If IT Workers Stay Home, What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown in America'? (nytimes.com) 254
"Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America," reports the New York Times. "On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy..."
[T]he vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019. Occupancy of the city's offices is roughly 7 percentage points below that of those in the average major American city, according to Kastle, the building security firm.
More ominous for the city is that its downtown business district — the bedrock of its economy and tax base — revolves around a technology industry that is uniquely equipped and enthusiastic about letting workers stay home indefinitely. In the space of a few months, Jeremy Stoppelman, the chief executive of Yelp, went from running a company that was rooted in the city to vacating Yelp's longtime headquarters and allowing its roughly 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in their country.
"I feel like I've seen the future," he said.
Decisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what's next. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation's central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home.... The city's chief economist, Ted Egan, has warned about a looming loss of tax revenue as vacancies pile up. Brokers have tried to counter that narrative by talking up a "flight to quality" in which companies upgrade to higher-end space. Business groups and city leaders hope to recast the urban core as a more residential neighborhood built around people as well as businesses but leave out that office rents would probably have to plunge for those plans to be viable.
Below the surface of spin is a downtown that is trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek.... On Wednesdays, offices in San Francisco are at roughly 50 percent of their prepandemic levels; on Fridays, they're not even at 30 percent.... In a typical downturn, the turnaround is a fairly simple equation of rents falling far enough to attract new tenants and the economy improving fast enough to stimulate new demand. But now there's a more existential question of what the point of a city's downtown even is.
More ominous for the city is that its downtown business district — the bedrock of its economy and tax base — revolves around a technology industry that is uniquely equipped and enthusiastic about letting workers stay home indefinitely. In the space of a few months, Jeremy Stoppelman, the chief executive of Yelp, went from running a company that was rooted in the city to vacating Yelp's longtime headquarters and allowing its roughly 4,400 employees to work from anywhere in their country.
"I feel like I've seen the future," he said.
Decisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what's next. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation's central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home.... The city's chief economist, Ted Egan, has warned about a looming loss of tax revenue as vacancies pile up. Brokers have tried to counter that narrative by talking up a "flight to quality" in which companies upgrade to higher-end space. Business groups and city leaders hope to recast the urban core as a more residential neighborhood built around people as well as businesses but leave out that office rents would probably have to plunge for those plans to be viable.
Below the surface of spin is a downtown that is trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek.... On Wednesdays, offices in San Francisco are at roughly 50 percent of their prepandemic levels; on Fridays, they're not even at 30 percent.... In a typical downturn, the turnaround is a fairly simple equation of rents falling far enough to attract new tenants and the economy improving fast enough to stimulate new demand. But now there's a more existential question of what the point of a city's downtown even is.
What always happens... (Score:5, Insightful)
The market takes over, property prices decline, and people who don't have silicon valley wages, or local small businesses without silicon valley incomes can afford them and thrive.
The only people getting hurt by this are massive banks with significant property investments, and large businesses who overpaid for expensive property. Both those can take the hit, and the hit gets redistributed to the little guy.
It's a good thing. Since covid and more remote working my small village has thrived with small businesses, we have a new sandwich shop with better food and drinks than any of the big chain tax evading shit shows like Starbucks who are whinging about the fact people like me aren't buying their overpriced goods in the city centre anymore.
And I can't say I have the slightest bit of sympathy for them. It's fairly simple - more affordable buildings means more affordable housing and more affordable commercial property for small businesses. That's not a bad thing by any measure.
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Yeah who needs those things like fire departments or paved roads.
Re: What always happens... (Score:2)
From what I can tell after having lived in California for 3 months, they defunded both of those a long time ago. My guess is they wanted to defund the police, but somebody filled out the wrong form, and nobody seems to have noticed. Instead they defunded everything else, meanwhile they have a nice budget surplus they keep boasting about while we put up with urban decay and an incredibly high homelessness rate.
Re: What always happens... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've lived in the People's Republic of California for three months now, and I can't figure out what they actually do spend that tax revenue on.
When I drive to work (from El Segundo to Hawthorne -- not far at all) I always see this sign that, for the life of me, I have no idea what it says because there's graffiti scribbled all over it. It's been that way this entire time. Obviously the sign isn't important, or else they'd clean it up. But then why the fuck did they even bother to put it up to begin with if it's not important? I think the roads here haven't been maintained in at least 20 years, possibly longer.
