9 ms·

Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks

165 points by onesafari 4y ago

twelvechairs 4y ago
The real solution to take the edge of these sort of impacts is some kind of regional 'Bay Area' or 'NorCal' planning and funding, somewhere between the state and the cities. America is a little unique in the developed world for lacking decision bodies at this level as well as having very local ('city' based) taxation decisions [n.b. I generally think this is good].
- eropple 4y ago
  Depends on where you are in the country. Some states, particularly ones with executive-style county governments, have started making these stronger forms of government, and in others the spread of the transit network is functionally tying municipalities together more strongly in a similar way.
- hedora 4y ago
  California has a statewide mandate to reduce commuter miles driven over the coming decades (it's an already outdated CO2 measure). They've been at it for a while now, and the main result has been intentionally crippling the road system at great expense (without fixing public transit). So, I'm not convinced allowing a regional authority more power to sabotage transportation networks is a good idea. There are also mandates to add affordable housing, but those are either ignored or lead to boondoggles. (Construction is ridiculously overpriced in California. They may as well be mandating affordable dollar bills.) One way to fix it would be to streamline permitting, etc for new housing (they did this for ADUs, but that's explicitly limited to housing that's inappropriate for families). Typical permitting delays in south bay are something like 3 years for new construction (enjoy those double mortgage payments!), and nonsensical requirements add at least 50% to construction costs on top of that. This could be solved in a few months by Sacramento outlawing such practices, then closing and replacing any non-compliant planning departments.
238475235243 4y ago
Not one mention of the recalled DA.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yieldcrv 4y ago
The market is telling you everything you needed to know. People aren't in San Francisco because they don't want to be in San Francisco. Even the people that "loved San Francisco" didn't even like things in the actual city limits, talk to nearly anybody about what they like there and they'll pick an endless list of things from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Nevada. Other cities aren't like that. Red Flag 1 through 10. There are people that like things in the city limits, 30 years ago. You'll know because they'll tell you about how a nice neighborhood used to be the most hellish thing you could ever imagine and would never visit, but at least artists used to lived there. Which is what they fawn over. As if someone else was going to pay for this $100 haircut, but if I see any gentrifiers I'll bark at them for you! scouts honor. And finally you begin to notice that almost all the other people that think they like(d) that city don't have an objective view of other metropolises to compare it with. Oh, I get it, this is "The City" for that region that people aspire for, because its 600 miles of frontier from there to Portland, Oregon. A couple aspirational people from Central Valley, "escaping" (their words), a bunch of economic migrants from across the US, visa holders that have no choice in the matter. Okay. Interesting. There were very few people from other cities that really just liked all the nature, and again, fewer of those are talking about the nature within the city limits. All that masked by actual geographic scarcity exacerbated by artificial scarcity to make the high prices seem like there was something to covet? Yeah, everyone that could leave has left. > The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. death spiral. Obviously this is just my experience, I bet many will have seen something similar. I don't think the city government policies are as big of a factor as people think. People saw an option to leave due to the nature of their work, and did.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This doesn't make any sense at all when you look at the prices of real estate. People want to be there, but they are not allowed due to pricing reducing demand.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    > The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. This is a reference to the rental prices. I can see how I didn't make that clear. SF fell the hardest out of metropolitan areas and has grown the slowest. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/san-francisco-rents-barely-changed-during-covid-housing-boom https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/san-franc...
1270018080 4y ago
I think this is a blessing. Cities have been designed for commuters instead of the people living in them since white flight in the 20th century. Just look at all of the metrics in the article. It's all about commuters and the city's dependence on them. Now, macroeconomic factors are forcing cities across the country to actually serve the people living in them. And it's great. Yeah there will be growing pains and this decade could get ugly, but the cities that come out of it healthy might be great places to live.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Uhhh have you stepped into SF since 2010? It is an unmitigated disaster. No one wants to live there. Just had a friend that sold his condo and moved to San Diego.
