Excerpt:

>Google mobility data suggest that San Francisco has had one of the slowest returns to in-person work since the pandemic when compared to over 50 major metropolitan areas — and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change in 2023.

>Google’s reports, which they stopped publishing in October 2022, are based on data from anonymous Google users who have their “Location History” setting turned on in their account, so may not be representative of all users.

>Google uses its location tracking and map directions data to quantify the places people are visiting. Those places are lumped into categories like “workplaces,” which includes places like offices and production facilities, and “retail and recreation” places.

>Trips to workplaces in San Francisco were still nearly 40% lower in October 2022 than in January 2020, according to data from Google’s COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

>In mid-April 2020, time spent in the workplace plummeted to 70% of what it was at the beginning of the year for San Francisco. Despite some growth, time spent in the workplace among these Google users in San Francisco was still 37% lower than pre-pandemic times as of October 2022.

>Meanwhile, other cities like New York and Los Angeles are 31% and 28% below pre-pandemic, respectively.

> 

>San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan said “there’s probably a certain amount of ‘only in San Francisco’ phenomenon that’s keeping people away from the workplace.”

>Still, these hollowed-out office spaces could have a large impact on the city’s financial outlook considering that the city’s downtown is a large source of revenue for the city. In 2021, office work contributed to three-quarters of the city’s GDP, according to Egan.

>“Almost nowhere in San Francisco is sales tax recovery to where it was before the pandemic after you adjust for inflation and it’s particularly bad in downtown,” Egan said. “We’re missing office workers, we’re missing residents and we’re missing hotel guests who were usually customers to those businesses.”

Adriana Rezal, 11 Jan. 2023, the San Francisco Chronicle (Hearst)

Los Angeles here! I refuse to go back to commuting. I'll simply not work if I can't work-from-home.

Great work everyone! Let’s keep it that way. If your job is doable remote you should be able to choose where to work.

Hey - how about let people work from home and use those big building for homelessness.

San Francisco as a city has been completely hollowed out. I don’t love too far away and hadn’t visited in a while. It was a shock to see some streets in downtown completely empty of any shops. This is going to take some doing to recover from.

All the offices can become apartments.

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Remove the office buildings and provide more housing, better public transportation, and change the zoning laws to allow mixed use neighbourhoods, and stop allowing single family houses. The 4-5 stories buildings seen in European cities like Paris allow for a lot more people to live in one place, reduces the cost per unit, and generates more revenue from property taxes.

Well now they’re all being laid off so….

More like keep downtown SF a shithole so returning to work is a risk

I would gladly take the train in to SF from Santa Clara, but it takes an hour longer than driving and is hella expensive. And I don’t want to drive in rush hour traffic to SF.

The Bay Area is missing some really basic infrastructure.

If my square footage to rent ratio was as high as San Francisco's I'd want to stay home too!

It would require significant renovation. Office buildings don't generally have private bathrooms and kitchens, and large ones don't have many windows per person.

It's mostly just pointless as so many stores are empty (since no one came back).

My last run through downtown I managed to go an entire block plus of Union Square and there was a Walgreens, a temporary pop-up, and about a dozen plus unused closed retail units. Ghost town.

Not sure undesirable activity is much higher, but when you lose almost all of the normal activity every street has a back alley vibe.

Yeah it rarely works.

You could convert a hotel or two, and change zoning to allow future builds near/in the area to get housing not office.

I haven't run the numbers on basic water, sewer, and electricity needs for residential vs office per square foot, but I would not be surprised if they were different.

In principle you can strip a building down to the bare walls and floors, and redo all the internal systems, but at some point it becomes cheaper to demolish and start over.

There are mixed-use towers in come cities. Trump Tower in Manhattan is an infamous example. Street level +/- 1 or 2 floors is retail, then office space above that, then apartments on top. But it was planned and built that way from the start.

Bold of you to assume all those shuttered businesses don't already have homeless in them.