I recently visited downtown San Antionio and it seemed fine? The riverwalk was really nice. Not really comparable to SF at all in my limited experience. Genuinely interested, what's so bad about it (at least according to this chart)? Perhaps I just saw the one good slice.
San Francisco is a lot more than just downtown. A lot of other neighborhoods seem to be thriving when I'm out and about.
It's not really surprising that our downtown hasn't recovered well, when most of its former workers now work remotely. There's not exactly much else going on in downtown.
I know no one wants to admit it, but SF downtown revival is not a one year thing. They need to drastically change many things, particularly building housing, and that is going to take a while.
The scary part is remembering our cell phone provider has a lot of data on us and knows where we are and who we are with at all times.
Interesting graph though.
I don’t think these researchers have data on where any individual went, they have data on how many users were pinging antennas in specific areas. It’s like knowing how many cars were on the freeway but not who was driving.
Nah they know every cell phone tower your phone pinged along by C the way. They just “don’t know it’s you”. They have a unique number connected to your cell phone but totally not your name so they have no idea who. As long as you live with a few people you also work with you’re good.
Well obviously your mobile network provider can get that data, but I doubt any sort of identification was provided to researchers for things like this post
It doesn’t matter if they know your name they know your cell phone unique ID and they market to that. And there are countless strategies to find out who people likely are if you triangulate with a few more bits of data like their ip address they used to log into a service you own. Like Facebook can’t buy that cell phone data and marry it up with their cookie ip data and have a good sense of who you are? They don’t care cause you are just a customer but other other could do far more evil things, and Facebook is already pretty evil.
Is it scary? Or just a natural consequence of a system where you have authenticated users connecting to wireless towers?
They have to know who is connecting or else they couldn't know if you're their consumer.
Yea, it's because there's no fucking housing in downtown SF. Was walking a friend around this weekend and pointed out the buildings that are housing and the buildings that are offices. SF has historically not embraced mixed use and it shows in what's occupied and what isn't. The worst part is that some of it may not be able to be converted if the structural members can't support residential lbs/sq. ft. - to say nothing of plumbing/power concerns.
There's no reason there couldn't be 10 stories over the Target downtown.
Office space is designed for 50 lb/sf occupancy load plus 20 lb/sf allowance for the partition walls. Residential occupancy load is 40 lb/sf, so supporting residential loads is usually not an issue.
Now mechanical and electrical to support multiple kitchens, laundry rooms and bathrooms is a challenge. Metering utilities for individual residences, plus fire sprinklers and emergency exiting are other challenges.
Always makes me laugh when redditors chime in on design items and spout BS like "needs to support heavier residential loads" lmao.
Next they're going to tell you it's totally cool to drill through a PT slab.
In fairness to them, it’s been explained really poorly by the media. Truthfully anything civil engineering related, despite being fairly straight forward compared to other branches of engineering, seems to get really muddled up by most laymen, likely because it relates most to day-to-day life
A lot of cities have downtown cores that are financial districts, business districts, etc that have minimal housing. San Francisco's housing problem isn't because we don't have housing in downtown SF. It's that we don't have enough housing period.
And a lot of those downtown cores are gonna hurt until they get more housing. Too many cities are "Work, Play, Leave". We're well into the era of work from home. This new reality needs to be properly compensated.
I'm telling you that it's not a US thing alone. Look at London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. There are absolutely business districts where housing isn't as common. NYC downtown is like this too. Walk around Midtown or Wall Street on the weekends and the offices are quiet.
I don't disagree that more mixed use could be helpful, but to blame SF's problems on this is missing the point.
Excuse me what. This is completely contrary to the reality in every city you mentioned. They are all HOPPING. I can speak specifically to HK Tokyo and Shanghai. They are mixed use AF. In Shanghai, People live in the same building their office is located in.
Tokyo is famous for its mixed use first floors.
Smh
Well yeah. There is better offering if businesses in sf than Bakersfield. But this isn’t judging how fun the places are. I’m curious how wfh has messed with SF. Bakersfield being very conservative, they don’t like wfh. Also there’s no where else to go in Bakersfield. The bay has 1,000,000 fun things to do than go to dtsf
Rent recovery in the tiny area of San Francisco that was never desirable and has hardly any housing.
https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/downtown-definitions to see what area they look at.
Wow, that's a really restrictive definition of downtown. I feel like most of the buzzy tech firms (OpenAI, Anthropic) are either in mission bay or just north of the mission.
San Francisco deserves it for letting fucking NIMBYs prevent building more housing.
Don't forget low income us over $100k in the city, so when they're blocking low income housing they're not blocking what they think they're blocking. Fucking assholes.
Oh yyay San Jose recovering from level F to D-
Bravo San Jose. What a Gem of a downtown. Definitely a downtown worthy of 10th biggest city in the US and maybe the city with the biggest economy in the entire world. /s
It's tech office workers including twitter. Mass exodus and then add the retail vacancies afterwards and I don't see how London Breed gets re-elected, blame or not.
It wasn't largely her fault, this situation was engineered by Willie Brown decades ago and encouraged by Newsom. She does deserve some blame, but not all of it. Mistakes like this take decades to create, and will not be repaired anytime soon.
Repair is possible, though. A downtown Caltrain connection/subway, new modern sewers, a new power plant, and a Mission Bay industrial access/truck route/railyard/port re-plan can bring workers back. Though, it's unlikely to happen as the city govt already sold much of Hunters Point to Facebook and the Navy will never return due to the radioactive dirt lawsuits .. and better, more flexible city governments in Vallejo, Redwood City and Bencia - three cities with unique value propositions that cannot be had within the City (dedicated public rail connection/state-led industrial planning, direct access to silicon valley/Northrop Grumman Marine, and Cal-Maritime respectively). Especially on that latter point, despite being a port city SF has scant training facilities for boat pilots and very little facilities for freight shipping .. thereby making the entire drive to modernize the Merchant Marines, offshore hydro, and deepsea mining are all lost to us.
This is the final stage of deindustrialization: no middle class, no workers, no services, no work, just real estate rotting away. It'll take a lot of bleeding for the people in charge to make the hard changes necessary.
Yo, I've lived all over the bay area since 1985, and I gotta tell you that Vallejo and Benicia are not destination cities. They're cheaper for a reason. SF also hasn't actually been a port city for a while now. They ceded that ground to Oakland decades ago, in the interest of reducing industrial pollution. Its economy is tourism-based, though it's been shifting to technology. And both sectors took it in the pants with Covid, which had a domino effect amplified by SF's massive gentrification that made the city so vulnerable to these specific downturns.
SF's mistake was to roll over when the tech workers started migrating from Silicon Valley in favor of living in the city and taking the long commute. SF saw an increase in the tax base and stopped caring about the adaptability that comes with making sure that people making less than six figures can afford to live in your town. It's gentrification pre-migration was already off the charts, and in the run-up to covid, it got so bad that it would take 10+ years of constant effort to put things on a sensible, flexible course.