  - 1270018080 4y ago
    Yes it sucks right now, because it was built for commuters and there aren't any. It may continue to suck for awhile, but the outcome of this bad period could be a place that's actually nice.
    - systemvoltage 4y ago
      Hard disagree. It is fucked up because we've allowed too many woke policies and gone soft on crime. It is simple as that. There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF. I feel like this stance does a tremendous amount of disservice in identifying issues and making SF better. It is always scapegoated and never confronted head on. Scapegoats come in the form of: We're kind out here in SF, we are pro-homeless, homelessness is caused by inbound people from other states, etc. None of which are remotely true, but peddled repeatedly ad-nauseum.
      - sammalloy 4y ago
        > There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF. Except, the correlation is real and well known. > At least 550,476 people commute to jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. When I lived in the city, I would often work downtown. When I would stay late, you would see up close and personal how the downtown area became a ghost town as the majority of people left the city for home. That’s both a brain, talent, and tax drain on the city, and represents a lost constituency that has no connection to local issues. This crazy idea that "woke" politics are somehow responsible for the rise in crime and the deterioration of living conditions is a talking point invented by Fox News. There is literally zero evidence for it. Boudin failed because the police admitted they refused to work with him. End of story.
forthwall 4y ago
I really hope L Breed and her leadership approve more residential conversions of office spaces in downtown. A few developers are interested but there seems to be a holdup for whatever reason. SF has already had some successful conversions like 100 Van Ness. While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little italy are pretty lively still, probably because everyone lives above the commercial and retail spaces that exist there. (There's not much commercial offices in those neighborhoods but there's a few, especially between california and bush)
- mc32 4y ago
  Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them? Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech. Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choose to live there. If I were a service worker, living in SF proper would not be the thing I'm looking to do.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    The housing won't be as expensive if there is mass office to residential conversion, and a large percentage of jobs go remote
    - mc32 4y ago
      I agree it will come down from $4000. But if I were a service worker, I'd balk at $2500 (let's say it even went as low as that) if I could get it cheaper elsewhere. Hayward, Oakland would be cheaper. Downtown SF and SJC were quite ugly during downturns before tech came to the rescue. Market street until recently was still suffering from blight brought on 40 years ago.
      - epistasis 4y ago
Zigurd 4y ago
It was a crazy valuation-driven fashionable thing to have high tech offices in a city center. The whole Bay Area went from being a reasonably efficient place for high tech businesses to an irrational "that's how we do things" consequence of funders wanting everything within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road. Urban revival is good but it was taken waaay too far and made unaffordable. "Affordable" isn't going to come back without a crisis.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Isn't SF kinda far from Sand Hill? And on slow-ass 280?
  - 0xFACEFEED 4y ago
    All the cool people roomed up with friends in the Mission and biked to work. Even the millionaires. That is until they got hitched.
epistasis 4y ago
I'm still absolutely furious that SF managed the boom times by handing over massive amounts of cash to landlords and property owners, by restricting construction, that came directly out of the pockets of workers and has resulted in massive displacement. Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those who had the most money to pay. That's not how it had to be, and choosing a zero-sum economic system rather than positive sum was foolish, and only meant to appease those with conservative views on construction. And by basing tax revenues on the business cycle, SF is now at such great risk, with huge social spending needed to repair the damage it inflicted with this unnecessary zero-sum system. Sadly, those who will be hurt the most by a potential downturn are not those who benefited by setting up a bad system. A downturn will help nearly no one, and cause great suffering. I feel a little sick in my stomach when I hear some hoping for a downturn, either as a chance for them to finally buy real estate, or as a chance for S.F. to be made great again by returning to some imagined past. Both of these are very unlikely, especially the second.
