My City Is Dying

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You have often heard of an almost universal description of San Francisco as "The City." The Golden State Warriors even had a uniform emblazoned with "The City" rather than San Francisco or Bay Area, or even Golden State. But my City is dying due to many reasons. Yes, things were peachy during the heights of high tech and biotech growth in the downtown, and SOMA areas. But things are much different now, post pandemic. This AP article almost perfectly describes the demise of the great downtown area:
After a three-year exile, the pandemic now fading from view, the expected crowds and electric ambience of downtown have not returned.

Empty storefronts dot the streets. Large “going out of business” signs hang in windows. Uniqlo, Nordstrom Rack and Anthropologie are gone. Last month, the owner of Westfield San Francisco Centre, a fixture for more than 20 years, said it was handing the mall back to its lender, citing declining sales and foot traffic. The owner of two towering hotels, including a Hilton, did the same.

Shampoo, toothpaste and other toiletries are locked up at downtown pharmacies. And armed robbers recently hit a Gucci store in broad daylight.

San Francisco has become the prime example of what downtowns shouldn't look like: vacant, crime-ridden and in various stages of decay. But in truth, it's just one of many cities across the U.S. whose downtowns are reckoning with a post-pandemic wake-up call: diversify or die.

As the pandemic bore down in early 2020, it drove people out of city centers and boosted shopping and dining in residential neighborhoods and nearby suburbs as workers stayed closer to home. Those habits seem poised to stay.

No longer the purview of office workers, downtowns must become around-the-clock destinations for people to congregate, said Richard Florida, a specialist in city planning at the University of Toronto.

Data bears out that San Francisco’s downtown is having a harder time than most. A study of 63 North American downtowns by the University of Toronto ranked the city dead last in a return to pre-pandemic activity, garnering only 32%!o(MISSING)f its 2019 traffic.

Hotel revenues are stuck at 73%!o(MISSING)f pre-pandemic levels, weekly office attendance remains below 50%!a(MISSING)nd commuter rail travel to downtown is at 33%!,(MISSING) according to a recent economic report by the city.
Office vacancy rates in San Francisco were 24.8%!i(MISSING)n the first quarter, more than five times higher than pre-pandemic levels and well above the average rate of 18.5% for the nation’s top 10 cities, according to CBRE, a commercial real estate services company.

But other major cities including Portland and Seattle, which also rely on tech workers, are struggling with similar declines, according to the downtown recovery study, which used anonymized mobile phone data to analyze downtown activity patterns from before the pandemic and between March and May of this year.

In Chicago, which ranked 45th in the study, major retailers like AT&T, Old Navy and Banana Republic on the Magnificent Mile have closed or soon will as visitor foot traffic hasn’t rebounded.
San Francisco leaders are taking the demise of downtown seriously. Supervisors recently relaxed downtown zoning rules to allow mixed-use spaces: offices and services on upper floors and entertainment and pop-up shops on the ground floor. Legislation also reduces red tape to facilitate converting existing office space into housing.

But Marc Benioff, chief executive officer of Salesforce, the city’s largest employer and anchor tenant in its tallest skyscraper, said downtown is “never going back to the way it was” when it comes to workers commuting in each day. He advised Breed to convert office space into housing and hire more police to give visitors a sense of safety.

From Business Insider:
If you want to rile up a San Francisco native, mention the doom loop. They're pretty sick of that.

Ever since the pandemic, the city has become the scary poster child for the Death of American Downtowns. Liberal newspapers and conservative pundits alike love to point to San Francisco as a cautionary tale of how not to run a city, a post-COVID apocalypse. A parade of national retailers have abandoned San Francisco for want of foot traffic. A quarter of all storefronts in the main shopping district are empty. Commercial real estate is a garbage fire; owners of several major hotels have given the keys back to the bank and split. Nobody's really sure how bad crime is, but it feels worse, and the police may have quiet-quit. Homelessness is a devastating problem, and it's not uncommon to see unhoused folks having mental breakdowns amid the outside dining parklets of ritzy restaurants. I've lived in the Bay Area for going on two decades now. It's not Mad-Max-meets-Omega-Man out here, but it's bleaker than I've ever seen.
San Francisco is a beautiful old city — Spanish mission and Eastern beaux-arts plugged into a European hill town full of Western bravado. The weather is dramatic, the food and booze are great, and it has a long tradition of welcoming people looking to make and remake themselves — cults, Black Panthers, labor rabble-rousers, grifters and strivers, counterculture poets, LGBTQ+ people, neurodivergent geniuses. Its history is a scintillating map of human diversity (though the record on immigrants and Black people, to be clear, is not great).
My thoughts:
Address the homeless issue, it is keeping tourists and locals away from downtown.
The neighborhoods are thriving, after all, that is where people live.
Agree with Benioff, convert office space into housing, and provide incentives.
Accept the fact that retail as it once was, will never return to its former self.
Since high tech companies are at the epicenter of this issue, require them to help solve the problems of downtown.
More events, like conventions, sporting events, concerts, and street fairs can boost visitor count and spending.
Two of my favorite stores are gone, or soon to be gone: Uniqlo and Nordstrom.
The City was very sad when I was there in April and June.
The Mayor of SF has a plan. Let's see if it works?
The City will never be the same!

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