8 ms·

San Franciscans seems to have just collectively abandoned downtown. Empty offices, empty retail, empty streets, seemingly no attempt to do anything new down the

• trophycase 4y ago
  Same way in my city. There are dozens and dozens of parking structures that are just absolute blights on the area, ultrawide streets that discourage and make miserable any form of walking, unmanaged homeless and addict problems, and awful zoning (even mixed use needs to ensure that there are many small tenants, not one massive tenant).
• xeonmc 4y ago
  So San Francisco is becoming Detroit?
  • doitLP 4y ago
    The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world. Detroit is a windy frozen wasteland 6 months of the year. I think they need to do a whole order of magnitude more self-destruction before they’ll really be able to keep people away.
    • ghaff 4y ago
      That's a bit of an exaggeration but SF has both weather and easy access to a lot of natural beauty, hiking trails, and so forth. Detroit has a nice Riverwalk and I'm sure any locals can point to other local things of interest. I will say that I was at a tech event in Detroit in the fall. Things I would do (knowing what I do about the city even today) in SF at night without a second thought felt risky and many other attendees felt the same--and there were some safety incidents. It wasn't even so much the things that might make you feel unsafe in the Tenderloin. It's that if you were walking 1/2 mile to someplace it was just deserted.
      • gtk40 4y ago
        I'm guessing you were at Kubecon as well. It was my first time in Detroit and overall thought the city was much nicer than expected. But to be fair, I mostly was just downtown during the day and we ended up staying in a suburb (Royal Oak) because all of the hotels within walking distance were booked by the time I registered for the conference. The drive between Royal Oak (adjacent to the city limits) and downtown Detroit had some areas that looked dilapidated or worse.
    • csomar 4y ago
      > The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world. Uhmm, I don't think I agree here. The Mediterranean has better weather all around. I like mid-west weather more if we are talking about US. SF is also very windy. Annoyingly windy. SF weather is "okay" but nowhere near the best. It does have great scenery nearby though.
      • jjeaff 4y ago
        Notably, there is a lot of coastal area in southern California that shares the same climate zone as the Mediterranean.
      • ksd482 4y ago
        Comparison is with rest of the US.
        • dehrmann 4y ago
          It has the best weather of any "real" city. San Jose and San Diego aren't "real" cities. Parts of LA get too hot. Florida is too humid. Redwood City is the obvious winner for weather, but it doesn't have sports teams, concerts, museums--big city amenities.
          • germinalphrase 4y ago
            "sports teams, concerts, museums--big city amenities" Which, arguably, was more important 50 years ago.
            • dehrmann 4y ago
              This isn't obvious to me. Why aren't these as important?
              • germinalphrase 4y ago
                Because mass media allows us to replace experiences that previously required physical participation (if only going to a specific location) with consuming those experiences anywhere we want - a trend that is only expanding/intensifying.
    • dangus 4y ago
      Weather has almost nothing to do with Detroit's economic decline, though. Compare the population decline of Detroit with Milwaukee: https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/detroit-michigan https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/detroit-michigan https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/milwaukee-wisconsin https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/milwaukee-wisconsin
      • kibwen 4y ago
        Note that, despite the relative decline, Detroit still has a higher absolute population than Milwaukee, which matters if we're to assume that (generally speaking) more population correlates with more potential economic activity (which may be a contentious statement in broad strokes, but these two cities are fairly comparable).
    • justapassenger 4y ago
      > The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world Correction - places near SF have amazing weather. SF itself - not that amazing.
      • dehrmann 4y ago
        SF weather is sometimes amazing, occasionally miserable, but generally not bad.
    • hoseja 4y ago
      That just means the homeless thrive.
    • jjav 4y ago
      > The difference is SF has amazing weather, some of the best in the world. Did you mean the Bay Area, or SF? Most of the Bay Area has fairly nice weather year-round. San Francisco though, has pretty terrible weather. Foggy and cold most of the time.
  • chadash 4y ago
    It would actually be pretty poetic. 100 years ago, Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. It was perhaps the center of the US economy. The Model T was introduced in 1908 and by the 1910s and 20s, there were more than a dozen car companies forming every year, with the biggest ones being located in Detroit. The city was a manufacturing powerhouse and with the immense wealth generated, they built wonderful theaters, funded a world class symphony, and built great museums (many of these things still remain today). It became a cultural hub. If you told someone in Detroit at the time that the city would be in ruins before the turn of the century, they probably would have had a good laugh.
• doctoboggan 4y ago
  This is how cities die. If the downtown gets abandoned the heart of the city stops beating. The whole premise of a city is a high density area to get economies of scale on many public goods.
  • nemothekid 4y ago
    It's hard to describe downtown/fidi as the heart of the city. It was already pretty dead on weekends compared to the rest of the city in 2019. OTOH, rents have been stubbornly flat or growing in other parts of the city. Places like the mission, hayes valley, marina, north beach and polk are very lively now and I'm back to struggling at getting reservations at some of my favorite places outside of downtown. I think what suffers the most is tourism - as places like Union Square, downtown and fisherman's wharf are relatively empty.