- rebelos 4y ago
  > to appease those with conservative views on construction More like "enlightened views on wealth preservation." You can follow the incentives on this one. It's not that complicated.
  - cowsandmilk 4y ago
    Generally, it isn’t preserving wealth though. Being able to build more densely increases my property’s value.
    - Aloha 4y ago
      But not it's value in its current state, it's as much about preserving the status quo.
      - sgc 4y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> Some commercial real estate firms say that as interest in opening businesses downtown has dropped, it has risen in other areas of the city. > “We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.” This actually might be a good thing. If the city gets optimized for people who want to live there verses people who are forced by their job to work in the city, in the long term it will be better for everyone and relieve some of the upward pressure on housing.
hedora 4y ago
The solutions seem pretty simple: - Add housing - Add staffed public toilets - Pilot office conversions that assume only half the workers show up on a given day.
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  pay the toilet staff very well, these are the true heroes
CamperBob2 4y ago
Having just spent an hour reading it and following various links, I'd rank this as a don't-miss article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-fr... The headline makes it sound like an exercise in question-begging, but it really isn't, as the author makes clear.
starik36 4y ago
A large article and not a single mention of crime.
- Overtonwindow 4y ago
  I started to think that, but actually the last section of the article, is about crime. I think it’s quite weak however, crime is in my humble opinion the very central reason for the decline of downtown San Francisco.
  - hindsightbias 4y ago
    Since correlation is causation, I blame WFH policies for higher crime.
  - piperswe 4y ago
    Why do you say that? May 2022 had 14.9% less crime than May 2021 according to SFPD: https://public.tableau.com/shared/HP3P97STJ?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link&:embed=y https://public.tableau.com/shared/HP3P97STJ?:display_count=n... Source for that Tableau dash: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crime-dashboard https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      Why are we cherry picking a single month? Every other month this year has seen ~25% increase in theft over the previous year.
    - _-david-_ 4y ago
      It had 14.9% less reported crime, not necessarily less crime. San Francisco also had a decline in population so dropping crime numbers makes sense.
- nathanaldensr 4y ago
  We are living in an age of media ignoring elephants so large they've burst through the very walls of the house.
henning 4y ago
The city planners made housing unaffordable by design. They chose office space over housing. They made it so that getting lunch downtown costs at least $20. Now they'll choke on used needles and urine. Good riddance.
inamberclad 4y ago
> “I’m surprised by how slowly the mayor is bringing back the public workforce,” Moretti said. Requiring a full return would set an example for the private sector, increase BART ridership, “and it would be a shot in the arm for the small businesses that have been struggling for two years.” AKA offloading the costs onto individuals by forcing them to show up to work the old way. The city needs to pivot to focusing on its full time residents and less of the business sector.
julianeon 4y ago
I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused. If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential. “But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality. When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.
- acchow 4y ago
  If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    > If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade. Valencia-Dolores was just fine before the gentrification. A better analogy would be the comparatively quick tear down and demolishment of the Embarcadero Freeway, which had formerly been a blight on the city for decades and blocked the beautiful waterfront. Once it was torn down and that area redeveloped, hardly anyone can imagine a good rationale for ever building it in the first place. That’s one of the greatest success stories of modern San Francisco, and it’s likely the downtown area can benefit from the same approach. People didn’t want to hear that about the Embarcadero Freeway and fought against bringing it down for years, but in retrospect, everyone now knows they were dead wrong.
infamouscow 4y ago
SF is in a death spiral entirely of it's own making. And unfortunately none of the mechanisms needed to fix it are in place. High taxes and pervasive violent crime outweigh any remaining benefit the city has to offer for those that fled to Austin, Miami, and Nashville.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