There's trash literally everywhere. Some parts of LA don't even have usable sidewalks, because apparently they've been informally re-zoned as low income residential areas. Which also means that even things that are walking distance require a car to travel to (also because the locals say it's very dangerous to walk in those areas even in broad daylight.)
In addition to all of that, the water here is bad, the grid here is bad... I mean, I get it, progressives insist that taxes are necessary. Ok -- fine -- so what the fuck do they actually do? I'll pay $21k/year more taxes here than I did in Phoenix, and yet Phoenix has way better public utilities, services, etc. And better yet, they don't do this stupid daylight saving bullshit.
that business. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:that business. (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the job is remote-only, then even with a lower salary, the worker could probably go live in a cheaper area and have a bigger house or apartment compared to living in a big city.
Let's say I earn 3000EUR/month, pay 800EUR for rent (not including electricity etc) and pay 200EUR for fuel to go to/from the office. I am left with 2000EUR/month.
Now let's say I work completely remote, so I can rent a bigger apartment in a small town for 500EUR/month and I do not need to drive to/from the office, but let's say I
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All sounds right, except that lunch need not be any more expensive for in-person work if you just pack a sandwich.
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And for the same price as that sandwich I can make something fresh, so it hasn't been sitting for 5 hours when eaten, and go and eat it in my garden. Better food, better mental health.
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WFH may be less convenient for the company, especially if people need to pick things up from the office etc. Now it would need to be packed and shipped and that would add time or someone (maybe me) would need to go and pick it up, but that would also waste "work" time.
Settling for less is not a good idea, businesses are already stealing money from you as their income is a direct relation to your work and others work.
It depends on the choices I have. I do not like going to the office, even if that meant getting more money (and giving all of the extra money to the landlord and gas station).
My current situation is better than that, but I can understand why s
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I don't blame you or them. Vancouver is the most expensive city in Canada in which to live, and apparently the third least-affordable in the world.
I moved out of Greater Vancouver a few years back to go to school. I'm not returning. It's too expensive to live and work there if you didn't buy your home 20 years ago.
What happens? (Score:2)
Detroit. Or, closer to home, Oakland and Fresno -- but closer to Detroit.
Los Angeles (Score:2)
I think the closest thing would be Los Angeles. Well maintained skyscrapers with some office workers in them, and absolutely nobody walking around outside.
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I think the closest thing would be Los Angeles. Well maintained skyscrapers with some office workers in them, and absolutely nobody walking around outside.
Wasn't that business's dream?
1. Get rid of all the workers doing the actual work.
2. Something something something
3 PROFIT!
Turns out that workers, far from being a cost center, are central to the whole damn economy And if those workers don't want to return to offices, they simply won't. Or in many cases, already haven't.
The pandemic didn't cause this - it just moved up the timing a few years, as we now have good enough systems that, in many cases, it's just the incompetents who don't want to aband
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And if you're thinking about the projects the problem with the projects was a whole bunch of rural people often black or brought into the cities with the intention of getting them jobs through government programs and then Re
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Those buildings won't get turned into living quarters. Too expensive to convert, and no reason for people to live "near the downtown office" then the downtown office is a barren wasteland.
City living may not be for you... (Score:5, Interesting)
Those buildings won't get turned into living quarters. Too expensive to convert, and no reason for people to live "near the downtown office" then the downtown office is a barren wasteland.
...but many like living in an urban area, especially when they're younger. Your only motivation may be to shorten your commute, but some feel otherwise. Some like the city, some like the burbs, some like rural living. I live in the city by choice, even back when I worked in the suburbs. I like my neighborhood. I like biking everywhere. I like the school system and amenities for my kids. I WFH full-time ATM. I am not eager to get in the burbs.
Where I live, the burbs are nearly the same price per square foot...just you get much bigger yards...because everyone in the area also had the idea of moving 2-5 towns over and commuting into the city.
This is a market scenario. Prices will go down and it is pretty cheap to convert into living quarters...especially compared to the price of keeping a large building unoccupied.
Real estate developers will bitch and whine...like they always have and always will do...you'll never find a more corrupt, lazy, and entitled lot than those who make a living in real estate. However, their justification for decades for overcharging society and exacerbating the homeless crisis is that it was a market economy and they're pricing in line with demand...now that it works out of their favor, we'll hear whining, but they'll certainly get no sympathy from me.
it is pretty cheap to convert into living quarters (Score:2)
Not really, because the internals have to redone for individual power, water, sewage, cable and likely HVAC.
