Seattle Metro Chamber CEO Joe Nguyễn found lessons for Seattle in a trip to San Francisco. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to highlight a range of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. To submit a guest column, email tips@geekwire.com .
How can a region care so much, spend billions in tax dollars and yet leave people losing faith in its future?
In Seattle, that question has become painfully familiar. People see suffering and disorder on their streets with little reason to believe help is coming. Business owners wonder whether the city values their presence or understands what it takes to keep their doors open. Even people who love this place are beginning to speak about its problems as permanent.
That growing resignation took us to San Francisco . We wanted to understand how a city so many had written off was giving people reasons to believe in its future again.
I expected to come home impressed with San Francisco. Instead, I came home with a deeper appreciation for Seattle. And an anger I am still trying to reconcile.
Seeing San Francisco make progress reminded me that Seattle has the talent and resources to do the same, perhaps even better. That is what made me frustrated. We should not have to accept people suffering on our streets and businesses struggling to stay open as conditions beyond our ability to change.
Not long ago, San Francisco had become a warning about what happens when a prosperous city loses its way. Less than two years into Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration, that story has begun to change. Reported crime fell 22 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. According to Kidder Mathews, office vacancy declined to 26 percent in the third quarter from 31 percent in the prior year.
San Francisco still has profound problems, and the suffering we saw on its streets cannot be erased by encouraging statistics. But the people we met shared a confidence that their work could change the city’s direction. They understood what they were working toward and could explain what would happen next. Their optimism comes from seeing progress and believing they can build on it.
And I kept wondering why that felt so refreshing.
Seattle has extraordinary talent and resources, with public servants who care deeply and service providers doing demanding work under difficult conditions. Our business community helps shape the world. With that much ability and commitment here, we should feel confident that we can make our own neighborhoods safer and more welcoming.
Yet we often seem more resigned to our limitations than confident in our possibilities.
I recognize that habit because I have worked inside it. As a legislator and state agency director, I saw good intentions fall short when leaders avoided hard decisions and failed to hold people accountable for results. Even small obstacles became accepted excuses when no one took responsibility for overcoming them.
Throughout the trip, I kept looking for a more complicated explanation for the difference between San Francisco and Seattle. Eventually, the answer became impossible to miss.
It was leadership.
Leaders expected the institutions they led to deliver results and took responsibility for making that happen. The unsettling part was how unfamiliar something so basic had come to feel.
San Francisco offered examples of what happens when leaders refuse to accept failure.
@import url(‘https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Roboto+Slab:wght@500&display=swap’);@media (max-width:768px){.gw-pq{display:none!important}}
“Perhaps the most consequential thing we have lost is the expectation that we can do better.”
One example was Mayor Lurie’s response to open-air drug markets. The previous administration had already brought police, public health officials and other agencies together, but people we met described meetings that produced more updates than action. Lurie took that existing structure and gave it a clear purpose. Participants were expected to make decisions and take responsibility for carrying them out, then return with evidence of what had changed on the streets.
This approach helped illuminate a problem that is also familiar to Seattle. Officers encountering someone dangerously intoxicated often have no appropriate place to take them. Leaving the person on the street puts them and others at risk, while taking them to jail does little to address their need for care and would remove scarce law enforcement officials from patrol for hours.
San Francisco opened the RESET Center to fill this gap. Eligible individuals are able to receive brief medical supervision and stabilization, followed by connections to services. The center opened within ten months of the decision to proceed. It is a limited response to a larger crisis, but it gives people an option they lacked.
Across our conversations, leadership meant staying with a problem until the next step became possible. That requires something more uncomfortable than calling for accountability. It requires accepting that evidence may challenge an approach we have previously defended.
If we believe Seattle is a progressive city, we should ask whether our policies deliver the progress we promise. That means questioning our assumptions and changing programs when results fall short. Reconsidering an approach can feel like abandoning our values, but those values should compel us to change when people are still in need of help.
The business community must reconsider its own habits too. We often avoid politics even as public decisions shape our future. In San Francisco, business leaders helped set the agenda and backed leaders willing to act. If we want better outcomes here, we must help shape the decisions that produce them.
Government, in turn, must make clear that businesses belong here. A shop owner asking for a safe doorway and a person in crisis outside that door both deserve a response. A capable city should be able to care for both.
People form their judgment of a city through these encounters. They notice whether someone answers. They notice whether anything changes.
Over time, those experiences become confidence or despair.
San Francisco reminded me that resignation can lift. People can begin expecting more when they see reasons to believe their efforts matter.
Seattle has so much worth believing in. What we need is leadership willing to turn that promise into something people can feel.
Perhaps the most consequential thing we have lost is the expectation that we can do better.
What might we accomplish if we recovered it?
Read the full series, starting with Part 1 .
