Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. Mayor Daniel Lurie and city leaders have enforced bans on camping and moved people off sidewalks to reduce visible homelessness. Critics say too many homeless people are housed in jail. Mayor Daniel Lurie of San Francisco spoke with a city worker in 2025 about cleaning up the Tenderloin neighborhood. Credit... Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times May 12, 2026, 8:41 p.m. ET 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.…