It's also a major change of use, so planning and zoning rules coming into play too... which require occupier parking availability usually as well.
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It's true an office accommodates more people at once, but they're not really heavy users of any utility.
The office bathrooms for an entire floor might use 5 gallons per minute at the busiest times, but just one shower will use 1 GPM. So if the pipe was not oversized, then it could support 5 people showering at the same time, which is not much at all. Then you have sinks, dishwashers and washing machines that might all use water at the same time. My washing machine seems to use 3 GPM when filling up. The sin
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Is this a joke? What fucking bike paths? How is the air cleaner if you're having to ride on a 6 lane highway? What mix of large and small businesses are you talking about that isn't present in a down town?
There are no 4, 5, or 6-lane unlimited access highways in the burbs. So you couldn't ride your bike on one if you wanted to. 4-6 lane streets? Don't exist, because there's not a concentration of office towers that require such a number of lanes to handle commuters.
Back in the '80s I proposed turning one lane of one major street here in the burbs into a bike path. A couple of years later, it was done. Then other bike paths, some by using a portion of existing lanes, some by creating new paths beside the r
You're 10x more likely to get hit in suburbs. (Score:2)
And why can't you bike anywhere and everywhere in the burbs? Nice bike paths, a mix of large and small businesses and shopping, plenty of things to do, and the air is cleaner and there's less noise pollution.
You can theoretically bike on nearly any surface....but your life is a lot less at risk when you bike on the dedicated bike paths than biking on a road where people are used to going 40mph and not watching for pedestrians. Driving in the city sucks...a large part of it is because there are so many cyclists and pedestrians that you have to be very cautious and on constant alert. In the suburbs? No, not really...no one walks there. It's much more relaxing...until you hit and kill someone. According to on
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Almost all our bike paths are separated from traffic by at least a sidewalk, sometimes also a grassy margin between the sidewalk and the bike path.
This is to prevent pedestrians from being hit by cyclists using the bike path. Cars have their space, pedestrians have theirs, cyclists have theirs. It's because in the burbs we have the space to do that, and bike paths are very popular with voters.
Also, the speed limit here is 30 mph (and 20 in some places). So if you as a driver want to do 40mph, feel free
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I have no idea what you are talking about but that ain't the 'burbs.
Might be "sub urban" in the general sense, but people are quite obviously talking about state in the US.
If you have them, you have poor urban planning.
If? IF? I strongly suspect you've never even seen America on TV let alone lived there.
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I don't know. Could we see a business exodus? Probably. Could we see large tracts of abandoned housing? It seems unlikely. Large numbers of abandoned office blocks? That seems possible, given that both companies and individuals are moving out of California.
For the Detroit scenario to happen there probably needs to be some dramatic safety and quality of life event, like the Detroit riots. Also some economic tidal wave, like the de-industrialization that you refer to. We don't seem to be seeing that a
Imitate Singapore (Score:2)
The best option is to copy the real estate model in Singapore [ssrn.com]. The increased residential space need not only be offered to the currently homeless, instead it can be managed in programs where families rent for very long 100 year or more periods - enabling the treatment of rental property as their own and passed down in ways that preserve wealth in families.
The government should buy these buildings, and either retrofit them as residence blocks or rezone as mixed residence/light commercial. Some offices I'
Re:Imitate Singapore (Score:5, Insightful)
Mebbe that would work if the city also copies Singapore's low tolerance to crime and social misbehavior.
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I suppose we could lower it a little bit more if we were brutal enough to kill people for petty drug offenses. Honestly I'd rather have a little bit of petty crime than have my government killing people for petty crimes. Wage theft far exceeds the losses from petty theft anyway. Still you're bound to reduce crime rates if you just kill anyone who might be a crim
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Urban decay is what happens. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's bad enough we have a new drug epidemic on our hands with Fentanyl sending overdose deaths skyrocketing, but now add WFH / WFAnywhere prevailing, and you get urban decay.
- City "bad part of town" expands because there's less people
- Fewer people downtown so more awnings; homelessness becomes much more visible
- Rather than a concentrated area where people take drugs and go through the process, they experience these effects everywhere. Result is more disturbing imagery, more random assaults, much more broken windows. And I see SF has a problem with brazen daylight attacks, which is its own problem.
