The End of California Dreaming

California has spent eighteen years and more than $15 billion trying to build a train. Somewhere in the Central Valley, an enormous bureaucracy has been busy studying the possible effects of this train on the environment, the surrounding communities, the local wildlife, and presumably the emotional well-being of any cows unfortunate enough to hear it pass. More than 130,000 pages of environmental documentation have been produced. The state has paid consultants, retained lawyers, commissioned studies, and conducted reviews of its reviews. The train itself remains conspicuously absent.

There is something almost magnificent about the achievement. In most places, a railway is built so that people can travel from one place to another. In California, the railway has become an occasion for employing people to consider the implications of building a railway. What began as a proposal for moving passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco has developed into a vast system for moving money between Sacramento and its contractors. The state has perfected a kind of administrative perpetual motion, in which the failure to produce anything generates an inexhaustible demand for further expenditure.

For a long time, Californians seemed willing to tolerate this arrangement. They lived in the richest state in the richest country in the world, surrounded by technological marvels, enormous private fortunes, and some of the most beautiful scenery on earth. Perhaps it was reasonable to assume that a place capable of inventing the future could eventually work out how to build a railway. But the patience that sustained California’s peculiar political culture appears to be wearing thin, and the evidence may be found in the unlikeliest of places: San Francisco, where the voters have elected a millionaire philanthropist with the rather unfashionable ambition of making municipal government do its job.

Daniel Lurie became mayor in January 2025 after defeating London Breed, the incumbent, in a city whose politics have spent much of the past decade providing the rest of America with material for cautionary tales. His victory was hardly a conservative revolution. San Francisco remains overwhelmingly Democratic, and Lurie himself is a product of the city’s liberal philanthropic establishment. Yet his campaign treated the ordinary business of government as a matter of some urgency. Crime, homelessness, addiction, housing, and the extraordinary difficulty of opening a business were problems to be solved rather than endlessly redescribed. He won 55 percent of the final ranked-choice vote against Breed, a result that suggested voters were prepared to entertain a different conception of what City Hall was for.

There is a particular significance to this happening in San Francisco. The city has long enjoyed a peculiar immunity from the consequences of its own political decisions. Its spectacular wealth, generated by industries operating largely outside municipal government, helped sustain an elaborate system of regulations, commissions, public consultations, and moral ambitions. The technology industry could make a company worth a billion dollars in a few years while the city government took months to decide whether someone could alter a storefront. The contradiction was tolerated because the money kept coming, the property values kept rising, and the Pacific Ocean continued to look rather lovely from the hills.

Then came the pandemic, the empty offices, the collapsing downtown foot traffic, the visible disorder, and the realization that even an extraordinarily wealthy city could make itself unpleasant and difficult to inhabit. One could still be immensely rich in San Francisco, but wealth offered no general solution to the experience of stepping over someone unconscious on the sidewalk or watching another neighborhood business close. The city’s problems had become too immediate to be absorbed into the reassuring language of a long-term strategic plan.

Lurie’s administration has offered some evidence that the machinery can be made to work differently. Police figures show substantial reductions in property crime, with car break-ins falling 43 percent in 2025 and reported burglaries continuing to decline in 2026. Preliminary figures from the city’s 2026 homeless count indicate a 22 percent reduction in unsheltered homelessness compared with 2024, although changes in methodology complicate the comparison and homelessness among families has increased. These developments cannot all be credited to a single mayor: crime has been declining in other American cities as well, and some improvements began before Lurie took office. Still, his administration has made measurable street conditions central to its work, and residents have more to examine than another declaration of concern.

There have been efforts to reform the city’s permitting system, too, a project whose significance may be difficult to appreciate unless one has attempted to do something as reckless as open a restaurant in San Francisco. The city’s labyrinth of approvals has long made the simplest commercial undertakings feel like negotiations with a medieval ecclesiastical court. Lurie’s PermitSF initiative promises to consolidate applications and bring the process into the twenty-first century. Its rollout has already attracted criticism over procurement decisions and delays, which is a useful reminder that changing the name of a bureaucratic process does not automatically improve it. The meaningful test will be whether ordinary people can obtain permission to undertake ordinary activities without spending a fortune on intermediaries.