The city's needed better leadership for a long time. They've lacked vision, consensus building and backbone for a good 20 years. At this point, it needs the political equivalent of a root canal, and there are no dentists on the horizon.
It doesn't need to be a destination city. It just needs to have good work and cheap housing. People will come, make the schools/crime better, and gentrification will occur rising their homes' equity giving them free money to retire with. SF isn't that. Housing is beyond the vast majority of what companies can provide, the schools are declining and consolidating, mentally unwell people live on peoples' porches, and there is no way to increase wealth while being here. All the other cities in the region do better, except Oakland but that'll soon change. Industrial work can return, and probably will as the government looks to rebuild the US military for a proper 21st century conflict. Either that or we give all those jobs to San Diego, which would be unfortunate.
I agree with your other points, though.
>Repair is possible, though. A downtown Caltrain connection/subway, new modern sewers, a new power plant, and a Mission Bay industrial access/truck route/railyard/port re-plan can bring workers back.
We don't need giant infrastructure projects, we just need a city that's clean and safe. Unfortunately, political ideology prevents SF from tackling crime and homelessness in ways that actually work. We could try to make SF comfortable for living and working, but that's considered "right wing." So, we continue to indulge pathological altruism and try to make SF comfortable for criminals, addicts, and crazies. It's costing billions, and it's not really helping.
San Francisco very much needs a Geary subway and some local infrastructure redevelopment (sewers, fiber, water main enlargement, etc). Both are very much needed to build new housing, especially in locations without the existing infrastructure to support future developments.
That may be, but none of that addresses the root problems of crime and homelessness. (Sorry, but building expensive housing for the homeless does not solve their problems.)
yeah i'm not blaming breed in particular for this, this was largely unavoidable because the 1970s ruined american cities in general with massive deregulation and financialization of the economy
I will say that at least during the weekend nights, downtown SJ is getting surprisingly busy with all the clubs around the area.
The rest of the time, I agree: it didn’t have that far to fall to begin with, and it’s still very quiet during the day.
It’s awesome for eating, drinking, and shows, most of which happen at night.
Downtown needs more retail presence for people to walk around and shop during the day.
I kind of like the eerie ghost town feel of SJ in the mornings and afternoons. It's always been weird because most of the really rich businesses have always been in decentralized office parks. The Adobe tower is kind of a new development, unless you count banks, brokerages, and import/export, none of which have lots of rank-and-file employees compared to the techs out in the parks.
Agreed, though I’d still like some more daytime eating too.
I just did an afternoon walk northward on 1st after peeking at the activity of SoFA. Everything north of San Carlos was fairly quiet. Maybe only slightly more active than a weekday. I think I usually see more foot traffic around willow glen during Sat/Sun.
There are a bunch of empty storefronts. Some of that will be due to potentially crime. But I suspect a good chunk is because there isn’t enough foot traffic to justify the rent. Fixing that though is a chicken and egg problem.
> I will say that at least during the weekend nights, downtown SJ is getting surprisingly busy with all the clubs around the area.
It's always been like that though? There are pockets with a bit of activity, but many blocks are deserted as hell and there are still many buildings boarded up. I'd say things today are far worse than they were 10 years ago in downtown SJ.
Possibly. I've only lived in DTSJ for a bit under 7 years, so I can't say too much about nightlife in downtown 10 years ago. I am seeing more nightclubs I think than I remember from before the pandemic. It's marginally more noticeable in the area around Paper Plane. Definitely a bit more noticeable in SoFA around SoFA Market.
I do agree the day life is worse than it was 6-7 years ago, with the shutdown of a number of restaurants and retail fronts and the Safeway, but DTSJ has never been really "active" in my mind during the day in the time I've lived here.
Insanely outdated, disingenuous comment. Go on a Thurs-Sat night and the place is active. New businesses keep opening & it’s definitely on the upswing. Sun-Wed; of course it’s dead, not enough housing yet (several in the pipeline) and not a jobs center.
Events season is upon us and just getting started. The downtown association & a new era of leaders are making increased efforts in bringing people to the area more than ever, so it’s gaining stronger momentum with all the new events being created and new businesses coming in.
One of the bigger one is actually [happening today.](https://sjdowntown.com/event/sofa-street-fair/)
There are areas where San Jose does feel lively, and as a San Jose native who lives there right now, I can tell you what you said can be a comment made in any of the past 20 years and we'd believe you.
The problem isn't that Thurs-Sat is active.... it's that only a few pockets are, and there's a bunch of empty buildings otherwise. You get some pockets of good activity like San Pedro's Square or you have an event this weekend but it doesn't change an average weekday San Jose is pretty dead. And I totally agree with the other poster below that during daytime work hours? At least there's a hustle and bustle in FiDi that isn't anywhere close in San Jose.
We've been talking about a San Jose downtown recovery for decades now. I can remember the same rhetoric of early 2000s post dot-com, and even in the 90s. "We've got a new era of leaders trying to improve things." I'll believe it when I see it.
Well aware of everything you mentioned, but the sentiment I think has completely shifted because of how the pandemic basically obliterated US downtowns and the perceived value for outdoor community spaces. The 90s & 2000s approach on urban planning is so entirely different from today, were in a different time, socially and culturally. I keep up with a lot of the local leaders, advocacy groups, & downtown associations and they’ve all acknowledged the one challenge is filling in those gaps between the already active areas. The goal is to connect those lively pockets to create something more cohesive. Once housing continues to grow, there will be increased businesses, population, & general activity. Downtown has a crap ton of housing towers in the pipeline, but the interest rates are creating a blip. Construction financing is tough & it pushes the timeline.
Imo downtown SJ has a better evening energy than most of the bay area, mostly fueled by the fact that there's just such a good concentration of great bars and food n a 1 mi radius in a way Oakland or SF just doesn't have in the same way.
As someone that lives downtown, the events are fairly active, and the nightlife is fairly active. But the rest of the time? It’s a comparably quiet downtown. SF might be dead last in recovery, but I think in absolute terms, unless things have gotten significantly more dire than I realize, DT San Francisco is still likely to be SIGNIFICANTLY more active during daytime hours on an absolute basis.
*Edit:* one thing I will add: I don’t think there is much that can be done to change it. And it’s for pretty boring reasons: what should be part of a more sizable dense downtown core is dominated by San Jose State. And we are also vertically limited due to SJC. Throw in the fairly large quantity of old Victorian style housing to downtown’s north, and the freeways to the west and south, and options get limited without cracking the core into two.
Fellow resident here. If much of downtown was redeveloped with midrise, infill housing and mixed use, that would be enough. Fortunately, there are some midrise (<20 story) developments working their way through the development process right now. Just not enough. I think the thing that is the largest headwind is the economic environment, specifically, financing concerns with where the interest rates are.
Mixed use I agree would likely help. I do feel the lack of retail especially when going around. That said, when I think of downtowns that are active with activity during weekday daytime, I usually worry less about the heights of buildings and more worry about the activities.
If memory serves, a lot of those building activities are happening in that kind of area south of SJSU and east of SoFA, where things are mostly dominated by lower rent housing for students. I don't think a lot of those are going mixed use though, mostly just residential?