Result: Employees don't want to work there, companies cancel leases, buildings go under-utilized. Developers start buying commercial and appealing to city hall to convert to residential. Or some property owners go bankrupt and the buildings go dormant.
See NYC in the 70s and 80s.
Exactly right (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a shame,. as I love some aspects of SF - I've been to a lot of conferences there in the past, and was back briefly for a morning this year. Some parts still do not look too bad...
But even in the nicest areas things do not feel really safe, there are still homeless almost everywhere, and SF has some of the most mentally affected homeless people I have seen from walking around many downtown areas.
If left unabated, who would want to work there? I was there visiting a company - that was planning to move out of downtown SF. Who would want to live there? Home prices in-city would have to drop to about 10% of current values before I'd even consider it, and even then probably not.
I just saw video yesterday of the most recent Glitter Bomb thief trap. Part of the video was glitter bombs for car thieves... these guys have set routes they patrol every day, multiple times a day. They casually break widows just to check and see if a car might have anything (they break rear windows often just to fold rear seats forward to look in trunk). But the most disturbing thing I saw was guys jump out of car, in traffic, the break the rear window of a hatchback that was stuck in traffic to take whatever they had, with the driver and passengers still inside! How can anyone live in a city where that is accepted and normal?
Re:Exactly right (Score:4, Interesting)
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City "bad part of town" expands because there's less people
For a while. But eventually the junkies move out (or at least try) to follow the wealth into the suburbs.
Developers start buying commercial and appealing to city hall to convert to residential.
Residential for whom? The workers moved out. The junkies followed the workers (their loot, actually). Developers don't want to rent to the latter types anyway (like they are actually going to pay rent). The city takes over the housing problem and eventually you get Cabrini Green.
Isn't it obvious? (Score:2)
The city where I work is trying to convince the government to get its workers back into the office because businesses are dying. All those government workers who would go out to lunch or use other services are no longer.
Reminds me of when the U.S. government was going through its base realignment process. One of the bases under consideration from closing isn't far from me. The howl and cries from businesses saying they'd lose money or have to close if the base was closed was deafening.
Remember this the nex
Re:Isn't it obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
All the government can do is redirect where money is spent that citizens would otherwise spend as a result not paying those dollars to the taxman.
False, to an extent. No private person, or company, would have put up the hundreds of billions of dollars to send people to the Moon. Only the government could do that and as a result, has created millions of jobs. The same with all those exploratory probes we've sent up, the telescopes in space, and pretty much anything else related to space until recently.
No private person or company would create all the weapons for a military force. Only the government can do that and as a result, millions of jobs have been created both in production of the weapons and development of new ones. Whether that is a benefit is a matter for another discussion.
No private person or company would create structures such as the Hoover Dam or the interstate highways. Only the government can do that and as a result, has created millions of jobs.
As I said earlier, when the government wants to build some office the first words out of people's mouths are how many jobs will be created. Look at the big deal having an FBI office in West Virginia. Literally, in the truest sense of the word, the first words spoken about the decision was how many jobs it would bring to that state. And not just the construction jobs which are temporary, but the physical jobs to do the work which means hiring people, and the subsequent spin off of job creation as those workers frequent private stores. Such as those I originally mentioned in my city and outside of it.
Re: Isn't it obvious? (Score:2)
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The economy is not zero-sum. Many projects (like say good roads) are very positive. Take away that spending and see who the economy as a whole fares. Generalizing that government spending is just taking money out of the economy is just obviously far too simplistic.
I am sure there are plenty of negative net return projects as well - the real question (probably impossible to answer in most cases) is whether on balance a given set of spending is good or bad for the economy.
Note: it isn’t as if the privat
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Sure, government spending creates jobs. However, excepting deficit spending (which has a different price), the government is spending money that it took out of the economy. That money would otherwise be in circulation somewhere else.
It’s not only a matter of whether the money is still “in circulation,” but more how fast it’s circulating and what the money is doing while circulating. Tax breaks for the poor and middle class are clearly stimulative for the overall economy, as they tend to spend a much larger portion of any increase in cash than the rich.
The rich tend to spend a lower proportion of their marginal increases in wealth, tending to either hoard it or spend it on lavish luxuries that don’t benef
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free markets have generated more wealth than alternatives as people acting in their own self interest tend to make better financial decisions on average than some bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of miles away do.
