Downtown San Francisco is in distress. Indicators of urban well-being point in the wrong direction: office occupancy, BART ridership and retail foot traffic are down, as is the city’s population. Every week brings news of another 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 “dynamics” of downtown. First Republic Bank, another San Francisco success story, went under after it couldn’t retain its wealthy customers and was sold to JPMorgan Chase. The future of its branches, the familiar green-and-gold presence downtown, is uncertain.
Now barely a day passes without the San Francisco Chronicle or another publication referencing a “doom loop” in the city. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, but no agreement about how to solve the actual issues, including the spiraling homelessness crisis, the unsustainable cost of living or a property crime rate consistently higher than that of similar metropolitan areas. If you see people smiling downtown, they’re probably tourists inside double-decker buses — and even that might be deceptive. Hotel occupancy rates 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 in love unconditionally with that shining city that looked like a mashup of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gondor and America’s proverbial city on the hill: an immigrant’s dream. Even back 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: “Things here only go up.”
