Full list of store closures in downtown San Francisco:
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It’s very sad to hear about all the store closings - SF is such a great city!
I visited there in the early 90’s and remember seeing homeless people sleeping in the bushes. I also saw a few folks pee in public but luckily saw no human 
on the sidewalk. We visited again maybe 6 years ago, stayed in the financial district but went many other places within the city. Saw the same people living in bushes and peeing in public, but never felt threatened.
I grew up just outside of NYC and used to take the train there in my teens often, with no parental supervision. This was in the 1980’s. We still go back as a family at least every other year and have no qualms walking/subway’ing around the city. We’re always aware of our surroundings and do come upon the occasional person acting erratically but have never had a confrontation.
There are homeless there as well, obviously, but they haven’t taken over areas the city in the way that they have in SF (although friends who live there told me it did start to become a problem during the COVID shutdown in the months afterward when NYC was a ghost town).
We’ve traveled to a couple of other cities where I was surprised to see that homeless population had successfully taken over popular public areas of tourist-heavy areas. One of those was Seattle, where we saw many tent cities existing near the market and waterfront areas as well as under just about every overpass in the city. The other was San Diego, with a tent city near the downtown/waterfront area. During those visits, we never experienced a confrontation or witnessed any crimes but it’s nonetheless a sobering experience, to see that many people who are displaced.
I worry that as SF loses its downtown tenants, the problem will become an even bigger one as the homeless and addicted population will spread and begin to squat in the abandoned areas. Over time, it will be interesting to see if this affects the home values in the area.
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Interesting about tourist levels in SF:
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That’s impressive. SF county has roughly 850k people, where as Orange and SD have over 3M and LA, over 10M.
A lot of people forget how tiny SF really is.
But when you take the whole Bay Area, it’s something like 7.5-8 million. And it really is a contiguous area for so many reasons.
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It would be interesting to see where “The Bay” ranked if they tallied the whole contiguous area and not just SF county.
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Technically the Bay Area is 9 counties and includes San Jose! Definitely much bigger than San Francisco proper.
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Totally agreed. People seem to think that cities like Oakland, SF, San Jose, Santa Clara (where the 49’ers play), Silicon Valley etc are separate cities. They are, but they aren’t. Lots of people live in one city and work in another all around the Bay Area.
Earlier, a poster mentioned the presence of Cal and Stanford as a major reason why the Bay Area will always be an important technology etc center, in addition to the vc/pe infrastructure. Yes, these are not all in SF proper, but it would be a mistake to treat the Bay Area as totally separate cities.
I had the fortune of hearing Larry Sonsini, whose law firm was Google’s chief legal advisor when it first started, talking about these very things that makes the Bay Area a continuous powerhouse. He was VERY comfortable that the Bay Area would always be a world leader given the world class universities and financial ecosystem alone.
Oh, and the weather is pretty fab too!
And while it’s interesting to hear about all the shops closing, that’s kinda’ what’s happening everywhere in retail, isn’t it? And the vast majority of crime in the Bay Area is property crime, not violent crime.
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Did he mention California law prohibiting most employee non-compete agreements as a reason for employees being more free to leave for other companies or their own start-ups (but not using their former employers’ intellectual property) compared to other states?
The vast majority of crime in the US overall is property crime, not violent crime. Perhaps even more so when you add in the white-collar type of crime (e.g. stealing millions of dollars from a bank by cracking its computers, social engineering a bank employee into giving unauthorized access, or accounting fraud by an insider) to the blue-collar type of crime (e.g. stealing thousands of dollars from a bank by yanking an ATM off the wall) that most people think of when they see the word “crime”.
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People who live in the city of SF don’t say they are from the Bay Area, they say they live in SF or “the city”. People who live in the Bay Area don’t say they are from SF unless they encounter someone unfamiliar with the names of cities in Bay Area. SF has its unique set of problems that is different from the rest of the Bay Area.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 40 years and would never live in SF; I just don’t like the year round colder weather. OK for me to visit once in a while, but not to live.
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Yup, but they sure work all over the Bay Area.
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This is all so true! I grew up in the city, and when I went away for college and would tell people I was from San Francisco and they would follow up with a “where?” question (meaning, “what city?”), I was so perplexed! Like, I said – SAN FRANCISCO! If I lived elsewhere, I would have told you something else like “Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco” or “Berkeley, just across the Bay from San Francisco.” Now I tell people in other places that I live in the Bay Area or the East Bay (“across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco”). Which is very much not the same as living in San Francisco, though I am usually there at least once or twice a week for activities my kids participate in (or to see a show or eat or whatever). But on one level I very much think of the whole Bay Area as a giant unit in which we move in and out of different pockets. It’s both fluid and yet with distinct areas with different personalities. I love, love, loved growing up in the city, but as a parent I’m so much happier raising my kids in the East Bay, not due to safety but more because it’s so much easier to dart across town to carpool from one activity to the next without dealing with crushing traffic or the inability to park. Plus the sun. I just so much need the sun! More sun here. That said, I do love going into the city for all kinds of reasons. Best of both worlds.