How about this false dichotomy: > "My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city," he said. It's always "we'll have to slash spending on basic city functions!" or "we'll have to raise your taxes!" but never "we'll have to cut all these unsustainable social policies!"
- daenz 4y ago
  >My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police I don't want this to turn into an ideological battle, but my understanding was that in SF, that is not an unpopular stance. Is this not the case?
  - viraptor 4y ago
    It normally comes with "and fund mental health, social care, non-lethal first response, etc." so it's not necessarily a short term saving.
- abxytg 4y ago
  Name an unsustainable social policy to end
  - ironmagma 4y ago
    Corrupt DPW that accomplishes fuck-all, for one. Subsidizing car ownership and driving in general. Rent control is arguably unsustainable as well. Don’t forget paying people to be homeless and shoot up in the BART station. Allowing people to get on BART without paying. Anyone else who has lived in the area could probably think of half a dozen more.
    - abxytg 4y ago
      Yea good luck getting a DA to move the needle on any of those state or federal policies you named. Clown show of a recall. Clown show of a city.
xivzgrev 4y ago
Events are not going to work. I like the idea of converting office space to mixed use / residential. Kill two birds with one stone. Even tho there’s not much to do downtown per se, as neighborhood living prices keep increasing, downtown will eventually look like attractive given its central location.
olliej 4y ago
I live in Oakland, so have awareness but obviously not direct exposure to SF's current D.A. problems - it seems like SF voted in a person they thought would be a DA that would reduce excessive prison, juvenile->adult conversion, better diversion to mental health support, etc. It turned out what they actually got was a DA that literally did not do his job, and just had literally everyone arrested put back on the street. Apparently also trying to get his father out of criminal charges as well? That goes a long way to explain the overwhelming recall in last? weeks election.
- littlexsparkee 4y ago
  The gap for the recall has narrowed to 55-45 as the remaining ballots got counted https://sfelections.sfgov.org/june-7-2022-election-results-summary https://sfelections.sfgov.org/june-7-2022-election-results-s...
  - olliej 4y ago
    oh sigh :-/
diogenescynic 4y ago
San Francisco is self-destructing and sabotaging its own success. Instead of fixing crime and quality of life issues, they've actively made them worse or gas-lighted residents and done nothing at all. I've always thought it was insane paying the prices of SF to live in squalor and near so much crime. BART is also a completely miserable experience. I don't think anyone wants to commute into SF or live there if they don't absolutely have to. Maybe during the next recession, employers will have more leverage to require more in-office work, but I definitely think employees/talent who can work remote are going to when possible. I know I am and that I never plan to commute back to SF or another South Bay campus ever again. I'll take a pay cut to keep working remotely if I have to. If SF wanted to clean things up, they'd have cops walking a beat in the Tenderloin--something I never say in the 12 years I lived there. I think the lack of any political competition has led to politicians who don't give a shit about what's best for residents and can just coast off the vote blue no matter who mentality.
- inamberclad 4y ago
  Beat cops should be a requirement in every neighborhood in every city. It makes the police more human and forces the police to see the populace as more human. I assume it's not done because of a combination of cultural reasons (cops don't want to walk) and budgetary reasons (it's more expensive somehow).
mbgerring 4y ago
San Francisco city planners made an idiotic decision about 50 years ago to push housing out of downtown, replace it with office buildings, and build gigantic freeways to bring people in from their new suburban homes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Many, many people fought hard against this stupid decision at the time, and city planners should have listened. Hopefully, somebody learns a lesson here, and we don’t have to repeat this same cycle another 50 years from now.
Thorentis 4y ago
The issue with everybody saying "just add housing" is that SF is becoming unappealing as a place to live for other reasons too. Rampant crime and homeless are big issues. Nobody wants to move to a city with the level of crime that SF now has, when that city is also seriously talking about defunding the police.
LeanderK 4y ago
Why is nobody living there? To me as a european, it looks just like a usual party of a city. Small, individual shops on the floor with offices or homes above. But apparently there are only offices, how? Zoning? No wonder it's struggling with remote work, there's no incentive to go there. If somebody would be living there, then there would always be someone around to shop, drink or go to work.

