When Joe Nguyễn, the CEO of the Seattle Metro Chamber, boarded a plane for San Francisco, he was carrying a heavy question with him—one that many people in his city have been asking for years. How can a place care so deeply, spend billions of dollars in public money, and still leave its residents feeling like the future is slipping away? Seattle had become a city of visible suffering: people living on the streets in crisis, business owners struggling to keep their doors open, and a creeping sense that these problems were simply permanent. Even those who loved Seattle most had started to speak about its struggles as if they were inevitable. Nguyễn wanted to see how San Francisco—a city many had written off—was beginning to give people reasons to believe again. He expected to come home impressed with San Francisco’s recovery. Instead, he came home with something more complicated: a deeper appreciation for Seattle, and a lingering anger he was still trying to make sense of. Because watching another city make real progress made him realize that Seattle has the talent, the resources, and the people to do the same—perhaps even better. And that is exactly why the frustration stung so much. We should not have to accept our streets and our businesses as casualties of a problem we are unwilling or unable to change.
Not long ago, San Francisco had become the national symbol of a prosperous city losing its way. Homelessness, open-air drug markets, and shoplifting had turned public spaces into sources of fear and sadness. But less than two years into Mayor Daniel Lurie’s administration, the narrative has started to shift. Reported crime fell by 22 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period the year before. Office vacancy rates dropped from 31 percent to 26 percent in just one quarter, according to Kidder Mathews. These numbers do not erase the profound suffering still visible on the streets, and Nguyễn made sure to acknowledge that. But what struck him most was not the data—it was the way people spoke about their work. The people he met in San Francisco shared a confidence that their efforts could change the city’s direction. They understood what they were working toward, and they could explain what would happen next. Their optimism was not naive or performative. It came from seeing actual progress with their own eyes and believing they could build on it. For Nguyễn, that feeling felt almost foreign. Why did something so basic—confidence in the future—feel so refreshing? That question followed him through every meeting and every conversation, pushing him to look deeper at what was really different between the two cities.
Seattle, after all, has every reason to feel confident. It is a city of extraordinary talent and resources, with public servants who care deeply and service providers doing demanding work under brutal conditions. Its business community helps shape the world, with innovations that reach far beyond the region. With all that ability and commitment concentrated in one place, Nguyễn believed Seattle should feel invincible. Instead, he saw a city that often seemed more resigned to its limitations than confident in its possibilities. He recognized that mindset because he had lived inside it. As a legislator and state agency director, he had seen 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 his trip, Nguyễn kept searching for a more complicated explanation for the gap between San Francisco and Seattle. He looked at policy, funding, and demographics. He considered history and geography. But eventually, the answer became impossible to miss. It was leadership. In San Francisco, leaders expected the institutions they ran to deliver results, and they took personal responsibility for making that happen. The unsettling part, Nguyễn admitted, was how unfamiliar something so basic had become. Leadership should not be a revelation. It should be the expectation. But in Seattle, it had started to feel like a rare gift.
San Francisco offered concrete examples of what happens when leaders refuse to accept failure. One story stayed with Nguyễn: Mayor Lurie’s response to open-air drug markets. The previous administration had already brought police, public health officials, and other agencies together to address the problem. But the people Nguyễn spoke with described meetings that produced reports rather than results—endless updates with no real decisions, no clear ownership, and no visible change on the streets. Lurie took that same existing structure and gave it a sharp, unmistakable purpose. Participants were expected to make decisions, take responsibility for carrying them out, and then return with evidence of what had actually changed in the real world. This approach helped surface a problem that Seattle knows all too well: officers who encounter someone dangerously intoxicated often have nowhere appropriate to take them. Leaving the person on the street puts everyone at risk. Taking them to jail does little to address their need for care, and it would pull scarce officers off patrol for hours. San Francisco opened the RESET Center to fill that gap—a place where eligible individuals could receive brief medical supervision and stabilization, followed by connections to services. The center opened within ten months of the decision to proceed. It was not a complete solution to a larger crisis, but it gave people an option they did not have before. That, Nguyễn realized, was what leadership actually meant. It meant staying with a problem until the next step became possible. And that required something more uncomfortable than calling for accountability. It required accepting that evidence might challenge an approach you had previously defended.
That willingness to be challenged is exactly what Seattle needs, Nguyễn believes. If Seattle truly is a progressive city, then it should ask whether its policies deliver the progress it promises. That means questioning assumptions, measuring outcomes, and changing programs when results fall short. Reconsidering an approach can feel like abandoning your values, but the real values—compassion, safety, dignity, responsibility—should compel change when people are still suffering. The business community must confront its own habits as well. Nguyễn observed that business leaders in Seattle have often avoided politics, even as public decisions shape their future in profound ways. In San Francisco, business leaders helped set the agenda, supported leaders willing to act, and stayed engaged in the messy work of governance. If Seattle wants better outcomes, he argued, its business leaders 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—not at the expense of each other, but together. People form their judgment of a city through these small encounters. They notice whether someone answers the phone. They notice whether anything changes. Over time, those experiences become either confidence or despair. That is what makes leadership so consequential: it determines which story a city tells itself.
San Francisco reminded Nguyễn that resignation can lift. People can begin expecting more when they see real reasons to believe their efforts matter. The city had not solved all its problems, but it had broken through the paralysis of hopelessness. Its people had rediscovered something Seattle has lost: the expectation that they could do better. Seattle has so much worth believing in—so much talent, so much heart, so much capacity for change. What it needs is not a new program or a bigger budget. It needs leadership willing to turn that promise into something people can feel in their daily lives. It needs leaders who refuse to accept failure, who stay with problems until they move, and who are willing to be judged by results rather than intentions. It needs a business community that shows up, a government that responds, and a public that believes its efforts are not wasted. The trip to San Francisco did not give Nguyễn all the answers. But it gave him something just as valuable: a clear picture of what is possible when a city refuses to give up on itself. The anger he felt was not really about San Francisco or Seattle. It was about the gap between what his city could be and what it had settled for. And that gap, he realized, is not permanent. It is a choice. The question now is whether Seattle will choose to close it. What might we accomplish if we recovered the simple, radical expectation that we can do better?