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The City no longer has a desirable port for commercial shipping as it was surpassed by Oakland long ago (due to containerization and train connections). It’s only world-class Uni is UCSF.
Well sure you can discount Stanford and Cal if you want to, but students from those schools are in and out of the city a lot, and many settle and work there afterwards. And that’s just the top two schools in the area.
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I walked from the Civic Center BART station (just outside the Whole Foods) to Haight yesterday evening, and it was the cleanest I’ve seen Market in some time. Really great to see. The number of commuters (especially on bikes) was also higher than I can recall it being since before the pandemic.
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Once you get into the neighborhoods west of Van Ness, SF is pretty much the same old fun, interesting SF. It’s generally east of Van Ness that’s the problem.
If there’s any point of comparison with Detroit, it’s that both SF and Detroit were overly dependent on one industry. In Detroit, it was autos. In SF, it was tech. I fully expect SF to come roaring back and recover- it’s just that it will take a few years. And really, SF needs a whole new set of city leaders. The ones it has now are stuck believing in ideas that got the city into trouble in the first place. Supposedly Einstein or somebody said the people who cause problems aren’t the ones who will get you out of them. I’ve found that to be fairly accurate.
As for Berkeley and Stanford, the former is about 20 minutes from downtown SF, and the former is about 40 minutes. They’re both close enough to SF that I would consider them part of the city’s entrepreneurial and creative ecosystem.
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They are certainly part of the Bay Area’s creative ecosystem. But there’s no reason tech needs to be based on the city itself: prior to about 2005 almost no tech companies existed there.
More broadly if the tech pullback continues, do you really think companies will want to continue to be based in the city, where getting employees back to the office is much harder than the Valley? Commuting to firms in the Valley will only get easier as layoffs increase and traffic gets lighter, whereas commuting to the city may get harder if there’s less money for Caltrain, BART and Muni and parking is still expensive.
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When my kids are complaining about walking somewhere in weather, I’ll jokingly tell/re-tell them the story of when I walked to school in the snow.
Detriot doesn’t have Alcatraz Island, the Golden Gate Bridge, Cable Cars, the Pacific Ocean, Lombard Street (crookedest street in the world), Fisherman’s Wharf, Twin Peaks, Coit Tower, The Painted Ladies, Blue Angels/Fleet Week, etc.
If I were a wealthy commercial real estate investor, then I’d looking for some distressed SF real estate in the future. Downtown SF will be back.
Cruise ships still stop in SF.
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I should have said “latter” for Stanford.
I’m a retired tech guy and never thought work from home was going to last. People weren’t working from home full-time because they were more productive. They were working from home because companies had no choice but to allow it. Pre-pandemic, most software jobs in SF already allowed for one or two days out of the office every week, and the offices were still packed. I expect that’s the schedule companies will return to. For cutting edge technology, people have to be collaborating closely, and there’s a point where you have to be directly together, in-person. Some company managers are understanding that, which is why they’re starting to insist people come into the office. When people who moved to Idaho and Montana lose or quit their jobs and find it’s not so easy getting a good job if they’re remote, they’re going to seriously consider moving back to where the jobs are.
After the dot com crash, people were saying tech was over in SF. That obviously wasn’t the case. I doubt tech will play as big a role as it did previously in SF. It shouldn’t. Depending so much on one industry is bad business. More people need to live in downtown, and if that happens, the city will be livelier and folks will be more willing to work there. But that won’t happen until the city gets its act together and cleans itself up. One of the reasons so many tech companies came to SF in the first place was that it was such a fun and exiting place. I’ve worked in both Silicon Valley and SF, and much preferred working and commuting to SF. The only people who would find commuting to Silicon Valley easier are people who already live there.
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Exactly. The companies started to come to SF (with satellite offices for Google, etc.) because people were sick of commuting to SV. I never wanted to make a job move to one of those companies that would have required me getting down to Mountain View or Menlo Park or whatnot, even 3 days a week. But I would go to the city if I needed to! We will see. It’s a time of change, but generally in SF, that’s followed by something new and exciting.
As for WFH, I’m on the outskirts of “tech” and we are back 3-ish days per week. The best thing has been developing ways to work away when you need to (like when a kid got COVID last week), but by and large people like and want to be back at least some of the time. We work better that way!
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