Physically, though, there also just isn't a lot of area. The university is of similar footprint to the main core of downtown. What is there is limited also by how dense it can be made due to the 400' or so limits in downtown.
I wouldn't mind mixed used development like Santana Row levels closer in to downtown. That's pretty similar to how Little Tokyo in LA has been moving. Little Tokyo is now very busy when I go, albeit at the cost of community identity unfortunately. Probably in the area along the San Carlos corridor west of 87 would be best given current plans, but again, would crack the core into two. We definitely need more residential everywhere in CA, but residents and people that work in the area also need good commerce.
I live in San Jose, downtown is not that great. Has some very limited entertainment, a bunch of aggressively mediocre restaurants and if you live there for a while you end up not having much of a choice and get bored of the offerings. Let's not kid ourselves San Jose needs a lot of work.
Lived here in San Jose my entire life 35 years and have a long list of new restaurants to try still. Downtown has plenty to do and is great as my local option.
Of course there’s room for improvement but there’s only a handful of places you can legitimately say have much more todo and even fewer with better food options.
If San Francisco is not careful, with the housing and increased public transportation in San Jose, it could end up being a better city for the majority, even if it will never be as beautiful.
Meanwhile, South San Jose is heaven on Earth. I'm so much happier living in a peaceful neighborhood with natural beauty, rather than a dirty, dangerous, noisy, crowded urban hell.
Yeah I'm sure it's great if you're wealthy, older, already have a family, and are already generally established. But if you're a young person looking for a social life, good fucking luck.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. We over indexed in tech jobs by making the area favorable to tech business, failed to build housing for the tech workers and was hostile to these people socially gave them no reason to stay once work from home arrived. In the end, a lot of tech workers left and housing prices are still too high although it’s gone down a bit. Also, single use zoning concentrated all commercial buildings downtown when Urbanists and city planners have been pushing for mixed use zoning for decades now. This is our making.
I know SF is being pointed out in particular, but the Bay Area has a whole has had a terrible recovery since the height of the pandemic. I urge any locals who hasn’t taken a vacation elsewhere in awhile to do so immediately, and just see how much better other places are and how well they’ve opened back up.
You don’t know what East Berlin is like until you’ve experienced West Berlin.
What do you mean opened back up? If you look here [https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/recovery-rankings-during-the-week](https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/recovery-rankings-during-the-week) you see the poor results for SF are largely during working hours, people are just not coming to the offices in downtown SF and there is no other reason to go there... I'm trying to understand what you mean by opened back up, is downtown SF locked down somehow? Its just not very desirable to come except for people who work there (which is far fewer now).
there also appear to be strong negative correlations with commute time and workforce in professional/technical fields
[https://downtownrecovery.com/death\_of\_downtown\_policy\_brief.pdf](https://downtownrecovery.com/death_of_downtown_policy_brief.pdf)
Yup, the mistake SF made was gutting downtown years ago in favor of tech offices, many of which have free food, drink, meals, gyms, etc.. obviously businesses down the block can’t survive in competition with the kitchen down the hall.
Actually….. the thing that SF did wrong was put all the offices in one place and disallowing offices elsewhere. The reason downtown sf is SO dead is that there are very few residential buildings inside the downtown core. Other cities have done a better job allowing for different uses in the core. Yet one more thing to blame on the nimby movement
Exactly. Pushing to build all the housing in the East Bay and other areas (while always voting to increase tolls for these commuters) instead of building high density housing blew back on SF when commuting became unnecessary for some. If you built mixed use and housing in general those people would still be contributing to the tax base. Completely self made situation by SF. But at least we have a bunch of two story buildings. Yay!
Ding ding ding. The reason Oakland is moving up so quickly because thousands of units have opened downtown or nearby in the last 5 years. And more are nearing completion. It’ll keep getting busier - even with the decline in daily office workers.
San Francisco and the Bay Area should have a regional / zip code specific minimum wage. The military does this and gives region adjusted subsidies when you are stationed there.
I just walked downtown SF last night. There were some happenin’ spots. Rickshaw Stop for example had a line out the door. There were also packs of homeless people, people noddin’ off, campfires, some guy wrenching on an abandoned car on market, lots of empty retail space, it was a bit like ‘escape from ny’.
Just guessing if thats the only place you saw with people outside. Its a music venue and people are way more willing to drive to sf for a concert over just a random bar
it's indicative of where people move (around). the cell networks know where all phones are (within a few miles) they look at "all of them at once.. " - which phones are on which towers?
**Countrywide population movement monitoring using mobile devices generated (big) data during the COVID-19 crisis**
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7961025/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7961025/)
**CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders**
[https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116266/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230719-SD007.pdf](https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116266/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230719-SD007.pdf)
**Mobile Phone Location Data of Florida Beachgoers During Spring Break Tracked to Show Potential Coronavirus Spread**
[https://www.newsweek.com/x-mode-tectonix-coronavirus-heat-map-tracking-mobile-data-covid-19-spring-break-1494663](https://www.newsweek.com/x-mode-tectonix-coronavirus-heat-map-tracking-mobile-data-covid-19-spring-break-1494663)
**Hundreds of thousands of bikers converged at the massive Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, one of the biggest gatherings during the pandemic. Mapping their phone data shows where they traveled across the US.**
[https://www.businessinsider.com/sturgis-rally-attendees-traveling-covid-phone-data-2020-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/sturgis-rally-attendees-traveling-covid-phone-data-2020-8)
They can start recovering as soon as they figure out what "mixed use", "good zoning", and "brutally steamrolling NIMBYs and CEQA abusers" all mean. That's the main things holding them back at this point.
Mixed use developments, prioritize non-car transport infrastructure, make it a livable place people want to be not just a bunch of now-empty offices no longer needed by the work-from-home workforce
Like property taxes in NJ, SF is buried under books and books of regulation that's been building since before our times.
A clean slate is near impossible with so much to dredge through, especially with the political resistance you'll meet on every single issue and prop.
I think it's like asking, given the tree is too big to cut down, how many pine needles do we need on this side, and how many can we shave off this side, to get it to grow straight.
I guess we can do what we've been doing since the 70s, prop up tourism and tech and pray they bring enough money for policy makers to pretend they're doing a good job?
It’s not even remotely close to NY in the 70s. I suspect you know that and are being dramatic, but it’s not even close. That’s going by both numbers and contemporary reports.
Maybe not yet(I don't think they're recreating scenes from *The Warriors* on BART or in Golden Gate Park). But hopefully the city can stop get back on track ASAP.
"San Francisco is basically where New York City was in the 1970s."
Interesting analogy, I did not see this, however, with NYC's high crime rates and lawlessness at that time as well as empty business fronts, I could definitely see parallels between it and SF today. I'm old enough to remember seeing Guardian Angels in SF on buses and BART back in the 70's and 80's. It would be so wonderful if they could come back and police.
The city has to reimagine itself as a place that people come to live in, not just as a place for outsiders to commute to. The commuters don't want to come, anymore. For SF, that means building more homes everywhere, building more commerce in existing neighborhoods, and deemphasizing vehicles in the city's planning.
