The much-watched back-to-work statistics from Kastle Methods, which measure how many individuals come into the buildings that use the corporate’s safety methods, do present a rise for the San Francisco metropolitan space, to 42% of pre-pandemic regular final week from about 35% within the spring — bumping it as much as second-to-last place among the many 10 metro areas tracked, forward of Philadelphia. Nevertheless it’s not clear how a lot of that’s in downtown San Francisco and the way a lot is in different areas like the big advanced of biotech labs and workplaces alongside the bay simply south of town, the place the parking heaps had been full after I handed by on a workday late final month.
My view was from an upstairs window of a double-decker Caltrain that I used to be using to get a way of the (vastly underutilized) present state of public transportation within the San Francisco Bay Space, the subject of one other column. So, I spent a few days roaming round downtown San Francisco. Having visited a yr earlier when it was an eerily abandoned wasteland the place you would trip the cable vehicles at no cost, I can report that it felt considerably much less abandoned, the cable vehicles are again to costing $8 a trip, and a good variety of vacationers are using them. There was additionally much more occurring in downtown San Francisco than in close by downtown San Jose, which in accordance with the UC Berkeley report was at 50% of pre-pandemic exercise this spring. However downtown San Jose is perennially sleepy. In contrast with its former self, and even with some outlying metropolis neighborhoods and suburban downtowns I visited, San Francisco’s downtown remains to be awfully quiet.
Why is that? Because the onset of the pandemic, San Francisco has been the topic of just about fixed evaluation and criticism, with observers calling out its struggles with wildly costly housing, persistent homelessness, drug abuse, rampant petty crime and dysfunctional governance. These are actual issues, however none is new. If you wish to know what’s modified concerning the metropolis since February 2020, the principle reply is solely that giant employers there and in surrounding areas, in addition to these they make use of, took to working from residence with better alacrity on the outset of the pandemic and have caught to it with extra persistence than their counterparts anyplace else within the US.
In accordance with the US Census Bureau, about 35% of workers within the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas had been nonetheless working largely from residence final yr — greater than in another giant US metro space and up from 7.2% and 4.8%, respectively, in 2019. Two close-to-downtown neighborhoods in San Francisco had WFH shares above 55%. With some giant space employers lastly requiring employees to return to the workplace this fall, these numbers will likely be down considerably this yr, however the change from earlier than the pandemic will certainly nonetheless be enormous.
Against this, the statistics on homelessness and crime in San Francisco present no such sea change. The town’s homeless inhabitants was truly barely smaller in January 2022 than in January 2019, though greater than it was for a lot of the 2010s.
With crime, the story relies upon considerably on which one you are speaking about. Murder is the one for which statistics are most dependable over time and throughout jurisdictions, and San Francisco’s murder charge did go up a surprising 50% from 2019 to 2021 (it is down 9% up to now this yr). However the 2019 murder charge was town’s lowest in additional than 34 years, and in contrast with each different yr within the 2010s, the 2021 determine did not look so alarming. For perspective, I’ve included the nationwide murder charge within the chart under, plus these of Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis, two cities with (1) empty-ish downtowns and (2) a lot clearer proof of a pandemic homicide wave.
Whereas San Francisco has by no means been one of many nation’s homicide capitals, it has lengthy been stricken by charges of theft, housebreaking and theft a lot greater than these of California and the US. And whereas theft and housebreaking had no less than been trending downward over time, there was a pointy enhance in the course of the 2010s in larceny-theft, which covers offenses akin to shoplifting and pickpocketing. This began earlier than California voters determined in 2014 to reclassify all thefts of $950 or much less as misdemeanors and worsened afterwards.
Since 2019, although, larceny-theft in San Francisco is down 17%. Most different offenses are additionally now at ranges under or much like these earlier than the pandemic, with the one massive exception being auto theft, which is manner up in the remainder of the nation, too.
A few of this will in all probability be chalked as much as there being fewer individuals out and about to rob or assault or pickpocket, and fewer open shops from which to shoplift. The danger of being against the law sufferer might nicely have risen for the a lot smaller variety of individuals going to downtown San Francisco. Equally, homeless individuals can each appear extra threatening and be in better hazard themselves when fewer different individuals are on the road. San Francisco’s ills have additionally been spreading past its borders. With fewer individuals going out within the massive metropolis, Walnut Creek, residence to one of many area’s liveliest suburban downturns, has skilled a pointy enhance in robberies over the previous two years. Homelessness rose in the remainder of California from 2019 to 2022 even because it fell in San Francisco.
In the meantime, the rise of distant work makes it simpler for these exasperated by the excessive prices and protracted issues of San Francisco and the Bay Space to flee, with San Francisco’s inhabitants falling by an estimated 58,764, or 6.7%, from April 2020 to July 2021 and that of the remainder of the nine-county Bay Space by 124,294, or 1.8%. San Francisco is the second-most-affluent giant US metropolis, and San Jose is essentially the most prosperous, with estimated median family earnings in 2021 of $121,826 and $126,377, respectively. The San Jose and San Francisco metropolitan areas additionally high the median earnings checklist, and San Francisco is among the comparatively few principal cities of a giant metro space that’s extra prosperous than its suburbs (San Diego and Seattle are among the many others). Its residents are usually individuals with ample assets to flee what they deem a foul state of affairs, particularly if they will preserve their jobs once they go away.
In some ways in which dangerous state of affairs is already enhancing. San Francisco rents have gone from about 230% of the nationwide common in 2019 to 166% as of September, in accordance with Condo Record’s estimates. The town’s politics additionally seem like within the midst of a course change, with voters already tossing out a number of college board members and the district legal professional. However then there’s that semi-deserted downtown, and the havoc it threatens to unleash within the type of a industrial actual property crash and presumably a public transportation meltdown, too.
The truth that so many individuals in San Francisco and the remainder of the Bay Space may and might earn a living from home has been a blessing in some ways. The town and space had about 70% fewer Covid-19 deaths relative to inhabitants than the US as a complete, giving the realm a Covid mortality charge much like Canada’s and decrease than that of all however a few European nations. The expanded potential to earn a living from home additionally introduced extra flexibility for fogeys and others with care obligations, new alternatives for the disabled and fewer geographically constrained labor markets, amongst different advantages. WFH is okay, however coping with the fallout from the Bay Space’s excessive choice for it is not going to be simple.
Extra From Bloomberg Opinion:
• San Francisco’s Empty Practice Vehicles Spell Hassle: Justin Fox
• California Versus Florida, a Covid Reckoning: Justin Fox
• Make Solar Belt Cities Extra Like New York and LA: Conor Sen
This column doesn’t essentially mirror the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its homeowners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist protecting enterprise. A former editorial director of Harvard Enterprise Evaluate, he has written for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He’s writer of “The Fantasy of the Rational Market.”
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