165 points by onesafari 4y ago

The real solution to take the edge of these sort of impacts is some kind of regional 'Bay Area' or 'NorCal' planning and funding, somewhere between the state and the cities. America is a little unique in the developed world for lacking decision bodies at this level as well as having very local ('city' based) taxation decisions [n.b. I generally think this is good].

eropple 4y ago
Depends on where you are in the country. Some states, particularly ones with executive-style county governments, have started making these stronger forms of government, and in others the spread of the transit network is functionally tying municipalities together more strongly in a similar way.
hedora 4y ago
California has a statewide mandate to reduce commuter miles driven over the coming decades (it's an already outdated CO2 measure). They've been at it for a while now, and the main result has been intentionally crippling the road system at great expense (without fixing public transit). So, I'm not convinced allowing a regional authority more power to sabotage transportation networks is a good idea. There are also mandates to add affordable housing, but those are either ignored or lead to boondoggles. (Construction is ridiculously overpriced in California. They may as well be mandating affordable dollar bills.) One way to fix it would be to streamline permitting, etc for new housing (they did this for ADUs, but that's explicitly limited to housing that's inappropriate for families). Typical permitting delays in south bay are something like 3 years for new construction (enjoy those double mortgage payments!), and nonsensical requirements add at least 50% to construction costs on top of that. This could be solved in a few months by Sacramento outlawing such practices, then closing and replacing any non-compliant planning departments.

238475235243 4y ago

Not one mention of the recalled DA.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

yieldcrv 4y ago

The market is telling you everything you needed to know. People aren't in San Francisco because they don't want to be in San Francisco. Even the people that "loved San Francisco" didn't even like things in the actual city limits, talk to nearly anybody about what they like there and they'll pick an endless list of things from the Pacific Ocean to the border of Nevada. Other cities aren't like that. Red Flag 1 through 10. There are people that like things in the city limits, 30 years ago. You'll know because they'll tell you about how a nice neighborhood used to be the most hellish thing you could ever imagine and would never visit, but at least artists used to lived there. Which is what they fawn over. As if someone else was going to pay for this $100 haircut, but if I see any gentrifiers I'll bark at them for you! scouts honor. And finally you begin to notice that almost all the other people that think they like(d) that city don't have an objective view of other metropolises to compare it with. Oh, I get it, this is "The City" for that region that people aspire for, because its 600 miles of frontier from there to Portland, Oregon. A couple aspirational people from Central Valley, "escaping" (their words), a bunch of economic migrants from across the US, visa holders that have no choice in the matter. Okay. Interesting. There were very few people from other cities that really just liked all the nature, and again, fewer of those are talking about the nature within the city limits. All that masked by actual geographic scarcity exacerbated by artificial scarcity to make the high prices seem like there was something to covet? Yeah, everyone that could leave has left. > The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. death spiral. Obviously this is just my experience, I bet many will have seen something similar. I don't think the city government policies are as big of a factor as people think. People saw an option to leave due to the nature of their work, and did.

epistasis 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense at all when you look at the prices of real estate. People want to be there, but they are not allowed due to pricing reducing demand.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  > The transit system’s looming deficit has given rise to whispers of a new regional tax to fill the gap. This is a reference to the rental prices. I can see how I didn't make that clear. SF fell the hardest out of metropolitan areas and has grown the slowest. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/san-francisco-rents-barely-changed-during-covid-housing-boom https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-21/san-franc...

1270018080 4y ago

I think this is a blessing. Cities have been designed for commuters instead of the people living in them since white flight in the 20th century. Just look at all of the metrics in the article. It's all about commuters and the city's dependence on them. Now, macroeconomic factors are forcing cities across the country to actually serve the people living in them. And it's great. Yeah there will be growing pains and this decade could get ugly, but the cities that come out of it healthy might be great places to live.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Uhhh have you stepped into SF since 2010? It is an unmitigated disaster. No one wants to live there. Just had a friend that sold his condo and moved to San Diego.
- 1270018080 4y ago
  Yes it sucks right now, because it was built for commuters and there aren't any. It may continue to suck for awhile, but the outcome of this bad period could be a place that's actually nice.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Hard disagree. It is fucked up because we've allowed too many woke policies and gone soft on crime. It is simple as that. There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF. I feel like this stance does a tremendous amount of disservice in identifying issues and making SF better. It is always scapegoated and never confronted head on. Scapegoats come in the form of: We're kind out here in SF, we are pro-homeless, homelessness is caused by inbound people from other states, etc. None of which are remotely true, but peddled repeatedly ad-nauseum.
    - sammalloy 4y ago
      > There is absolutely zero causation between "Built for commuters" and the absolute hell hole you've seen that is SF. Except, the correlation is real and well known. > At least 550,476 people commute to jobs in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. When I lived in the city, I would often work downtown. When I would stay late, you would see up close and personal how the downtown area became a ghost town as the majority of people left the city for home. That’s both a brain, talent, and tax drain on the city, and represents a lost constituency that has no connection to local issues. This crazy idea that "woke" politics are somehow responsible for the rise in crime and the deterioration of living conditions is a talking point invented by Fox News. There is literally zero evidence for it. Boudin failed because the police admitted they refused to work with him. End of story.