Simply not true. The New Deal needed government. The space race that gave us all our tech goodies needed government (and spacex benefited hugely from government contracts, same as tesla did from government subsidies).
Those crypto coins and NFTs are a clear indication that people make shit decisions. Look at Trump's latest NFTs - probably bought them all himself, same as his wife bought her own NFT.
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All the government can do is redirect where money is spent that citizens would otherwise spend as a result not paying those dollars to the taxman.
You failed to mention the trillion dollars a year the US government spends in addition to tax dollars.
Instead of "Escape from New York" (Score:2)
It'll be "Escape from San Francisco" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_New_York) And no doubt, the administration for the penal colony will be on Alcatraz Island...
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There was, in fact, a California-based sequel [wikipedia.org] to Escape From New York, but it was set farther south than San Francisco.
Specifically for San Francisco (Score:2)
30 years ago there were many scary parts of San Francisco. Gentrification has made most of the city less scary, but at the same time pushed out its artsy, wierd, and creative side. I don't think prices can drop enough to bring that back gracefully. Residential there seems to have gotten close-- maybe needs to go about 10% lower and interest rates need to drop. Office space asking rent seems to be about 20% higher than what the market will really bear though, and about 30% higher than what would be neces
This is very similar (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:This is very similar (Score:5, Informative)
Small towns in America have been declining a lot longer than the last 25 years. As farming became industrialized, the need for manpower on farms decreased sharply over the last century, forcing the children of farmers to look for work in cities. Big box stores continued the trend, but they didn't cause it.
Depends on the government (Score:5, Insightful)
You can be forward thinking and adopt sensible multi-purpose zoning and turn your city centres into bustling mixed residential areas, or you can pretend businesses will magically come back and turn into Detroit.
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Houston has no city zoning law. Its downtown buildings have been converting to residential space for decades already. Yet its downtown is still struggling to attract enough people to make it a thriving place to live. For one thing, there are no supermarkets downtown, making it more difficult to buy food. My wife and I have considered moving downtown, but it's just not ready yet.
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How exactly would zoning have helped attract a grocery store downtown? There's no rule preventing one from moving in already. And Houston is far from the only city, with or without zoning, that has no good grocery options downtown. Our entire CITY is multi-purpose zoning (which just means you can have residential and commercial and other types of buildings in a particular area.)
Raise taxes? (Score:2)
It gets converted into housing (Score:2)
There's SERIOUS people's money at stake here (Score:2)
Unlike the death of small town America where the losers were relatively small people, the loss of value in commercial property portfolios is going to hurt people with a lot of influence. This won't stop it from happening in the long term, but it will result in propaganda form some sources that 'working from home is a skiv' etc. The UK's Daily Telegraph is banging this drum monotonously.
The long term solution in my city of Manchester, England, has been the arrival of vast amounts of high density, multi store
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vast amounts of high density, multi storey housing
Noooo! What about the painted ladies [staticflickr.com]?
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Not gonna happen. That genie left the bottle.
And stuffing it back in will not be easy. The current workforce ain't like the old one was who only cared about money and amassing as much of it as possible. You are dealing with a workforce that only wants enough money to get by, knowing that they won't ever save up enough to buy anything of relevance anyway, so why bother trying? And since Basel III pretty much means you'll only get a mortgage loan if you don't really need one, they also have no chance of getti
Maybe convert some of that space to dwellings (Score:3)
They always talk about how there is a lack of housing in SF and other tech areas, maybe they need to convert some of that office space to residential dwellings -- that would solve the lack of housing problem and need for long commutes -- imagine, living and working in the same area -- then they could do joint work w/o the commute. Of course, i suspect housing is no where near as profitable as commercial space, but if commercial space is over-built, maybe balance is needed? Not as much fossil fuel use by eliminating commuting.
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Re: tax fraud... art of the deal? (Score:2)
maybe tax fraud is just part of their deal in refinancing...though tax evasion didn't work out so well for Capone if I remember right.
The zombie horde from 9th st... (Score:3)
Downtown SF sucks (Score:5, Insightful)
Downtown San Francisco sucks in a lot of ways. The aggressive homeless people make it unpleasant to be in some parts of it (and yes, it sucks to be homeless too, but there's no effective work to help them in ways that mean they don't aggressively hassle other people). The soulless corporate buildings and facilities are not very interesting. The active, aggressive hostility towards anyone "tech worker" gets to you after a while (SF is the only city in the USA where I've been assaulted just for being who I am, and it's happened twice).
