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San Francisco Office Vacancies Reach 35%, Breaking New Record
City is ‘getting so close to hitting bedrock’
According to a new study released on Friday, San Francisco’s office vacancy rate hit a new high of 35% in December, climbing up from 29.4% earlier this year as the economic situation in San Francisco continues to get worse.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, San Francisco had a near 100% office occupation rate throughout the city, thanks in large part to the continuing tech boom and a steady demand for office space. However, with the pandemic, many companies began breaking leases to save money, while others embraced stay-at-home work and declined to continue using office space. Even after restrictions were dropped in 2021 and 2022, more companies switched to a work-from-home model or allowed more work-from-home positions, keeping many companies from returning to offices. In addition, high crime rates as well as a growing number of lease expirations by non-returning companies helped keep vacancy rates well above 20%.
In 2022 however, another major factor spiked vacancy rates yet again. Mass layoffs in the tech industry, which began in earnest in October 2022, quickly wiped out the need for large office complexes and long-term leases. Fueled by economic uncertainty, high inflation, rising insurance costs, more people working from home, the rise of AI and automation, the continued rise of e-commerce, and many companies overcompensating, many large companies shed thousands of employees overnight. Tens of thousands of cuts came from longtime Silicon Valley stalwarts Google, Amazon, Intel, Lyft, Yahoo, Meta and Salesforce, with the second quarter of 2023 even producing many corporate, non-tech layoffs for companies in the city as well.
In 2022 however, another major factor spiked vacancy rates yet again. Mass layoffs in the tech industry,
Half Off: Another San Francisco Office Trades For 50% Discount
4 Cars Set on Fire in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights, Rattling Residents
I thought it was a skit but turns out this was a real San Francisco board meeting
A journalist has shared alarming images of a once-prominent street that's been rocked by store closures in San Francisco.
One snap, taken in the heart of the city's famed shopping district, shows tourists wandering down a gutted Powell Street.
But instead of being graced with an array of shops, cafés, bars, and restaurants, the party is seen encountering countless shuttered storefronts.
More shots from Erica Sandberg show more of the same, and how the thoroughfare that runs adjacent to the city's Downtown, all the way from Market to Fisherman's Wharf, has become a shell of its former self.
San Francisco in a ‘Tough Spot’ as $1.4B Budget Deficit Looms
San Francisco in a ‘Tough Spot’ as $1.4B Budget Deficit Looms
https://sfstandard.com/2024/01/17/san-francisco-budget-deficit-1-4-billion-cuts-london-breed/
San Francisco in a ‘Tough Spot’ as $1.4B Budget Deficit Looms
raise taxes or austerity
raise taxes or austerity
Bay area is so bad I move there for any price. Weather is the only reason it hasn't turned into a Detroit.
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/01/21/status-of-the-housing-bust-in-san-francisco-lowest-price-for-any-december-since-2017-2019-silicon-valley-and-the-bay-area/
All that money is paid to grifters for their political support, and to expand the homeless population to justify yet further increased funding.
Here’s How Long It Took To Buy Locked Up Basic Items in San Francisco Stores ...
Aisle 10 inside the Safeway at Market and Church streets is lined with gleaming, locked acrylic cases stocked with everything from toothpaste and hand soap to sunscreen and K-Y Jelly.
But you can’t just go up to the shelf and grab what you want; you need to press a button to summon an associate to unlock the case. What’s more, the employee won’t even give the item to you. The staffer must put it in a basket and bring it to the register, lest you waltz out the door without paying.
Before I could press said button, a local resident named Danielle did. She and I waited three minutes and 31 seconds for our toothpaste, at which point a worker came over and hurriedly pulled two tubes of Crest off the shelf, put them in a shopping basket and walked away. ...
Two minutes and 34 seconds elapsed before a worker retrieved a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red for me. ...
Stores should go back to clerk-behind-counter model. You pay - you get your toothpaste.
The hardest thing you’ll ever have to comprehend in terms of San Francisco’s government is the city’s leaders aren’t incompetent. This is what they want.
At any given moment, on any given day, there are around 8,000 people sleeping on the streets of the city — one of the wealthiest, per capita, in human history. Once acquainted with the basic facts of the crisis, including the incredible sum of money dedicated to solving the problem, the average San Franciscan concludes the city must be run by morons. How else, with billions of dollars, have city leaders failed to provide a few thousand temporary beds? Even with supportive services, the numbers don’t add up. This is because the average person assumes the small cabal of activists who run the city’s bloated homeless industrial complex want to temporarily shelter and rehabilitate the homeless. They do not. In fact, they are ideologically opposed to the concept. The goal of San Francisco’s activist government is to provide every person who moves to the city with a free, one-bedroom apartment for the rest of their life. City funds are largely allocated to this end. Once placed, this “permanent” solution costs money every year, and every year more people move to the city looking for free housing. The problem compounds.
While the project was never sustainable, the city’s sheep-like wealthy tax base has recently fled for the suburbs. Now, billions of dollars and a decade later, with more people living on the streets than ever, the government faces an impending $724M deficit, with around ten thousand more people reliant on funds, for “free” housing, that could easily cease to exist. This is a ticking time bomb.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy–to be followed by a dictatorship.
18th century Scottish lawyer Alexander Fraser Tytler:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy–to be followed by a dictatorship.
San Francisco’s Brand Is on Life Support. City Leaders Lack Courage To Act
by Hank Plante
Published Jan. 30, 2024
Brands die. Just ask Lord & Taylor, Blockbuster or the California Republican Party.
Even city brands die.
If it’s not dead already, San Francisco's brand is clearly on life support. It happened because officials allowed 4,400 people to destroy it. That’s the number ofunshelteredhomeless people in the city’s official 2022 point-in-time count, and they have essentially held the city’s reputation hostage. ...
A series of district attorneys who didn’t believe in prosecuting criminals didn’t help. DA Terence Hallinan had the worst record in the state in the late 1990s, winning convictions in only a third of his cases. His replacement, Kamala Harris, refused to seek the death penalty for a cop killer, drawing widespread condemnation from police and a rebuke from Sen. Dianne Feinstein at the funeral of the officer, Isaac Espinoza. George Gascón famously became the co-author of Proposition 47, which lowered the penalty for smash-and-grab thefts under $950 to misdemeanors. And Chesa Boudin, who was kicked out of office by voters in 2022, never seemed to realize that voters expected him to be a public prosecutor, not the public defender he once was.
Nor did it help when Mayor London Breed announced cuts of $120 million from the police and sheriff’s department budgets in 2020. The cops got the message. Who could blame them for feeling disrespected and less aggressive about fighting crime? ...
The city certainly cleaned up many streets by enforcing anti-camping laws during last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference. But permanently doing those things would require city officials to admit their progressive policies have failed.
I’m not convinced the city’s current political leadership has the courage to do that. San Francisco politics are tribal; many leaders are too afraid of looking “conservative” in a liberal town if they take a tougher approach. But the public backlash is real, and it may be the spark the city needs to stop hugging criminals, even if local politicians are the last to realize it.
I spoke with a lady today that formerly lived in the Bay Area of California where she worked as an RN at an Oakland hospital. Just the other day, she spoke with a fellow RN that still works at the same hospital. Her friend told her that the hospital just put out a very strong warning for all hospital employees, stating that they should not leave the premises for lunch, due entirely to the extremely high crime in the area.
The decay of that entire area is alarming, and almost hard to believe.
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