forthwall 4y ago

I really hope L Breed and her leadership approve more residential conversions of office spaces in downtown. A few developers are interested but there seems to be a holdup for whatever reason. SF has already had some successful conversions like 100 Van Ness. While I don't think that is a surefire way of fixing dtsf but it is a start. The superdense neighborhood of chinatown and somewhat dense neighborhood of little italy are pretty lively still, probably because everyone lives above the commercial and retail spaces that exist there. (There's not much commercial offices in those neighborhoods but there's a few, especially between california and bush)

mc32 4y ago
Why would people want to live in relative expensive housing if there are no jobs in the city for them? Converted apartments are not going to be "affordable" (by say the likes of students, and people just out of college not in finance or tech. Once the white collar workers leave, there is less demand for service workers to live there. Sure maybe some salaried workers like in emergency services and policing might choose to live there. If I were a service worker, living in SF proper would not be the thing I'm looking to do.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  The housing won't be as expensive if there is mass office to residential conversion, and a large percentage of jobs go remote
  - mc32 4y ago
    I agree it will come down from $4000. But if I were a service worker, I'd balk at $2500 (let's say it even went as low as that) if I could get it cheaper elsewhere. Hayward, Oakland would be cheaper. Downtown SF and SJC were quite ugly during downturns before tech came to the rescue. Market street until recently was still suffering from blight brought on 40 years ago.
    - epistasis 4y ago

Zigurd 4y ago

It was a crazy valuation-driven fashionable thing to have high tech offices in a city center. The whole Bay Area went from being a reasonably efficient place for high tech businesses to an irrational "that's how we do things" consequence of funders wanting everything within a stone's throw of Sand Hill Road. Urban revival is good but it was taken waaay too far and made unaffordable. "Affordable" isn't going to come back without a crisis.

djbusby 4y ago
Isn't SF kinda far from Sand Hill? And on slow-ass 280?
- 0xFACEFEED 4y ago
  All the cool people roomed up with friends in the Mission and biked to work. Even the millionaires. That is until they got hitched.

epistasis 4y ago

I'm still absolutely furious that SF managed the boom times by handing over massive amounts of cash to landlords and property owners, by restricting construction, that came directly out of the pockets of workers and has resulted in massive displacement. Sure, the tax revenue looked great, but it happened in a way that caused great human suffering by making occupancy in the city zero sum, and awarding it to only those who had the most money to pay. That's not how it had to be, and choosing a zero-sum economic system rather than positive sum was foolish, and only meant to appease those with conservative views on construction. And by basing tax revenues on the business cycle, SF is now at such great risk, with huge social spending needed to repair the damage it inflicted with this unnecessary zero-sum system. Sadly, those who will be hurt the most by a potential downturn are not those who benefited by setting up a bad system. A downturn will help nearly no one, and cause great suffering. I feel a little sick in my stomach when I hear some hoping for a downturn, either as a chance for them to finally buy real estate, or as a chance for S.F. to be made great again by returning to some imagined past. Both of these are very unlikely, especially the second.

