I’ve been seeing a lot of news articles recently about how deserted downtown San Francisco is with post-pandemic work-from-home, including how many stores are closing for lack of office-worker customers,
I’m in Chicago. Leaving aside the “nobody goes downtown! Everyone’s leaving Shit-cago” hyena brigade on Twitter, the actual local news coverage correctly notes that there’s significant numbers of office workers in downtown Chicago Tuesday through Thursday with considerably fewer Mondays and Fridays. I’ve been downtown mostly on Tuesday-Thursday but a few times on Monday or Friday. Even on the latter, downtown is hardly deserted, and during the middle of the week my commuter trains and the train stations seem very busy and there’s no shortage of people getting Starbucks in the morning or getting lunch. And maybe it’s the season, but I saw seemingly as many people arriving downtown for a night out as leaving from work the last Friday I was downtown.
I also was in New York in April 2022, and found hand-wringing coverage that Midtown and downtown were deserted and nobody was riding the subways to be greatly exaggerated. I saw a few crowded trains, mostly busy (every other seat taken) trains, and only once was on a half-empty train car. Seemingly every tourist was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and eating at Katz’s Deli at the same time as me.
If the “decline of San Francisco” meme was mostly on Twitter, I’d chalk it up to partisan-motivated exaggeration, but it’s in news coverage. So I’m wondering just how badly downtown San Francisco is doing. Is SF doing significantly worse because it’s tech-focused with more work-from-home? Or is it par for the middling course (neither bleeding nor booming) like Chicago and New York but news outlets have decided to focus on SF?
I live in the Bay Area. It’s pretty bad in downtown SF, especially for the big retailers. They just announced the closing of Old Navy, and a huge Nordstroms also.
The problem is that a huge number of people who used to work in offices downtown now work from home. My understanding is that a far higher percentage of workers made that shift in this area than in most other metro areas. Largely because the type of work done here is readily amenable to work-from-home.
Right wingers say it’s because crime and homelessness is out of control. Those are issues but, IMO, not the primary cause.
Just as a personal note, I never worked in the city per se, but I have always visited regularly to go to shows, concerts, museums, etc. I’m doing it about the same as ever.
Portland has/had the same reputation. There is part of the downtown there that is bad news, and some businesses, including the Nike store shut their doors so they wouldn’t have to deal with the continuing tagging and broken windows by the finer element in the city. We left there a year ago, so I can’t say what it’s like today.
I took my family on vacation there last summer and we had a blast. We specifically didn’t get a car or Uber. We wanted to use public transportation as a growing/learning experience for the kids. We stayed on top on Knobb hill and went to most the touristy stuff. Took the BART from the airport. Bused down hill through the financial district and up through Chinatown many times as we went to the warf. It seemed great to me. I’m sure there are bad parts, and maybe late at night. It didn’t seem dangerous.
My coworker just returned from a nine day vacation on the west coast. They spent one day in San Francisco. While there, she and her husband parked their rental car near the Palace of Fine Arts and walked around for 20 minutes. When they got back to the car, the saw the window was smashed and their belongings were gone. When they contacted the car rental company, they told her that fifteen of their rental cars had been broken into that day.
We went to San Francisco a year ago this Labor Day (and drove up the coast to Redwoods Nat’l Park, then back to SF). Our base hotel was by the airport, and we spent 2-3 days in the city total.
I never felt unsafe, but I wasn’t impressed with the city, either. I thought it was dirty, with a lot of litter. Fisherman’s Wharf smelled to me like an open dumpster. What we saw of downtown was the downtown of a big city; though it was less crowded than I’d expected, it was certainly not the Escape from New York/LA type of thing conservatives try to paint it as.
It is the current crime-du-jour in SF, only instead of just jour it’s been the last several years that it has become epidemic. It seems to be a rising problem everywhere, but SF is leading the charge. It’s usually just charged as a misdemeanor in CA (though apparently it can be charged as a felony, it usually isn’t), much like stealing a catalytic converter, another crime category that is reaching epidemic proportions. And like stealing a CC it can be accomplished very quickly, with a very low risk of getting caught and with the potential for a decent haul.