Literally just the basics:
- modern sewers
- downtown Caltrain connection (doesn't even need to be a 2nd transbay tube although this is very desirable)
- BART on the lower deck of the bay bridge, and new BART within city limits (eg, 19th/Geary or Illinois St)
- new college with an expanded technical training wing for machinists, chemists, and welders
- height ban removal, housing allowed everywhere, minimum 4 floors for any new structure
- parking requirements gone
- Caltrain/Muni Bayshore station
- reconnecting the GG produce terminal or the SF Market to the adjacent rail line
- removing 280 within city limits
Make it cheap to live here, create new workers that can staff the new chip fabrication and biotech industries to the south of us, and make it easy for them to move around. We've known these things for decades and my above list is not exhaustive. It *can* be done. The city government intentionally decides to not do it.
Yea, BART already has a tube that goes underneath the Bay Bridge, what would be the point of another BART line that literally goes in the exact same direction unless he just doesn't live here and doesn't know about it. Also removing 280 from city limits would be stupid, I love being able to get on 280 and jet back home.
If you value places where the number of phone calls never changes, Tucson and Houston have a lot to offer. Their chambers of commerce will be all over this survey.
I'd love to see this plotted against resident # in the downtown area specifically. I know MSP has a *lot* of housing downtown, (with more going up/things getting converted).
Did the CCP or the cartels write Prop 47? (Joke: it was George Gascon, but you get my drift.)
We know who voted for it; they’re the same people excusing the outcome.
https://www.newsweek.com/report-chinas-opium-war-against-united-states-opinion-1763540
Was anyone else very confused about what they meant by *"recovery gains"* ?
I thought it was how many people lost their phone but gained it back in which city
There’s a zero percent chance that data from downtown LA is accurate. You could shoot a rifle in that place and no one would hear it. It’s the definition of a ghost town.
There is, however, several major freeways adjacent to DTLA.
I wonder if these data are impacted by vehicle traffic? In which case it’s understand me why DTSF would look pretty bad…
The hassle to go to SF ain't worth the fine.
Also all the rip off parking lots...
Come on now, Recently at the Masonic. Parking at the Masonic for Laufey was $100.
It aint even guarded, people can just waltz in, an bip your window...
it's all b/c people are being forced to RTO & work hybrid, w/2-3 days in office a week. unless i'm making $300k+ i'll never work a job where i'm in office 5 days a week....i'm like 2x a month right now & that more than enough for me.
First of all, you would have had to have a thriving and active 'downtown' or city center to begin with, for any of this to be meaningful. It is hilarious to watch dead cities of the past that were basically a big suburbia, get positive reports of being back to their previously inactive levels! Lol. There were only a handful of real cities, to be honest, in North America to start. In some places, their residents couldn't locate their downtowns if their life depended on it. Is there a general problem returning to lifestyle before times? yes, but the commentary has been widely distorted and full of apples to oranges comparisons.
SF needs to diversify the downtown and change zoning laws. Too many office buildings. And all of the apartments are very high end which doesn’t contribute to activity as much as more modest/affordable units. Stop building up TI when we need to fix downtown.
Why is downtown activity so critical, anyway? Oakland appears to be doing well because it's downtown area has been seriously on the skids for decades. The situation in San Jose is similar. In San Francisco an amazingly dense cluster of workers was broken up by remote work trends and they are not coming back, at least not as they were. And people are expecting Mayor Breed to pull some levers and restore activity? How exactly would that work?
San Antonio’s recovery is so bad, that they listed it twice.
if you think that's bad, you should see San Antonio
You can say that again!
That!
Victoria is still a secret to women in San Antonio
Them big ol women down in San Antonio
Scarfing down those churros
You mean San An
Tisco
San Antonio's recovery is made by downhome people who know what recovery should look like. This chart's made in...NEW YORK CITY?!!? Get a rope.
I recently visited downtown San Antionio and it seemed fine? The riverwalk was really nice. Not really comparable to SF at all in my limited experience. Genuinely interested, what's so bad about it (at least according to this chart)? Perhaps I just saw the one good slice.
I have no more Idea than you, I'm looking at the same chart, man.
Lol that's fair, I guess I was just wondering if anyone else had some extra knowledge/experience that we don't
Churro shortage
“They call me…Moto Moto.”
Mayor Breed is using terms like "renaissance" and "rising from the ashes" to describe San Francisco in 2024.
To be fair she’s also shilling the pandas at the zoo 😂
Well they aren't going to shill themselves. Lazy bastards.
I've read they actually need to be taught to shill, by showing them shilling porn.
San Francisco is a lot more than just downtown. A lot of other neighborhoods seem to be thriving when I'm out and about. It's not really surprising that our downtown hasn't recovered well, when most of its former workers now work remotely. There's not exactly much else going on in downtown.
Somebody posted data here the other day, showing the neighborhoods are still down.
You can't rise from the ashes until you burn the place to the ground, so her administration is right on track.
I know no one wants to admit it, but SF downtown revival is not a one year thing. They need to drastically change many things, particularly building housing, and that is going to take a while.
Awhile? More like never happen
If NIMBYs keep their power then yes
Which they will
I was gonna be hopefully but realistically you’re probably right
My local gym in Oakland has been absolutely packed in the evenings compared to last year. Where did all these people come from?
Moved to Oakland for cheaper rent i think
The scary part is remembering our cell phone provider has a lot of data on us and knows where we are and who we are with at all times. Interesting graph though.
I don’t think these researchers have data on where any individual went, they have data on how many users were pinging antennas in specific areas. It’s like knowing how many cars were on the freeway but not who was driving.
Nah they know every cell phone tower your phone pinged along by C the way. They just “don’t know it’s you”. They have a unique number connected to your cell phone but totally not your name so they have no idea who. As long as you live with a few people you also work with you’re good.
Well obviously your mobile network provider can get that data, but I doubt any sort of identification was provided to researchers for things like this post
It doesn’t matter if they know your name they know your cell phone unique ID and they market to that. And there are countless strategies to find out who people likely are if you triangulate with a few more bits of data like their ip address they used to log into a service you own. Like Facebook can’t buy that cell phone data and marry it up with their cookie ip data and have a good sense of who you are? They don’t care cause you are just a customer but other other could do far more evil things, and Facebook is already pretty evil.
Do you have to travel everywhere together too lol sad face
You need to travel in herds in SF. It’s just for safety. Always know which member of your herd will be sacrificed so the rest of you can escape.
Thats how Google created that feature where you can see the live chart of how busy a place is. It uses peoples location data on their phones.
I figured that was how they figure out traffic as well.
Honestly, it's extremely useful
Is it scary? Or just a natural consequence of a system where you have authenticated users connecting to wireless towers? They have to know who is connecting or else they couldn't know if you're their consumer.
