Global Courant 2023-05-21 15:01:12
Downtown San Francisco is in distress. Indicators of urban well-being point in the wrong direction: office occupation, BART ridership And retail foot traffic have fallen, as have those of the city population. Each week brings news of a different high-profile exit: recent closures include a Whole foods flagship and Nordstrom, which announced the end of its 35-year run on Market Street due to changes in the downtown dynamics. First Republic Bank, another San Francisco success story, went under after it failed to and did not retain its wealthy clients sold to JPMorgan Chase. The future of its branches, the well-known green-and-gold downtown presence, is uncertain.
Now hardly a day goes by without the San Francisco Chronicle or some other publication referencing onedoom loopin the city. There is a lot of finger-pointing, but no agreement on how to solve the real problems, including the burgeoning homelessness crisis, the unsustainable cost of living or a property crime consistently higher than that of comparable metropolitan areas. If you see people smiling downtown, they’re probably tourists on double-decker buses – and even that can be deceptive. Hotel occupancy rate remain significantly below pre-pandemic levels.
Like most people who had a good run for too long, San Francisco didn’t see it coming. I understand why. When I moved here from Boston in 2003, I fell unconditionally in love with that radiant city that looked like a mishmash of JRR Tolkien’s Gondor and America’s proverbial city on the hill: an immigrant’s dream. Even then, San Francisco wasn’t exactly affordable. We ended up buying a house in the East Bay, and it still cost twice the amount we would have paid back East. But such was the Bay Area, our real estate agent explained, “It’s only going up here.”
It made sense. In the early 2000s, San Francisco was the closest metro area to a gold rush — Silicon Valley — and the job market felt solid even during the recession (I got a job within four months while caring for a newborn), with industries at a high salaries and the seemingly infinite upside potential of stock options. Google had just gone public, as had Salesforce and many others. The city was flooded with workers buying million-dollar apartments near the ballpark, joining the nation’s “one percent.”
Tech wealth grew exponentially, with Facebook, Twitter and Uber IPOs generating billions of dollars. With that wealth came Michelin-starred restaurants and luxury malls filled with young tech entrepreneurs on their eternal white soles. It was to cater to that millennial demographic that First Republic Bank, whose “privilege” was to serve the city’s elite, hired me as a contract writer in 2018. balance sheets electronically. I wrote the words that helped them do that.
In the year and a half that I worked at One Front, as we called the bank’s headquarters, downtown San Francisco seemed like the ultimate metropolis. European and homegrown coffee shops competed with juice parlors that charged over $10 a glass without batting an eyelid and still drew long lines. The Ferry Building’s wine bars and waterfront cafes overflowed at lunchtime, even though employers often served free or subsidized high-quality food. Inside one could get lavender chocolate and Argentinian empanadas, Spanish hams, cheeses from the local famous Cowgirl Creamery. Sometimes after work I’d pick a fresh sourdough loaf before squeezing onto the downward escalator at the Embarcadero BART station, the entrance of which had to be closed frequently to contain the deluge of riders.
Other times I didn’t rush home, waiting for the madness to subside in the light-filled atrium of the nearby Palace Hotel, another San Francisco landmark. I would meet my husband there and then we would go to the San Francisco Ballet. The four blocks between Twitter headquarters on 5th Street and the War Memorial Opera House were unpredictable, so you had to walk fast. But once there, all you could see was the genius of the city’s performers, many of them transplanted, like Shanghai-born San Francisco legend Yuan Yuan Tan. During breaks, standing on the balcony of the mezzanine and shivering in the breeze, we gazed at the magnificent neoclassical town hall lit up at night and blessed the good fortune that brought us here, to the ultimate stop on the Go West dream train .
My last pre-pandemic memory of downtown was as dreamy as it gets: Keanu Reeves shooting the new “Matrix” movie on One Front. I still have his picture on my iPhone as I traverse the bank lobby. Four weeks later, on March 7, 2020, First Republic sent us home to shelter with our laptops and a few leftover bottles of hand sanitizer. When I worked remotely for a month, I was fired along with other contractors. During the pandemic, I often thought of “Firbie” as my paradise lost. I hoped that when it’s over, I’d find my way back.
But the shore that seemed as impenetrable as the city is no longer there. Technology, the force that propelled San Francisco to the top, also bore the seeds of its demise. At the start of the pandemic, tech stocks had been boosted by remote work tools. But when the closures finally ended, they collapsed, dragging everything else down — just as the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank helped kick off the death spiral that wavered and eventually brought down confidence in First Republic.
As the seemingly never-ending IPO money tsunami abated, it revealed the city’s less visible realities that accumulated during the tech boom: homelessness, addiction, deficient public services. Office workers who financially fueled the city fled to the suburbs — or they were dismissed. San Francisco’s once vibrant downtown now feels like a graveyard, where abandoned skyscrapers look down on lifeless streets, boarded-up storefronts and “for rent” signs.
Meanwhile, buses continue to arrive and depart in the grandeur of the city Salesforce Transit Center, which has cost the city $2.2 billion and is regularly vacant. San Francisco, it seems, simply danced away its “fat years” and developed no lasting attachment to its “sea of talent,” much of which left for other cities referring to affordability and concerns about quality of life.
San Francisco leaders brush off the bad news and say the city will recover. Yet no one seems to know what that looks like, or what the way forward is. Concerns about the “doomsday” do not affect all San Franciscans in the same way. While downtown hurts remarkably, it looks fine in the affluent residential areas of Sea Cliff and Russian Hill. The rich were taken out of their banking situation and don’t have to worry about fewer jobs, canceled work visas or closed shopping centers. San Francisco has the third highest income inequality gap in the nation, despite its progressive leanings.
The pandemic didn’t help. Still, it didn’t cause the city’s current plight – it just accelerated existing problems. Now that the tech bubble has burst, the costs are borne by the rest of us.
Anastasia Edel is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. @AEdelWriter
