Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks
I live in SF & read these articles, which all have a tone of “What is to be done?” They seem reluctant to draw unpopular conclusions, even if those conclusions are inevitable. So here, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.Downtown as a healthy fully occupied business district is dead. Cause of death: remote work. You can wait 50 years if you want and see if it comes back, but it never will; there’s no going back.You can’t harangue workers into reversing that, and you can’t browbeat business owners into paying for space that goes unused.If you assume a lack of business renters being able to occupy the space or live off the people coming do business there, there’s only one customer base left: residential.“But it’s hard to retrofit”, “we’ll have to redo the laws”, etc. Well, ok. You can wait to see if things will change, but they won’t. Eventually the property owners, and a city in need of tax revenue, are going to have to come to terms with the new reality.When they do, even if it’s three decades from now, there will be more housing in that area. It will keep the streets filled, it will keep crime down, and it will bring in tax revenue… eventually. It’s anybody’s guess how long that will take, however.