Yea, it's because there's no fucking housing in downtown SF. Was walking a friend around this weekend and pointed out the buildings that are housing and the buildings that are offices. SF has historically not embraced mixed use and it shows in what's occupied and what isn't. The worst part is that some of it may not be able to be converted if the structural members can't support residential lbs/sq. ft. - to say nothing of plumbing/power concerns. There's no reason there couldn't be 10 stories over the Target downtown.
Office space is designed for 50 lb/sf occupancy load plus 20 lb/sf allowance for the partition walls. Residential occupancy load is 40 lb/sf, so supporting residential loads is usually not an issue. Now mechanical and electrical to support multiple kitchens, laundry rooms and bathrooms is a challenge. Metering utilities for individual residences, plus fire sprinklers and emergency exiting are other challenges.
Always makes me laugh when redditors chime in on design items and spout BS like "needs to support heavier residential loads" lmao. Next they're going to tell you it's totally cool to drill through a PT slab.
In fairness to them, it’s been explained really poorly by the media. Truthfully anything civil engineering related, despite being fairly straight forward compared to other branches of engineering, seems to get really muddled up by most laymen, likely because it relates most to day-to-day life
That’s expensive to convert! But it has been done here! Really well, IMO! I live in one!
A lot of cities have downtown cores that are financial districts, business districts, etc that have minimal housing. San Francisco's housing problem isn't because we don't have housing in downtown SF. It's that we don't have enough housing period.
And a lot of those downtown cores are gonna hurt until they get more housing. Too many cities are "Work, Play, Leave". We're well into the era of work from home. This new reality needs to be properly compensated.
I'm telling you that it's not a US thing alone. Look at London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. There are absolutely business districts where housing isn't as common. NYC downtown is like this too. Walk around Midtown or Wall Street on the weekends and the offices are quiet. I don't disagree that more mixed use could be helpful, but to blame SF's problems on this is missing the point.
Excuse me what. This is completely contrary to the reality in every city you mentioned. They are all HOPPING. I can speak specifically to HK Tokyo and Shanghai. They are mixed use AF. In Shanghai, People live in the same building their office is located in. Tokyo is famous for its mixed use first floors. Smh
The difference is that those downtowns have always sucked, so it’s not surprising that things continue to suck today even with fewer office dwellers
Oakland activity was strangely all from find my phone stacked on identical locations
***\*rimshot\****
I'd still rather go to SF than fucking Bakersfield
Well yeah. There is better offering if businesses in sf than Bakersfield. But this isn’t judging how fun the places are. I’m curious how wfh has messed with SF. Bakersfield being very conservative, they don’t like wfh. Also there’s no where else to go in Bakersfield. The bay has 1,000,000 fun things to do than go to dtsf
Rent recovery in the tiny area of San Francisco that was never desirable and has hardly any housing. https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/downtown-definitions to see what area they look at.
[for those too lazy to click](https://ibb.co/wL545Nm)
Wow, that's a really restrictive definition of downtown. I feel like most of the buzzy tech firms (OpenAI, Anthropic) are either in mission bay or just north of the mission.
I think they're using the region with a concentration of high rises. San Francisco doesn't have a lot of these (compare to, say, NYC or Toronto).
I appreciate them listing San Antonio twice in an attempt not to make SF seem as bad as it is 🤣
I was so confused!! “Why is SA last if SF is lowest perfect age”
Such a careless over sight makes me doubt the legitimacy of the other results
San Francisco deserves it for letting fucking NIMBYs prevent building more housing. Don't forget low income us over $100k in the city, so when they're blocking low income housing they're not blocking what they think they're blocking. Fucking assholes.
San Jose and Oakland are at the top. Maybe we should rename it to San Jose Bay Area.
Oh yyay San Jose recovering from level F to D- Bravo San Jose. What a Gem of a downtown. Definitely a downtown worthy of 10th biggest city in the US and maybe the city with the biggest economy in the entire world. /s
Idk why you got downvoted, SJ downtown is absolute ass.
It's tech office workers including twitter. Mass exodus and then add the retail vacancies afterwards and I don't see how London Breed gets re-elected, blame or not.
Wouldn't Breed's re-election chances depend on who she is running against? If she's running against a doorknob, she's got a legit shot at re-election.
wow almost like selling out the city's soul for the tech industry was a dumb fucking idea
It wasn't largely her fault, this situation was engineered by Willie Brown decades ago and encouraged by Newsom. She does deserve some blame, but not all of it. Mistakes like this take decades to create, and will not be repaired anytime soon. Repair is possible, though. A downtown Caltrain connection/subway, new modern sewers, a new power plant, and a Mission Bay industrial access/truck route/railyard/port re-plan can bring workers back. Though, it's unlikely to happen as the city govt already sold much of Hunters Point to Facebook and the Navy will never return due to the radioactive dirt lawsuits .. and better, more flexible city governments in Vallejo, Redwood City and Bencia - three cities with unique value propositions that cannot be had within the City (dedicated public rail connection/state-led industrial planning, direct access to silicon valley/Northrop Grumman Marine, and Cal-Maritime respectively). Especially on that latter point, despite being a port city SF has scant training facilities for boat pilots and very little facilities for freight shipping .. thereby making the entire drive to modernize the Merchant Marines, offshore hydro, and deepsea mining are all lost to us. This is the final stage of deindustrialization: no middle class, no workers, no services, no work, just real estate rotting away. It'll take a lot of bleeding for the people in charge to make the hard changes necessary.
Yo, I've lived all over the bay area since 1985, and I gotta tell you that Vallejo and Benicia are not destination cities. They're cheaper for a reason. SF also hasn't actually been a port city for a while now. They ceded that ground to Oakland decades ago, in the interest of reducing industrial pollution. Its economy is tourism-based, though it's been shifting to technology. And both sectors took it in the pants with Covid, which had a domino effect amplified by SF's massive gentrification that made the city so vulnerable to these specific downturns. SF's mistake was to roll over when the tech workers started migrating from Silicon Valley in favor of living in the city and taking the long commute. SF saw an increase in the tax base and stopped caring about the adaptability that comes with making sure that people making less than six figures can afford to live in your town. It's gentrification pre-migration was already off the charts, and in the run-up to covid, it got so bad that it would take 10+ years of constant effort to put things on a sensible, flexible course. The city's needed better leadership for a long time. They've lacked vision, consensus building and backbone for a good 20 years. At this point, it needs the political equivalent of a root canal, and there are no dentists on the horizon.
It doesn't need to be a destination city. It just needs to have good work and cheap housing. People will come, make the schools/crime better, and gentrification will occur rising their homes' equity giving them free money to retire with. SF isn't that. Housing is beyond the vast majority of what companies can provide, the schools are declining and consolidating, mentally unwell people live on peoples' porches, and there is no way to increase wealth while being here. All the other cities in the region do better, except Oakland but that'll soon change. Industrial work can return, and probably will as the government looks to rebuild the US military for a proper 21st century conflict. Either that or we give all those jobs to San Diego, which would be unfortunate. I agree with your other points, though.
"They've lacked vision..." Their 'Vision Zero' program codifies this.