When you add an hour or more journey to get there from wherever you live, it results in having to spend a lot of time to go to a place that's just not so great to be.
Without an office job to force you to go there, why go?
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SF is the only city in the USA where I've been assaulted just for being who I am, and it's happened twice
Try being LGBT+. I've got video.
Lower Manhattan. (Score:2, Redundant)
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Sure. I mean, 4 or 5 billion people would die, and the remainder would just eventually rebuild what we have now, but what a great 20 years it'll be.
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Well I know one thing (Score:5, Insightful)
Developers that paid high in the assumption that they would be able to charge sky-high rents forever CANNOT be 'saved' when they start to cry that they're going bankrupt "and it's not their fault".
2 points:
- it absolutely IS their fault. Market prices don't rise on their own, they rise when owners feel they can charge more, and renters pay more, starting a cycle that ends at rents that are unsupportable when demand falls. This is fine, but only painful failure by the owners will drive market rents back down to the start again.
- this is an ENTIRELY NATURAL part of the commercial cycle. Capitalists assume risk as a part of investing in capital. We *cannot* have a system where that risk is mitigated by government compulsion of the masses (ie through bailouts and subsequent taxation). Capitalism REQUIRES (economic) death of the noncompetitive as much as evolution requires failure of less-adapted species. The current system is broken where billionaires get the rewards at the top of the economy, and get bailed out from their risk at the bottom.
Do not repeat the dot.com crisis and then the housing/lending crisis again.
I live in SF (Score:2)
Throes of the Old World (Score:2)
This has changed how we shop, how we eat outside food, how we socialize, and how we work.
Some things may be dead forever, like 24-hr stores/restaurants, eating fast food in open lobbies.
But one thing that the pandemic shutdown demonstrated was that the corporate business that survived the shutdown can operate fine fully remote. There's literally no need to return to the office fulltime, ever.
All the "vanity" stores, companies, and organizations with unsustainable busi
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Maybe where you live things have changed. During the whole pandemic nonsense nothing changed where I live. Life is exactly the same as it was before that crap. Occasionally you see some typically out-of-towner wearing a mask who gets funny looks. But it seems this is definitely an echo cham
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Life here is pretty much 100% back to normal. Some businesses didn't make it, and there's more WFH. But otherwise, other than the maybe 1 in 20 people still hanging onto their masks, totally back to 2019.
Biased for IT people (Score:5, Interesting)
I've also done a bit of RF work. While I have a lab at home it is far from a full RF lab. This idea that certain propeller heads have about work from home is mostly pushed by people who don't have a single callus on their hands. Could you imagine something like the space shuttle being built by engineers mostly working from home? No. Real high-tech (not writing web wrappers for database CRUD operations) isn't easy to do without labs and industrial equipment. That means that for actual high-tech advancement WFH is not an option.
Movie idea starring Kurt Russell (Score:3)
"Escape from San Francisco." Production costs can be minimal because it'll be a documentary.
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Ol' Kurt might need a walker to aid his escape, at this point in time...
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I think that this is a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Fuck your empty downtown (Score:2)
But now there's a more existential question of what the point of a city's downtown even is.
For around a year I went every week from Santa Cruz to Club Trocadero at 4th and Bryant. Then the neighborhood got gentrified and they shut down the club, even though it was there before the fuckos who moved in and ruined SF. So the real question is what the point of a city even is. It's clearly not to have culture.
Detroit or hopefully something better (Score:5, Interesting)
It really wasn't that long from 1950s Detroit to them making jokes about it. The Motor City was the metaphorical engine of post-war America. There's nothing that says SF can't end up that way. It could be like Fry's Electronics, writ large. You know Fry's? The mecca for geeks to come and buy... the hardware that would be used to build the online world that would eventually... make Fry's obsolete.
Arguably it's just a continuation of that. "Remember when all the geeks congregated in SF?", but they built the technology that makes it practical to... work someplace else and collaborate just as effectively, and much like Detroit kind of hung in mid-air like a cartoon character off a cliff, SF might be doing this now and it will only be apparent in hindsight if true. I've actually been thinking along these lines for a good 10 years, perhaps even written other posts like this.
