San Francisco is continuing to recover from yet another natural disaster. While COVID-19 didn't level the city like the great San Francisco earthquake, it sure did hollow it out.
At the San Francisco Center Mall, which is now called the Emporium, about half of the shops have closed during and after the pandemic. A cable car ride up Powell Street takes us to Union Square, where Macy's has announced it will close within a year. Some nearby storefronts are already vacant. One of them has boarded up black plywood. One has some stickers in the windows.
"It started with the pandemic, and then the city just allowed the situation on the street to deteriorate," said one man who works for a Union Square landlord. He's seen most of the negative things you've probably heard about San Francisco -- skyrocketing homelessness, shoplifting and drug use.
"Start enforcing laws, quality of life laws, those little misdemeanors and infractions, they matter," he said. "That's what's keeping tenants away."
But at the same time, tourists seem to be coming back. Like George and Joanna, who were visiting from Toronto and catching the sights at Pier 39, where hundreds of sea lions were out and about.
"It's no different than anywhere else. It's very similar to where we came from, especially some of the issues that you're facing as well," said George.
"I keep thinking I'm going to go back and tell my co-workers and friends, like, if they're going to go see somewhere, they should definitely come to San Francisco," said Joanna.
San Francisco Supervisor Joel Engardio says the city's recovery is underway, and it's starting in the neighborhoods, like the Sunset.
"We have the Sunset Night Market that I created last year, and it's coming back this summer. We have the Great Highway Park on the weekends. We have our Farmer's Market on Sundays. Sunset is really happening," Engardio said, adding that "the state of San Francisco is one of hope."
Visitor numbers may be down, but the people who do travel to the City by the Bay seem to be having a blast.
Although tourism has been slowly growing year by year since 2020, the city is still short more than 3 million visitors a year when compared to pre-pandemic stats, according to the San Francisco Travel Association's latest numbers. You may remember it was just five years ago that the city proposed making people pay to drive down the windy Lombard Street. Now the focus is on being as welcoming to visitors as possible, said Alex Bastian, president and CEO of the Hotel Council of San Francisco.
"This city is a piece of gold, and that piece of gold is a little bit covered in mud right now. Part of it is our own doing right. Part of it is the pandemic, and part of it is this national mudslinging we're seeing on the national news media circuit," he said. "But if you clean that piece of gold, if you keep it safe, it's going to shine bright on the world stage again. And that's going to be up to all of us."
When COVID-19 hit, San Francisco's nightlife ground to a screeching halt. Some industry insiders say now that the pandemic is over, the scene is rebounding -- but some argue it's already back to where it used to be.
At Trick Dog, a Mission District bar ranked among the top 50 in North America and a three time James Beard finalist, closing time used to be 2 a.m. seven nights a week. But for owner Josh Harris, even before the pandemic, 2 a.m. always felt forced -- despite the fact that it's a San Francisco standard.
"I'm not really too high on believing that people want to go out at 10 11 o'clock at night," he said.
There's been a lot of changes to San Francisco nightlife since the industry reopened after the pandemic. And short of that time when operators served as the vaccine police, many of them are unfolding organically for Harris. The single biggest one has to do with his hours of operation.
"My experience with a place that I owned on Valencia Street, that was before the pandemic called Bon Voyage and after the pandemic called Shay Shay, was that while I've always thought that San Francisco was sort of like a little bit of an earlier town, I found that after the pandemic, I've seen social and cultural shift here," he said.
Shay Shay was built on the late night experience. But in the end, post-pandemic, Harris says that model didn't work. The bar ended up closing, and Trick Dog reduced its hours. Although it's open less, Harris says Trick Dog sales are back to 2018 levels. For him, people are still going out, but they're doing it in a different way.
"The world's challenging right now, so they want things that are easy and delicious," he said.
The Bay Bridge is the carotid artery of San Francisco. Between the traffic on this span and the commuters traveling through the Transbay Tube under the water, we can take the pulse of the city's recovery.
Metropolitan Transportation Commission Spokesman John Goodwin says he's seeing a steady increase, though we're not back yet. Trips across the Bay Bridge are at about 90% of pre-pandemic levels, and BART ridership is much further behind.
"For instance, in March of 2019, on an average weekday, BART carried over 400,000 riders. In March of 2024, it was 162,000," Goodwin said.
It's tough to figure out how many people who are driving might have been BART riders four years ago, and it's also tough to know what the tipping point will be to get people out of cars and onto trains again. But the traffic data shows what San Francisco is up against.
"We've clearly got a three-day workweek going on,"said Goodwin.
The pandemic accelerated work-from-home trends, and the nature of work is still very much in flux.
"The office vacancy rate in San Francisco currently stands at a little over 36%," said Colin Mazzocchi, the executive director for tech insights at the commercial real estate firm CVRE. He says the hybrid work trend is transforming the way companies use space, which has been a clear trend during pandemic recovery.
"And that's really impacted the street-level environment, the retail, and just the overall vibrancy of downtown," Mazzocchi said. "I think that's probably been the biggest difference this time versus, like, say, the dot-com crash or the financial crisis."
And there's optimism that the market is beginning to bottom, according to Derek Daniels, the regional research director for commercial real estate firm Collier -- which puts the vacancy rate at 30%. He says more time is needed to know if we've hit rock bottom and started to bounce, but there are signs.
"In the last few months, there have been some large block leases signed by AI companies," he said.
At the same time, San Francisco is in a massive budget crunch, and S&P Global Ratings changed its outlook on the city's outstanding debt obligation.
"It's warning that San Francisco's got some fundamental issues that really have been somewhat unprecedented," said Sonoma State economist Robert Eyler, who added that tough political choices will need to be made about what gets cut.
Most Popular
Comments / 0