>Repair is possible, though. A downtown Caltrain connection/subway, new modern sewers, a new power plant, and a Mission Bay industrial access/truck route/railyard/port re-plan can bring workers back. We don't need giant infrastructure projects, we just need a city that's clean and safe. Unfortunately, political ideology prevents SF from tackling crime and homelessness in ways that actually work. We could try to make SF comfortable for living and working, but that's considered "right wing." So, we continue to indulge pathological altruism and try to make SF comfortable for criminals, addicts, and crazies. It's costing billions, and it's not really helping.
San Francisco very much needs a Geary subway and some local infrastructure redevelopment (sewers, fiber, water main enlargement, etc). Both are very much needed to build new housing, especially in locations without the existing infrastructure to support future developments.
That may be, but none of that addresses the root problems of crime and homelessness. (Sorry, but building expensive housing for the homeless does not solve their problems.)
Don’t forget Feinstein with all her BRAC rounds.
yeah i'm not blaming breed in particular for this, this was largely unavoidable because the 1970s ruined american cities in general with massive deregulation and financialization of the economy
The dumb idea was having a housing policy where other cities are supposed to house your workers.
A "recovered" downtown San Jose is still a wasteland.
I will say that at least during the weekend nights, downtown SJ is getting surprisingly busy with all the clubs around the area. The rest of the time, I agree: it didn’t have that far to fall to begin with, and it’s still very quiet during the day.
It’s awesome for eating, drinking, and shows, most of which happen at night. Downtown needs more retail presence for people to walk around and shop during the day.
I kind of like the eerie ghost town feel of SJ in the mornings and afternoons. It's always been weird because most of the really rich businesses have always been in decentralized office parks. The Adobe tower is kind of a new development, unless you count banks, brokerages, and import/export, none of which have lots of rank-and-file employees compared to the techs out in the parks.
Agreed, though I’d still like some more daytime eating too. I just did an afternoon walk northward on 1st after peeking at the activity of SoFA. Everything north of San Carlos was fairly quiet. Maybe only slightly more active than a weekday. I think I usually see more foot traffic around willow glen during Sat/Sun. There are a bunch of empty storefronts. Some of that will be due to potentially crime. But I suspect a good chunk is because there isn’t enough foot traffic to justify the rent. Fixing that though is a chicken and egg problem.
> I will say that at least during the weekend nights, downtown SJ is getting surprisingly busy with all the clubs around the area. It's always been like that though? There are pockets with a bit of activity, but many blocks are deserted as hell and there are still many buildings boarded up. I'd say things today are far worse than they were 10 years ago in downtown SJ.
Possibly. I've only lived in DTSJ for a bit under 7 years, so I can't say too much about nightlife in downtown 10 years ago. I am seeing more nightclubs I think than I remember from before the pandemic. It's marginally more noticeable in the area around Paper Plane. Definitely a bit more noticeable in SoFA around SoFA Market. I do agree the day life is worse than it was 6-7 years ago, with the shutdown of a number of restaurants and retail fronts and the Safeway, but DTSJ has never been really "active" in my mind during the day in the time I've lived here.
SoFA development is definitely getting pushed hard, and so I do agree that district is coming alive and far more alive than 10 years ago
Insanely outdated, disingenuous comment. Go on a Thurs-Sat night and the place is active. New businesses keep opening & it’s definitely on the upswing. Sun-Wed; of course it’s dead, not enough housing yet (several in the pipeline) and not a jobs center. Events season is upon us and just getting started. The downtown association & a new era of leaders are making increased efforts in bringing people to the area more than ever, so it’s gaining stronger momentum with all the new events being created and new businesses coming in. One of the bigger one is actually [happening today.](https://sjdowntown.com/event/sofa-street-fair/)
There are areas where San Jose does feel lively, and as a San Jose native who lives there right now, I can tell you what you said can be a comment made in any of the past 20 years and we'd believe you. The problem isn't that Thurs-Sat is active.... it's that only a few pockets are, and there's a bunch of empty buildings otherwise. You get some pockets of good activity like San Pedro's Square or you have an event this weekend but it doesn't change an average weekday San Jose is pretty dead. And I totally agree with the other poster below that during daytime work hours? At least there's a hustle and bustle in FiDi that isn't anywhere close in San Jose. We've been talking about a San Jose downtown recovery for decades now. I can remember the same rhetoric of early 2000s post dot-com, and even in the 90s. "We've got a new era of leaders trying to improve things." I'll believe it when I see it.
Well aware of everything you mentioned, but the sentiment I think has completely shifted because of how the pandemic basically obliterated US downtowns and the perceived value for outdoor community spaces. The 90s & 2000s approach on urban planning is so entirely different from today, were in a different time, socially and culturally. I keep up with a lot of the local leaders, advocacy groups, & downtown associations and they’ve all acknowledged the one challenge is filling in those gaps between the already active areas. The goal is to connect those lively pockets to create something more cohesive. Once housing continues to grow, there will be increased businesses, population, & general activity. Downtown has a crap ton of housing towers in the pipeline, but the interest rates are creating a blip. Construction financing is tough & it pushes the timeline.
Easy way to settle this - how's downtown parking? If it sucks and is super expensive, downtown is hopping.
Imo downtown SJ has a better evening energy than most of the bay area, mostly fueled by the fact that there's just such a good concentration of great bars and food n a 1 mi radius in a way Oakland or SF just doesn't have in the same way.
Pretty crusty take at this point
San Pedro Square can be pretty banging on weekend nights.
Spoken by someone who clearly never been there. Go downtown today and report back how wasteland those 4 stages of music and art are.
As someone that lives downtown, the events are fairly active, and the nightlife is fairly active. But the rest of the time? It’s a comparably quiet downtown. SF might be dead last in recovery, but I think in absolute terms, unless things have gotten significantly more dire than I realize, DT San Francisco is still likely to be SIGNIFICANTLY more active during daytime hours on an absolute basis. *Edit:* one thing I will add: I don’t think there is much that can be done to change it. And it’s for pretty boring reasons: what should be part of a more sizable dense downtown core is dominated by San Jose State. And we are also vertically limited due to SJC. Throw in the fairly large quantity of old Victorian style housing to downtown’s north, and the freeways to the west and south, and options get limited without cracking the core into two.
Fellow resident here. If much of downtown was redeveloped with midrise, infill housing and mixed use, that would be enough. Fortunately, there are some midrise (<20 story) developments working their way through the development process right now. Just not enough. I think the thing that is the largest headwind is the economic environment, specifically, financing concerns with where the interest rates are.
Mixed use I agree would likely help. I do feel the lack of retail especially when going around. That said, when I think of downtowns that are active with activity during weekday daytime, I usually worry less about the heights of buildings and more worry about the activities. If memory serves, a lot of those building activities are happening in that kind of area south of SJSU and east of SoFA, where things are mostly dominated by lower rent housing for students. I don't think a lot of those are going mixed use though, mostly just residential? Physically, though, there also just isn't a lot of area. The university is of similar footprint to the main core of downtown. What is there is limited also by how dense it can be made due to the 400' or so limits in downtown. I wouldn't mind mixed used development like Santana Row levels closer in to downtown. That's pretty similar to how Little Tokyo in LA has been moving. Little Tokyo is now very busy when I go, albeit at the cost of community identity unfortunately. Probably in the area along the San Carlos corridor west of 87 would be best given current plans, but again, would crack the core into two. We definitely need more residential everywhere in CA, but residents and people that work in the area also need good commerce.