This is where Lurie’s experiment becomes interesting beyond the confines of San Francisco. California has spent decades cultivating a political culture in which the demonstration of good intentions has acquired an almost independent moral value. Environmental protection, social justice, public safety, affordable housing: each is a worthy object of government. Each has also generated its own system of administrators, advocates, legal requirements, consultants, and organizations whose continued existence depends upon the perpetuation of the problem they were originally established to address. A public project can be delayed for years while every participant remains able to demonstrate that the proper procedures were followed.

The high-speed railway is the most extravagant monument to this philosophy, but its principles are visible almost everywhere. California needs housing, so housing must pass through a process elaborate enough to ensure that very little gets built. It needs infrastructure, so infrastructure must be subjected to years of review. It wants to reduce emissions, so it creates elaborate markets for carbon credits and an accompanying professional class to administer them. Eventually the paperwork acquires a kind of sacred character. A project that exists on paper has satisfied the demands of the system, even when it has failed to satisfy the demands of the people supposedly being served.

The peculiarity is that California’s private economy understands perfectly well the importance of producing things. Silicon Valley companies operate under relentless pressure to deliver products, improve performance, and respond to customers. A business that spent eighteen years and billions of dollars developing a product that did not exist would ordinarily find itself in considerable trouble. The public sector has been allowed to operate under a different understanding of success, one in which expenditure demonstrates commitment and the multiplication of procedures demonstrates seriousness.

Lurie is an improbable figure to challenge this arrangement. He’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, a former nonprofit executive, and a man whose social and political connections place him comfortably within the establishment he now proposes to reform. His approach has also relied heavily on wealthy donors and private philanthropy, raising legitimate questions about the degree of influence exercised by people who never appear on a ballot. A mayor who depends on private money to make public institutions function has hardly resolved the deeper difficulties of democratic government.

And yet the very conventionality of Lurie’s background makes his political success more revealing. The appetite for practical government has emerged from within California’s liberal establishment. It requires no sweeping ideological conversion, no embrace of a new political religion, and no abandonment of the environmental and social concerns that have shaped the state’s politics for generations. It requires a more elementary recognition that a city government ought to make its streets reasonably safe, permit businesses to open, and provide the services for which its citizens already pay.

The distinction matters because California’s troubles have too often been understood exclusively as an argument between left and right. Conservatives point to the state’s extraordinary tax burden, regulatory excesses, and highly visible urban dysfunction. Progressives reply that California remains a center of immense wealth and technological achievement, and that its problems are in part consequences of its extraordinary desirability. Both observations contain some truth. Neither adequately explains why a place with so much money, talent, and institutional capacity should find certain basic tasks so difficult to accomplish.

The deeper problem may be the emergence of a political class that has gradually lost the habit of distinguishing between an activity and its accomplishment. To fund a program is to take action. To convene a commission is to demonstrate leadership. To commission an environmental impact report is to protect the environment. The language of government has become so saturated with process that it is possible to spend an entire career making important decisions without ever having to confront the physical consequences of those decisions.

For the people living under this system, the distinction eventually becomes impossible to ignore. The shopkeeper wants to open his shop. The family wants an apartment it can afford. The commuter wants a train that actually runs. The resident who has been told that a new initiative will address street disorder wants to be able to walk home without encountering it. These are modest expectations, almost embarrassingly modest for a state that once seemed to embody the limitless possibilities of American life.

San Francisco’s recent political turn suggests that such expectations have acquired a new force. Whether Lurie can satisfy them over the course of his administration remains an open question, and the difficulties surrounding his permitting reforms show how readily even a campaign for efficiency can become entangled in the old arrangements. His eventual record deserves to be judged by tangible outcomes, including those that his supporters would prefer to overlook.

But the political appetite that brought him to office is significant in its own right. San Francisco voters had ample opportunities to choose another administrator of the familiar system. Instead, they elected a candidate who made its failures a central subject of his campaign. The city is now engaged in a practical experiment with the possibility that government might regain public confidence by performing its ordinary functions.

California once offered Americans a vision of the future, a place of astonishing physical ambition where people built bridges across impossible distances, carried water through mountains, and transformed orchards into the center of the world’s technological economy. Much of that confidence has since been absorbed into an administrative apparatus more comfortable contemplating great works than completing them. It would be a strange and rather fitting development if San Francisco, having become the national symbol of California’s dysfunction, were among the first places to rediscover the simpler pleasures of competent government.

After all, the purpose of a railway is to carry passengers. At some point, somebody has to lay the tracks.