rebelos 4y ago
> to appease those with conservative views on construction More like "enlightened views on wealth preservation." You can follow the incentives on this one. It's not that complicated.
- cowsandmilk 4y ago
  Generally, it isn’t preserving wealth though. Being able to build more densely increases my property’s value.
  - Aloha 4y ago
    But not it's value in its current state, it's as much about preserving the status quo.
    - sgc 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> Some commercial real estate firms say that as interest in opening businesses downtown has dropped, it has risen in other areas of the city. > “We had our best year in 2021,” said Santino DeRose, managing broker at Maven real estate. “The neighborhoods by far, where people lived and worked, came back the fastest.” This actually might be a good thing. If the city gets optimized for people who want to live there verses people who are forced by their job to work in the city, in the long term it will be better for everyone and relieve some of the upward pressure on housing.

hedora 4y ago

The solutions seem pretty simple: - Add housing - Add staffed public toilets - Pilot office conversions that assume only half the workers show up on a given day.

micromacrofoot 4y ago
pay the toilet staff very well, these are the true heroes

CamperBob2 4y ago

Having just spent an hour reading it and following various links, I'd rank this as a don't-miss article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-fr... The headline makes it sound like an exercise in question-begging, but it really isn't, as the author makes clear.

starik36 4y ago

A large article and not a single mention of crime.

Overtonwindow 4y ago
I started to think that, but actually the last section of the article, is about crime. I think it’s quite weak however, crime is in my humble opinion the very central reason for the decline of downtown San Francisco.
- hindsightbias 4y ago
  Since correlation is causation, I blame WFH policies for higher crime.
- piperswe 4y ago
  Why do you say that? May 2022 had 14.9% less crime than May 2021 according to SFPD: https://public.tableau.com/shared/HP3P97STJ?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link&:embed=y https://public.tableau.com/shared/HP3P97STJ?:display_count=n... Source for that Tableau dash: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crime-dashboard https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    Why are we cherry picking a single month? Every other month this year has seen ~25% increase in theft over the previous year.
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    It had 14.9% less reported crime, not necessarily less crime. San Francisco also had a decline in population so dropping crime numbers makes sense.
nathanaldensr 4y ago
We are living in an age of media ignoring elephants so large they've burst through the very walls of the house.

henning 4y ago

The city planners made housing unaffordable by design. They chose office space over housing. They made it so that getting lunch downtown costs at least $20. Now they'll choke on used needles and urine. Good riddance.

inamberclad 4y ago

> “I’m surprised by how slowly the mayor is bringing back the public workforce,” Moretti said. Requiring a full return would set an example for the private sector, increase BART ridership, “and it would be a shot in the arm for the small businesses that have been struggling for two years.” AKA offloading the costs onto individuals by forcing them to show up to work the old way. The city needs to pivot to focusing on its full time residents and less of the business sector.

julianeon 4y ago

I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back. You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused. If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential. “But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality. When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.

acchow 4y ago
If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  > If there's enough demand for it (and risk appetite), change can happen swiftly. Just see how rapidly the Mission transformed (particularly Valencia-Dolores and adjacent) over the past decade. Valencia-Dolores was just fine before the gentrification. A better analogy would be the comparatively quick tear down and demolishment of the Embarcadero Freeway, which had formerly been a blight on the city for decades and blocked the beautiful waterfront. Once it was torn down and that area redeveloped, hardly anyone can imagine a good rationale for ever building it in the first place. That’s one of the greatest success stories of modern San Francisco, and it’s likely the downtown area can benefit from the same approach. People didn’t want to hear that about the Embarcadero Freeway and fought against bringing it down for years, but in retrospect, everyone now knows they were dead wrong.

infamouscow 4y ago

SF is in a death spiral entirely of it's own making. And unfortunately none of the mechanisms needed to fix it are in place. High taxes and pervasive violent crime outweigh any remaining benefit the city has to offer for those that fled to Austin, Miami, and Nashville.

nathanaldensr 4y ago

How about this false dichotomy: > "My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police, or it aggressively puts up taxes on businesses to cover the shortfall and drives them out of the city," he said. It's always "we'll have to slash spending on basic city functions!" or "we'll have to raise your taxes!" but never "we'll have to cut all these unsustainable social policies!"

