![]() The Creative ClassĪs it happens, Yelp was inspired by a flu. It proceeded along the sleepy streets where she used to work - past coffee-shops and dim sum restaurants, past the glass towers and the boarded-up storefronts - and sped across the Golden Gate Bridge toward Marin. Cerros-Mercado watched her Uber pull up outside a downtown Whole Foods so she could start her commute to the suburbs. Mixt opened the Mill Valley location this year as part of a push to generate more business in residential neighborhoods and suburbs. Many of the former office workers who live there have yet to return downtown en masse, but their purchases over the past three years have shown that they still want downtown perks and services like a freshly prepared lunch. During a recent lunch at a Mixt location in the financial district, the company’s chief executive, Leslie Silverglide, pointed to the line of badge-holding workers and competition for outdoor tables. Business groups and city leaders hope to recast the urban core as a more residential neighborhood built around people as well as businesses but leave out that office rents would probably have to plunge for those plans to be viable.īelow the surface of spin is a downtown that is trying to adapt to what amounts to a three-day workweek. Brokers have tried to counter that narrative by talking up a “flight to quality” in which companies upgrade to higher-end space. The city’s chief economist, Ted Egan, has warned about a looming loss of tax revenue as vacancies pile up. The same thing is happening in downtowns.” “It disrupts the whole ecosystem and produces a lot of chaos. ![]() “Imagine a forest where an entire species suddenly disappears,” said Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies urban real estate. This has made the San Francisco area something of a test case in the multibillion-dollar question of what the nation’s central business districts will look like when an increased amount of business is done at home. “I feel like I’ve seen the future,” he said.ĭecisions like that, played out across thousands of remote and hybrid work arrangements, have forced office owners and the businesses that rely on them to figure out what’s next. Occupancy of the city’s offices is roughly 7 percentage points below that of those in the average major American city, according to Kastle, the building security firm. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy, while the vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019. Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. “People would get off the BART, buy coffee, buy this, buy that. “This area was always packed with people,” recalled Maria Cerros-Mercado, a Mixt manager who built her career in food service downtown. As downtowns have emptied out, their once-symbiotic relationship is coming undone. Businesses like Yelp took root in the high-energy, high-density city chains like Mixt flourished alongside them as their workers ventured out for lunch. Their virtuous cycle of nearness, of new ideas becoming new companies, feeding other ideas that become other companies, was the template for urban growth. Mixt was a booming business serving lunchtime salads to the workers who traveled on electrified trains and skateboards to their jobs in downtown cubicles. ![]() Yelp was an idea that became billions of dollars in value on the internet. Yelp and Mixt had little more than proximity in common, which at that time was enough. The nearby salad store was part of a fast-growing chain called Mixt. Decades later, it served as the home of the local search company Yelp. The 26-story building, an Art Deco landmark that was once the tallest in the city, began its life as the headquarters for the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company. Take the five-minute jaunt from the office building at 140 New Montgomery Street to a line-out-the-door salad shop nearby. ![]() There was a time three years ago when a walk through downtown San Francisco was a picture of what it meant for a city to be economically successful. The lanyard-wearing visitors who crowded the sidewalks when a big conference was in town. The columns of headphone-equipped tech workers rushing in and out of train stations.
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