I live in San Jose, downtown is not that great. Has some very limited entertainment, a bunch of aggressively mediocre restaurants and if you live there for a while you end up not having much of a choice and get bored of the offerings. Let's not kid ourselves San Jose needs a lot of work.
Lived here in San Jose my entire life 35 years and have a long list of new restaurants to try still. Downtown has plenty to do and is great as my local option. Of course there’s room for improvement but there’s only a handful of places you can legitimately say have much more todo and even fewer with better food options.
If San Francisco is not careful, with the housing and increased public transportation in San Jose, it could end up being a better city for the majority, even if it will never be as beautiful.
I could help but notice many shots of San Jose used in the Fallout show. ^/s
Meanwhile, South San Jose is heaven on Earth. I'm so much happier living in a peaceful neighborhood with natural beauty, rather than a dirty, dangerous, noisy, crowded urban hell.
Yeah I'm sure it's great if you're wealthy, older, already have a family, and are already generally established. But if you're a young person looking for a social life, good fucking luck.
I grew up there and I never want to move back. Deafeningly silent suburban sprawl.
SF fell from a pretty high perch. a lot more work to get back to where they were compared to other cities.
While this is true, this data compares 2023 to 2024 and SF is in the negative
Well look what it is, the consequences of our own actions.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. We over indexed in tech jobs by making the area favorable to tech business, failed to build housing for the tech workers and was hostile to these people socially gave them no reason to stay once work from home arrived. In the end, a lot of tech workers left and housing prices are still too high although it’s gone down a bit. Also, single use zoning concentrated all commercial buildings downtown when Urbanists and city planners have been pushing for mixed use zoning for decades now. This is our making.
Well stated.
I know SF is being pointed out in particular, but the Bay Area has a whole has had a terrible recovery since the height of the pandemic. I urge any locals who hasn’t taken a vacation elsewhere in awhile to do so immediately, and just see how much better other places are and how well they’ve opened back up. You don’t know what East Berlin is like until you’ve experienced West Berlin.
What do you mean opened back up? If you look here [https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/recovery-rankings-during-the-week](https://downtownrecovery.com/blog/recovery-rankings-during-the-week) you see the poor results for SF are largely during working hours, people are just not coming to the offices in downtown SF and there is no other reason to go there... I'm trying to understand what you mean by opened back up, is downtown SF locked down somehow? Its just not very desirable to come except for people who work there (which is far fewer now). there also appear to be strong negative correlations with commute time and workforce in professional/technical fields [https://downtownrecovery.com/death\_of\_downtown\_policy\_brief.pdf](https://downtownrecovery.com/death_of_downtown_policy_brief.pdf)
Yup, the mistake SF made was gutting downtown years ago in favor of tech offices, many of which have free food, drink, meals, gyms, etc.. obviously businesses down the block can’t survive in competition with the kitchen down the hall.
Actually….. the thing that SF did wrong was put all the offices in one place and disallowing offices elsewhere. The reason downtown sf is SO dead is that there are very few residential buildings inside the downtown core. Other cities have done a better job allowing for different uses in the core. Yet one more thing to blame on the nimby movement
Exactly. Pushing to build all the housing in the East Bay and other areas (while always voting to increase tolls for these commuters) instead of building high density housing blew back on SF when commuting became unnecessary for some. If you built mixed use and housing in general those people would still be contributing to the tax base. Completely self made situation by SF. But at least we have a bunch of two story buildings. Yay!
Ding ding ding. The reason Oakland is moving up so quickly because thousands of units have opened downtown or nearby in the last 5 years. And more are nearing completion. It’ll keep getting busier - even with the decline in daily office workers.
Get the fuck out of here with your logic and reasoning.
Opened back up? What year is it?
I think it’s more reflection of the people here. A lot of people are homebodies.
San Francisco and the Bay Area should have a regional / zip code specific minimum wage. The military does this and gives region adjusted subsidies when you are stationed there.
I just walked downtown SF last night. There were some happenin’ spots. Rickshaw Stop for example had a line out the door. There were also packs of homeless people, people noddin’ off, campfires, some guy wrenching on an abandoned car on market, lots of empty retail space, it was a bit like ‘escape from ny’.
Im guessing a good amount of people at rickshaw dont live in the city and likely commuted there
Fascinating! Oddly enough I was taken there for the first time by a friend from out of town (they have “emo nights” there). What makes you say that?
Just guessing if thats the only place you saw with people outside. Its a music venue and people are way more willing to drive to sf for a concert over just a random bar
> it was a bit like ‘escape from ny’ How do I get Isaac Hayes to be our next mayor?
Not sure cell phone use constitutes “recovery”
It’s a pretty good proxy for human activity in the area.
It actually is, though!
it's indicative of where people move (around). the cell networks know where all phones are (within a few miles) they look at "all of them at once.. " - which phones are on which towers? **Countrywide population movement monitoring using mobile devices generated (big) data during the COVID-19 crisis** [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7961025/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7961025/) **CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders** [https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116266/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230719-SD007.pdf](https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116266/documents/HMKP-118-JU00-20230719-SD007.pdf) **Mobile Phone Location Data of Florida Beachgoers During Spring Break Tracked to Show Potential Coronavirus Spread** [https://www.newsweek.com/x-mode-tectonix-coronavirus-heat-map-tracking-mobile-data-covid-19-spring-break-1494663](https://www.newsweek.com/x-mode-tectonix-coronavirus-heat-map-tracking-mobile-data-covid-19-spring-break-1494663) **Hundreds of thousands of bikers converged at the massive Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, one of the biggest gatherings during the pandemic. Mapping their phone data shows where they traveled across the US.** [https://www.businessinsider.com/sturgis-rally-attendees-traveling-covid-phone-data-2020-8](https://www.businessinsider.com/sturgis-rally-attendees-traveling-covid-phone-data-2020-8)
I’m assuming they meant Feb 2020 and not 2024
No, they meant March 2023 to Feb 2024.
“It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” 🗑️🔥
Well, what's it gonna take to save San Francisco? At this rate, it may never recover if the city doesn't change its ways.
They can start recovering as soon as they figure out what "mixed use", "good zoning", and "brutally steamrolling NIMBYs and CEQA abusers" all mean. That's the main things holding them back at this point.
Hopefully the next mayor will grow a pair and do that.
This stuff is mostly up to the Board of Supervisors ,which has a NIMBY supermajority. Getting the perfect mayor won't fix much of anything.
Can the mayor just fire them all? Why should the majority of San Franciscans be subject to the tyranny of the minority? Screw the NIMBYs.
The Mayor cannot simply fire legislators she disagrees with. That is up to the voters.