Which is why rentals are especially targeted. Tourists in particular have a bad habit of leaving cameras, laptops, luggage and other assorted fenceable goodies in their cars.
ETA: Apparently not really pre-pandemic, but much more recent. Overall car break-ins jumped over 105% from 2020 to 2021. But in the central station covering the more touristy areas it jumped 750%. From here.
At least part of that could be overcome with building code waivers/changes. But if they have to tear down and start again, so be it. The demand is very obviously there – the way to solve this kind of housing crisis is to make new housing.
Maybe smash-and-grab from cars is up significantly in SF proper since Covid, but when I visited SF in 2017 my in-laws from the East Bay were telling smash-and-grab stories and warning that nobody with any sense keeps anything in sight in their cars. We didn’t rent a car anyhow, it just came up in conversation.
You’re the second person I’ve heard from who didn’t enjoy their experience at Fisherman’s Wharf. I went in the early 1990s as a teenager, and I enjoyed it well enough. I did see a few homeless people, and my first man in a dress (that I know of), but overall I had a positive view of the city and would like to go back. But because of the reports of theft and homeless problems (including human waste), I took San Francsico off my list of places to visit any time soon.
The closure/departure of a few important retailers in the downtown area have been reported quite a bit. Nordstrom leaving the vaunted San Francisco Center mall, Saks, Anthropologie, Coco Republic, and even Whole Foods, among others, have left the downtown SF retail scene. Walgreens has all but deserted the city. In a lot of cases, blame is cast on the changing atmosphere of downtown since the pandemic - less foot traffic, and concerns about unsafe conditions. Some major employers have vacated their offices in SF, or cut way back on their real estate footprint in the city. BART, the subway, has seen a slow recovery in ridership since the pandemic - slower than other transit systems in other cities.
The mayor’s office hand-waves-away the idea that homeless, crime, and grime are a cause, and blames the press for exaggerating things. Personally, I think the politicians are not facing the new reality of workers telecommuting, and the perception that SF is in decline. I passed thru the city in April and it was pretty much as I remember and expected, but I did not go thru the downtown or the waterfront. IMHO SF is in a state of decline not due so much to it’s “liberal” image, but more to do with constraints created by the pandemic and has been slower to respond to the changing conditions, probably thinking everyone would be eager to flood back into the office towers and retail scene, which has not come to pass.
It may be the office culture in SF. I think SF was one of the first cities to shut-down at the start of the pandemic, and local employers were early to embrace sending workers remote, and late (ISTM) to require workers to return to the office (compared to other regions).
That’s just it: I didn’t see a lot of homeless people (proportional to other cities), and like John_Bredin said, we didn’t keep anything in sight in our car (rental).
My first impression of Fisherman’s Wharf (we went there on Labor Day) was a crowded tourist trap with no decent parking close by. Not SF’s fault; you’d find that complaint in any big (or not-so-big) city. The next day, we found a place to park, walked through FW, took a bay cruise, which was nice, ate lunch, got the car, and left to drive down Lombard Street.
I’d go back to the city, but I don’t like big cities in general…I don’t like crowds. But to me, SF was okay as far as any of this talk goes.
Been that for. . .ever, really. Other than my first visit in the 70s, I’ve always gone with my present wife, who lived in SFO for 25 years. A much better experience, for sure.
Entirely accurate IMHO . And I used to live in and still sorta like SF.
It’s much more transparently touristy now than it was in the 1990’s. And it was very transparently touristy in the 1990’s . I used to be fine with strolling around the area with out of town guests once upon a time. I’m really not these days - might be age making me more irritable (harumph!).
Same thing happened to some friends during a trip to SF w/in the past year. As I recall, the rental car was parked in a very public, touristy area. Their description of the homeless situation did not make it sound appealing to me.
Coincidentally, right now they are in the area - but in a distant burb E of Aokland - for their daughter’s wedding. If I recall, when they get back I’ll ask if they made it into the city and, if so, their impressions.
. And I used to live in and still sorta like SF.
. I used to be fine with strolling around the area with out of town guests once upon a time. I’m really not these days - might be age making me more irritable (harumph!).