It doesn't have to be like Detroit. It can be a safe yet affordable city again. It has a lot of things going for it that Detroit doesn't--better weather for one; but this whole deal of paying the equivalent of a car a month just to afford a house has to end at some point. It was always silly to think it was sustainable. It has just never been prudent to bet against it because it always finds a way to pick itself up and dust itself off--until it doesn't.
Maybe, just maybe... (Score:3)
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Why would they? These buildings are currently designed and zoned in a way that only attracts a certain type of renter. You can't address the housing crisis by hoping the free market magically sorts out a problem that braindead government zoning restrictions created.
Rent seekers butthurt and water is wet (Score:2)
Work sucks which is why we are paid to work not paying to work.
Commuting is uncompensated work turning natural resources into air pollution. The goal should be dispersed WFH so workers can get their lives back while saving gobs of money normally wasted on commuting.
If rent seekers want tenants it's on them to entice customers.
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who cares?
Anyone with sense cares. Lack of forward thought here isn't just about empty buildings, it's also able loss of taxes. You may not give a shit at first, but I wonder if your tune changes when your roads stop getting fixed, your water quality drops, and other utilities provided through local land taxes get worse.
If your city decays, you aren't magically safe in the suburbs.
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who cares?
Anyone with sense cares. Lack of forward thought here isn't just about empty buildings, it's also able loss of taxes. You may not give a shit at first, but I wonder if your tune changes when your roads stop getting fixed, your water quality drops, and other utilities provided through local land taxes get worse.
If your city decays, you aren't magically safe in the suburbs.
If nobody's using it, why waste tax dollars maintaining it? And since when are water plants located in the downtown core? They're usually located in the burbs and they've got these things called "pipes", you know, tubes, like the internet is a series of tubes, but for water. Same with electrical generation - those solar, wind, gas, coal plants aren't downtown for a few reasons.
During lockdown, city cores were pleasant enough. No traffic noise, no car pollution, no problems finding a parking space. The pro
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And yet the burbs can support their water plants and plumbing just fine. And without the cities, they can cut back on water treatment capacity and save $$ by just supplying their own needs.
The infrastructure, including pipes, in cities tends to be older and leakier. So a constant drain, literally.
You seem to think that a suburb of 50,000 - 500,000 just can't stand on it's own.
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Actually, suburbs are subsidized by city cores. Suburbs generally can't stand on their own. There are plenty of urbanist discussions about this issue such as Why American Cities Are Broke - The Growth Ponzi Scheme [youtube.com] and How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer [youtube.com] and Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math [youtube.com].
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And with people abandoning working in the city centers, or the central cities, the burbs are doing quite well, with more local business activity since the people aren't going downtown to spend their money there.
So ultimately the affordability
Re:What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah most of these articles are written by people who have not even visited downtown SF. It is NOT as bad as everyone claims. It's actually quite pleasant in a way as it's not just packed to the gills with people but it still feels crowded in a city sense.
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There's a lot of "people don't have the same lifestyle I do, Rawwrr!" Someone lives in a 300 person town and doesn't like it, then let's send a million people over to live in that utopia.
Re: What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown... (Score:4)
SF is actually very clean. Cleaner than some of its suburbs and the small towns in the Central Valley.
That's hilarious. The West coast is just a bizarre place now. I've been to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco in the last 10 months. Compared to Chicago, New York, DC, and a bunch of other places in the east I've been recently, they are FILTHY.
Re:What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown... (Score:5, Insightful)
God 100% what you just said. San Francisco certainly has its problems but it's hardly the cesspool conservatives try to make it out to be.
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In the culture cold war, it seems to serve as the demon used to get the troops riled up. Any problem SF has, Manhattan has also but with a larger population, but Manhattan is mostly ignored.
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because why live in SF when you can have a much higher standard of living
It's almost as if someone who has lived here for 20 years would have friends and family here.
as one of the wealthy ones able to maintain a high quality of life
You keep bringing this up, which exposes a mix of bitterness and ignorance in you towards San Francisco and people who live here. If you understood anything about SF you would have keyed on the fact that I've been here since the early 2000's. I'll let that little breadcrumb guide you to an understanding of how anyone not "wealthy" could possibly live here.
You can be an Internet tough guy, but the flipside is, why would I, an anonymous slashdot poster, lie to another anonymous slashdot poster?
Because that's what trolls do. If you weren't a troll you
Re: What Happens to 'the Most Empty Downtown... (Score:2)
I wouldn't even call it a financial hub.
The reason it exists is because it's on a convenient location on the pacific coast.