By Alan Greenblatt : governing – excerpt
The office recession is real, with downtowns in major cities still missing a majority of their pre-pandemic workforce. San Francisco offers a case study in terms of the consequences.
Market Street, the main drag through San Francisco’s downtown, was closed to private cars just before the pandemic. It’s missing office workers and pedestrian life. (All photos Alan Greenblatt/Governing)
Sales were slow during the holidays but Alphonse Verkler stayed optimistic. He manages a cheese and sandwich shop in downtown San Francisco and says that foot traffic had improved from a low point last summer. “Obviously, as you can imagine, it’s not as busy as it once was, but things have picked up,” he says.
Verkler’s shop is half a block from Salesforce Tower, the second-tallest building on the West Coast and headquarters of San Francisco’s largest private employer. It wasn’t great news for the neighborhood when Salesforce announced it was laying off 8,000 people and cutting back on office space at the beginning of the year. The mass layoffs announced in recent days by Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram), while certainly not all impacting San Francisco directly, aren’t a good sign for the city either. Tech companies make up nearly a third of the city’s private-sector payrolls. “It’s not the first time that I have wished San Francisco’s economy was a little more diversified than tech,” says Supervisor Matt Dorsey.
San Francisco already suffers an all-time record office vacancy rate of 27.6 percent. Meta has just put up 34 stories of office space — 435,000 square feet, enough space for 2,000 workers — for sublease…(more)
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