Long bereft of much street life in spite of its central location, it was marked for revitalization through a controversial tax break in the early 2010s that was intended to lure Twitter and other tech firms. The once-hot Mid-Market is the neighborhood that’s felt the brunt of these phenomena, Radulovich says. Another is that capitalism will realize you need everyone in the office or they’re going to goof off.” One possibility is that everyone is realizing this is awesome, and capitalism is woken up to the fact that we didn’t have to go to the office. We don’t know how it’s going to work out. “Work-from-home is an enormous social experiment. “That scenario feels unlikely to me,” Radulovich says, qualifying any prediction with an emphasis on uncertainty. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce reported that restaurant sales are down 91% since March, rendering the idea that a near-future San Francisco could resemble the “poor but sexy” Berlin of 20 years ago a probable fantasy. Every other day brings fresh news of a Michelin-starred chef calling it quits or an 83-year-old family-owned restaurant shutting for ever. They’ll need cultural amenities to lure them here, but the Covid pandemic has walloped the entertainment, nightlife, and restaurant sectors hard. The Women’s Building in the Mission District of San Francisco. But rents would need to come down a lot for a lot of people who were priced out to return.” “There’s this narrative of ‘all the boring, wealthy people leave and all the fun artists and queerdos will come back’,” Radulovich says.
Still, it’s unlikely to wind back the clock to the bohemian days of yore, or even the late aughts. Tom Radulovich, the executive director of Livable City and a former director of Bay Area Rapid Transit, is adamant that these accelerating trends will alter the demographics of cities, particularly for “the class of people for which work-at-home will be an option”.
Although rents still average $3,550 per month, that represents a 20% decline from the city’s 2015 peak, a time when anti-tech sentiment awoke and protests against corporate shuttles began to stir. That may already be happening – San Francisco’s extraordinary unaffordability may finally have taken a breather. Housing isn’t necessarily reaching the people that need it.” As of right now, when you have a homelessness crisis it seems like the demand is still there. “I hope rents in those vacant apartments become affordable when there’s less demand. “What does it mean when all these empty apartments are out there?” asks Luke Stewart, a planner who has left San Francisco for Idaho to care for a relative who is ill. But the specter of a mass departure has thrown long-festering issues about growth, development, and the unhoused in a new light. Much of the local business press, such as the San Francisco Business Times, had long been documenting a so-called “California exodus”, which has been felt perceptibly enough in booming Sunbelt states that a “ Don’t California My Texas” campaign arose in protest of the new arrivals.Ĭalifornia-on-the-brink-of-collapse has been a perennial rightwing trope no matter how many billionaires call this alleged socialist dystopia home. Photograph: Randi Lynn Beach/APĪny of these issues could lead newly untethered white-collar workers to re-evaluate living in an ultra-expensive city where the disparities between rich and poor grow ever more apparent. In May, California’s projected $5.6 billion surplus for 2020 became a $54.3bn deficit.ĭykes on Bikes riders before the the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade in 1999. Its $13bn budget – larger than that of a dozen US states – now faces a $1.7bn deficit over the next two years. Besides its long-running housing and homelessness emergencies, and a transit network in meltdown, the city faces a severe fiscal challenge. On the residential side of things, the number of homes on the market in San Francisco is up 150% year-over-year.įlush with cash only months ago, San Francisco is experiencing multiple crises. In August, Pinterest paid nearly $90m to break a lease on an unbuilt, 500,000-sq ft office it no longer needs, while smaller companies like Credit Karma have closed their San Francisco offices and consolidated employees elsewhere. Post-Covid demographic data is at best preliminary, but real estate responds more quickly than census enumerators. San Francisco’s official population had already begun to decline slightly last year, shedding some 2,500 people from its all-time high of 884,000. For a region blanketed by wildfire smoke and gradually phasing out the stricter terms of its coronavirus lockdown, it’s an abrupt shift from the prolonged boom that emerged from the late-1990s tech frenzy.