Local leaders are trying anything they can to keep San Francisco’s struggling downtown core afloat, including paying retired, unarmed police to keep an eye out for trouble, the Wall Street Journal reported. Homelessness, drug use, and nonviolent crimes like shoplifting and car thefts are commonplace in many parts of the neighborhood. Downtown San Francisco thrived during the 2010s in large part because of the growth of the tech industry. But those employees easily transitioned to remote work during the pandemic and the majority never came back to the office full time. Under pressure to cut costs last year, tech giants like Meta Platforms and Salesforce laid off workers and cut their real estate footprints in the city. Floors of many downtown office towers now sit empty. Those changes have collided with a series of intertwined problems that have been festering in San Francisco for years, including high housing costs, street homelessness, rampant property crime, the fentanyl crisis and a precipitous drop in public transit ridership since the pandemic. Downtown San Francisco now trails nearly every other major urban center in economic health. Its 25.7% office vacancy rate is close to 10 percentage points higher than the U.S. vacancy rate of 16.4%, according to commercial real-estate firm Colliers International. Ridership to downtown on Bay Area Rapid Transit trains is one-third its 2019 level. Retailers like Nordstrom and Banana Republic have announced in the past few months that they are closing their downtown San Francisco stores. The owner of the city’s biggest mall, located downtown, is handing it back to the lender rather than continue to make debt payments. Other parts of San Francisco are recovering faster from the pandemic downturn, with full restaurants and crowded stores. But downtown has long been the economic engine of this city of 808,000, generating three quarters of the local gross domestic product.
