his first wine shop in the early 1990s. He has told confidants that when his children are grown and he’s out of public life, he wants to move back. Advisers liken his relationship with San Francisco to that of an older sibling who understands every facet of a family’s complex dynamics, down to the fading stains on its dirty laundry. He knows the pressure points, where and when to punch to try and get his way. While he feels like his own history in the city allows him to administer tough talk and policy rebukes of local officials, he views broadsides coming from outside the house with suspicion.

“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.”

The downtown blocks Newsom toured this spring have plunged deeper into despair over the past dozen years.