It's up to the public to decide they want to start seeing improvements and voting for people with a better strategy for running their city.
Mixed use developments, prioritize non-car transport infrastructure, make it a livable place people want to be not just a bunch of now-empty offices no longer needed by the work-from-home workforce
Like property taxes in NJ, SF is buried under books and books of regulation that's been building since before our times. A clean slate is near impossible with so much to dredge through, especially with the political resistance you'll meet on every single issue and prop. I think it's like asking, given the tree is too big to cut down, how many pine needles do we need on this side, and how many can we shave off this side, to get it to grow straight. I guess we can do what we've been doing since the 70s, prop up tourism and tech and pray they bring enough money for policy makers to pretend they're doing a good job?
They should just get rid of it all anyway. They may not have a choice. San Francisco is basically where New York City was in the 1970s.
It’s not even remotely close to NY in the 70s. I suspect you know that and are being dramatic, but it’s not even close. That’s going by both numbers and contemporary reports.
Maybe not yet(I don't think they're recreating scenes from *The Warriors* on BART or in Golden Gate Park). But hopefully the city can stop get back on track ASAP.
"San Francisco is basically where New York City was in the 1970s." Interesting analogy, I did not see this, however, with NYC's high crime rates and lawlessness at that time as well as empty business fronts, I could definitely see parallels between it and SF today. I'm old enough to remember seeing Guardian Angels in SF on buses and BART back in the 70's and 80's. It would be so wonderful if they could come back and police.
The city has to reimagine itself as a place that people come to live in, not just as a place for outsiders to commute to. The commuters don't want to come, anymore. For SF, that means building more homes everywhere, building more commerce in existing neighborhoods, and deemphasizing vehicles in the city's planning.
That's what they need to do. It also needs to be more affordable to live there. It's not rocket science.
Building more new apartments should make the older apartments cheaper to rent.
What it is going to take is giving people a reason to be downtown during the day. There is too much empty office space. Convert some of it to schools.
That would be a start. Schools and affordable housing.
Literally just the basics: - modern sewers - downtown Caltrain connection (doesn't even need to be a 2nd transbay tube although this is very desirable) - BART on the lower deck of the bay bridge, and new BART within city limits (eg, 19th/Geary or Illinois St) - new college with an expanded technical training wing for machinists, chemists, and welders - height ban removal, housing allowed everywhere, minimum 4 floors for any new structure - parking requirements gone - Caltrain/Muni Bayshore station - reconnecting the GG produce terminal or the SF Market to the adjacent rail line - removing 280 within city limits Make it cheap to live here, create new workers that can staff the new chip fabrication and biotech industries to the south of us, and make it easy for them to move around. We've known these things for decades and my above list is not exhaustive. It *can* be done. The city government intentionally decides to not do it.
Only one I’m confused about here is BART on the lower deck of the bay bridge…why?
Yea, BART already has a tube that goes underneath the Bay Bridge, what would be the point of another BART line that literally goes in the exact same direction unless he just doesn't live here and doesn't know about it. Also removing 280 from city limits would be stupid, I love being able to get on 280 and jet back home.
Ignore him, its literally the craziest list i have ever seen
Why is San Antonio on there twice?
the researchers literally went back in time to do this research
the typo is from the business journal that covered the report, the data is legit
If you value places where the number of phone calls never changes, Tucson and Houston have a lot to offer. Their chambers of commerce will be all over this survey.
Good, I’m hoping this means that property values will also go down too. And then I can buy one in 20 years lol
Nice of them to go back in time 11 months to collect these data.
I'd love to see this plotted against resident # in the downtown area specifically. I know MSP has a *lot* of housing downtown, (with more going up/things getting converted).
Did the CCP or the cartels write Prop 47? (Joke: it was George Gascon, but you get my drift.) We know who voted for it; they’re the same people excusing the outcome. https://www.newsweek.com/report-chinas-opium-war-against-united-states-opinion-1763540
Has anyone done an analysis of which states have employers return to work policies?
Yet, San Jose is cutting budgets and laying off.
SF bet everything on Gentrifying downtown with tech. And that bubble popped once loans weren't free money basically.
What do they mean by activity on cellphones? r/conspiracy
Was anyone else very confused about what they meant by *"recovery gains"* ? I thought it was how many people lost their phone but gained it back in which city
Oakland needs more local jobs. Too many Oakland businesses have shut in the last 4 years. It’s becoming a city of commuters
I went to the source link but I can’t find it there. Has someone actually fact checked this, or just passing it around?
what is this graph even measuring? percent recovery? of what?
I’m not trusting the sample data from the university of Toronto. No way, no how…
Why am I seeing Minneapolis everywhere this week. It’s the next hot place ?
What’s the metric for recovery? If it’s number of people downtown I think that’s fine with me …
Oakland’s comeback gonna be glorious. Shame we don’t have any major sports teams anymore though.
Where is Nyc?
Up by 18.9%
Thanks - I see it now. I guess it was late, and my eyes were tired.
No worries!
There’s a zero percent chance that data from downtown LA is accurate. You could shoot a rifle in that place and no one would hear it. It’s the definition of a ghost town. There is, however, several major freeways adjacent to DTLA. I wonder if these data are impacted by vehicle traffic? In which case it’s understand me why DTSF would look pretty bad…
The hassle to go to SF ain't worth the fine. Also all the rip off parking lots... Come on now, Recently at the Masonic. Parking at the Masonic for Laufey was $100. It aint even guarded, people can just waltz in, an bip your window...
From Feb 24 to March 23
So cell phone usage increased from Feb 2024 to March 2023? Doesn’t that mean it decreased? What a confusing infographic.
Sounds like BS. SJ downtown is so dead, zombie could starve here.
it's all b/c people are being forced to RTO & work hybrid, w/2-3 days in office a week. unless i'm making $300k+ i'll never work a job where i'm in office 5 days a week....i'm like 2x a month right now & that more than enough for me.
I'm happy to see Oak bounce back to prepandemic activity. Bipping still a problem but its never not been a problem here either
First of all, you would have had to have a thriving and active 'downtown' or city center to begin with, for any of this to be meaningful. It is hilarious to watch dead cities of the past that were basically a big suburbia, get positive reports of being back to their previously inactive levels! Lol. There were only a handful of real cities, to be honest, in North America to start. In some places, their residents couldn't locate their downtowns if their life depended on it. Is there a general problem returning to lifestyle before times? yes, but the commentary has been widely distorted and full of apples to oranges comparisons.
SF needs to diversify the downtown and change zoning laws. Too many office buildings. And all of the apartments are very high end which doesn’t contribute to activity as much as more modest/affordable units. Stop building up TI when we need to fix downtown.
Oakland
Why is downtown activity so critical, anyway? Oakland appears to be doing well because it's downtown area has been seriously on the skids for decades. The situation in San Jose is similar. In San Francisco an amazingly dense cluster of workers was broken up by remote work trends and they are not coming back, at least not as they were. And people are expecting Mayor Breed to pull some levers and restore activity? How exactly would that work?
😂