daenz 4y ago
>My biggest fear is the city either has to slash spending on, say, police I don't want this to turn into an ideological battle, but my understanding was that in SF, that is not an unpopular stance. Is this not the case?
- viraptor 4y ago
  It normally comes with "and fund mental health, social care, non-lethal first response, etc." so it's not necessarily a short term saving.
abxytg 4y ago
Name an unsustainable social policy to end
- ironmagma 4y ago
  Corrupt DPW that accomplishes fuck-all, for one. Subsidizing car ownership and driving in general. Rent control is arguably unsustainable as well. Don’t forget paying people to be homeless and shoot up in the BART station. Allowing people to get on BART without paying. Anyone else who has lived in the area could probably think of half a dozen more.
  - abxytg 4y ago
    Yea good luck getting a DA to move the needle on any of those state or federal policies you named. Clown show of a recall. Clown show of a city.

xivzgrev 4y ago

Events are not going to work. I like the idea of converting office space to mixed use / residential. Kill two birds with one stone. Even tho there’s not much to do downtown per se, as neighborhood living prices keep increasing, downtown will eventually look like attractive given its central location.

olliej 4y ago

I live in Oakland, so have awareness but obviously not direct exposure to SF's current D.A. problems - it seems like SF voted in a person they thought would be a DA that would reduce excessive prison, juvenile->adult conversion, better diversion to mental health support, etc. It turned out what they actually got was a DA that literally did not do his job, and just had literally everyone arrested put back on the street. Apparently also trying to get his father out of criminal charges as well? That goes a long way to explain the overwhelming recall in last? weeks election.

littlexsparkee 4y ago
The gap for the recall has narrowed to 55-45 as the remaining ballots got counted https://sfelections.sfgov.org/june-7-2022-election-results-summary https://sfelections.sfgov.org/june-7-2022-election-results-s...
- olliej 4y ago
  oh sigh :-/

diogenescynic 4y ago

San Francisco is self-destructing and sabotaging its own success. Instead of fixing crime and quality of life issues, they've actively made them worse or gas-lighted residents and done nothing at all. I've always thought it was insane paying the prices of SF to live in squalor and near so much crime. BART is also a completely miserable experience. I don't think anyone wants to commute into SF or live there if they don't absolutely have to. Maybe during the next recession, employers will have more leverage to require more in-office work, but I definitely think employees/talent who can work remote are going to when possible. I know I am and that I never plan to commute back to SF or another South Bay campus ever again. I'll take a pay cut to keep working remotely if I have to. If SF wanted to clean things up, they'd have cops walking a beat in the Tenderloin--something I never say in the 12 years I lived there. I think the lack of any political competition has led to politicians who don't give a shit about what's best for residents and can just coast off the vote blue no matter who mentality.

inamberclad 4y ago
Beat cops should be a requirement in every neighborhood in every city. It makes the police more human and forces the police to see the populace as more human. I assume it's not done because of a combination of cultural reasons (cops don't want to walk) and budgetary reasons (it's more expensive somehow).

mbgerring 4y ago

San Francisco city planners made an idiotic decision about 50 years ago to push housing out of downtown, replace it with office buildings, and build gigantic freeways to bring people in from their new suburban homes. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. Many, many people fought hard against this stupid decision at the time, and city planners should have listened. Hopefully, somebody learns a lesson here, and we don’t have to repeat this same cycle another 50 years from now.

Thorentis 4y ago

The issue with everybody saying "just add housing" is that SF is becoming unappealing as a place to live for other reasons too. Rampant crime and homeless are big issues. Nobody wants to move to a city with the level of crime that SF now has, when that city is also seriously talking about defunding the police.

LeanderK 4y ago

Why is nobody living there? To me as a european, it looks just like a usual party of a city. Small, individual shops on the floor with offices or homes above. But apparently there are only offices, how? Zoning? No wonder it's struggling with remote work, there's no incentive to go there. If somebody would be living there, then there would always be someone around to shop, drink or go to work.