  • heleninboodler 4y ago
    Yep, going to hell in a handbasket. Just terrible. Most certainly going to be a desolate wasteland before long. I'll do you a favor and buy your house.
  • Kon-Peki 4y ago
    > This is how cities die. If the downtown gets abandoned the heart of the city stops beating. My office is in a 90+ year old skyscraper in Chicago. Our building is not renewing leases; they’re trying to empty it out to convert to residential. At our last town hall the CEO said he’s hearing talk about incentives to terminate leases early. In the Chicago Loop, population is up 10% since before the pandemic, and expected to continue to increase faster than new construction can handle, so there is real demand for converting old office buildings. Old buildings typically have ideal floor plates. New office buildings are bad, but there was a story in The NY Times just the other day about a developer who cut a vertical hole in the middle of a newer skyscraper in Manhattan so the giant rectangular floor plate became an O-shape, allowing apartments along the interior of the building to have windows opening to an interior courtyard. SF really needs to get on the ball before the damage to the city is too great.
    • 4y ago
• thaumasiotes 4y ago
  San Francisco's downtown was already deeply unhealthy in 2017. If it wasn't a workday, everything was closed. The only things that existed downtown were offices and office support, like lunch restaurants.
  • zol 4y ago
    Yep, that’s been my experience as well. This might actually turn downtown around if it’s forced to convert more to residential. With its hills, access to green space, forests, ocean, waterways and culture it’s a fantastic city to live - up there with the best in the US in my books. I’ve even grown to love the fog and wind, it feels amazing to come back to in the summer when everywhere inland from the coast is baking in 100+ degree weather.
    • dsq 4y ago
      > love the fog and wind I think that the original perception of California in general and San Francisco in particular as having good climate is based in the pre-air conditioning era, when no effective artificial climate control existed.
  • etempleton 4y ago
    Downtown SF is weird. I love the neighborhoods, but the downtown feels like a movie set without enough extras in the background. Maybe if developers converted more of downtown to residential it could help the city have some night life as well because that was the other odd thing that struck me about SF.
    • 8ytecoder 4y ago
      Downtown is also dark and gloomy in an already gloomy city. I’ve been to many cities but have never seen a downtown like SF. Too many tall buildings may be? But other than offices, conference center and office lunch places there’s just nothing to bring people in. The bars were usually empty, not many good dinner places…etc. It was always weird and depressing.
  • 4y ago
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > The value of that entire area for business is headed to zero. If only there were some other high-value use for San Francisco real estate besides office space.
  • ironic_comment 4y ago
    [dead]
  • gumby 4y ago
    In the 80s and 90s it was a bedroom community for Silicon Valley. I used to commute to Palo Alto from SF.
  • crooked-v 4y ago
    For anyone genuinely wondering why they don't do the implied thing and convert it to residential, the answer is that the San Francisco permitting process to build even as little as a single-family home on an unused lot can often require paying someone full-time to hassle the city government literally every single day for several years straight, and then if the NIMBYs persuade the board of supervisors against it the project gets denied anyway.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      This is half of it, but plumbing, windows, layout, and elevators are very different between residential and offices.
      • swiftcoder 4y ago
        Nonetheless, commercial->residential conversions tend to be pretty popular. All those industrial-themed urban lofts in other cities sell/rent just fine
        • gregshap 4y ago
          Different converting the 1890s brick 4 story buildings vs the 1970s or 2000s or 2010s office buildings.
• arcticbunny 4y ago
  LOL SF. Really, if SF has a problem, then most of the small market cities that had terrible downtowns pre-pandemic are done for. I am not concerned for SF, I am concerned for small cities like Winnipeg Canada or Buffalo NY.
• xvedejas 4y ago
  I was on Market street today around 6pm and it was crowded, loud, full of life. And that's even on a slightly rainy Wednesday. You clearly haven't been so recently?
  • erikstarck 4y ago
    Yeah. Clearly no one goes there anymore. The place is too crowded.
  • ny2ko 4y ago
    GDC?
• rsync 4y ago
  "San Franciscans seems to have just collectively abandoned downtown. Empty offices, empty retail, empty streets, seemingly no attempt to do anything new down there." I live in the SFBA - quite close to downtown - and I am both optimistic and excited about the tumult, reorganization and rebirth that I predict. Unlike Cleveland or Detroit or Baltimore, there is an unlimited supply of people who want to live and work in San Francisco and the entire residential and office market will "clear" - given the right price. I predict an interesting and exciting (and gritty and scrappy) period in SF where artists and projects and spaces re-fill the city. Remember: New Hack City[1] was not in Oakland or Fremont - it was in the center of downtown financial district - and it was only 20 years ago. [1] Hacker space belonging to the l0pht / cdc family tree.
• ulfw 4y ago
  I've lived in SF first time in 1997. Market Street was utterly shit back then already. This was before SoMa became a big thing for internet startups. Scary, shops closed or decrepit. Frankly SF hasn't used it's potential in a long time.