This is downtown San Francisco.
Monday morning, 9 am. pic.twitter.com/feHhM7Rjl7
— Michelle Tandler ⚖️ (@michelletandler) February 7, 2022
Michelle Tandler writes:
For seven years (’11-13, ’15-20) I went downtown to work. I’ve worked in SOMA, Mid-Market, Financial District. I loved getting ready in the morning, packing up my work bag, and heading downtown to work.
Now I’m on day 500 of sitting home alone at my desk…
All my friends here in SF are working from home. Some go into their offices sometimes but they say it’s just too eerie. Three people in a space built for 60.
What is happening to all the local businesses? The taco trucks? The falafel shops? The salons? The after-work bars? The catering companies? The florists? The janitorial staff? The lunchtime restaurants? The bodegas? The shoe shiners? The liquor stores?
What is happening to all these shops & people? How are they staying in business? How are they making the rent?
How are the landlords staying afloat and paying their bills? Are the tech companies paying full rent? How are the REITs and commercial landlords balancing their books?
Something isn’t adding up. How is San Francisco solvent right now? Is it because we received so much federal aid?
Isn’t our economy reliant on downtown? Tourism? Conferences? A daily influx of office workers?
Something here is off…
Anyone?
Top pic: Michelle Tandler
I don’t suppose the thousands of homeless, the addicts openly shooting up in building doorways and having to play hop,skip and jump to avoid all the human excrement on the sidewalks help.
I was there just a few months before the pandemic and the city was already dying.
Democrat- controlled natch.
Mind you, Portland was even worse.
What a dump.
It’s what happens when you let loose the BLM defund the police mob.
Walter Mitty’s travelogue
Tell us all about Wellingtonbridge so
They all wear flowers in their hair.
There you go, told you.
Mad, isn’t it?
Is it close to Bastardstown?
SF is like Dublin to the power of 100 in terms of how a successful tech industry has driven the cost of living up to unsustainable levels.
If you follow the people who ply their tech trade there, they’re almost to a person certain not to return to their offices once their Covid restrictions are lifted.
This will obviously have a negative knock-on effect on businesses built around those people being forced to congregate in the one place together.
As for the commercial landlords and real estate bozos ? Fupp em.
I was in Dublin city centre one day last week and while it wasn’t deserted, it certainly hadn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels of bustle. So many shops boarded up around Grafton Street. I hope city atmosphere returns soon.
it feels very unloved, without all the people to distract you, it’s more obvious it’s in a state
Yes, it felt desolate.
It’s likely to be March before the majority of offices are opened back up and even then we may see many of them implement some form of hybrid approach that leaves them below pre-Covid occupancy levels.
Businesses that relied on everyone being stuck together in the same small place will have to adapt accordingly and this includes their landlords.
It’s likely to be a tough transition but it was always coming down the tracks, Covid just sped it up a little.
Sped it up by about a decade. Those ppl who left corporate life to open cafés may find themselves redundant unfortunately. Lots of places already closed. The cost of the useless (0.2% reduction in fatalities according to the John Hopkins Uni study) restrictions has yet to be counted. Society will pay this price for years to come. Us ratlickers warned about all of this but were sneered at and mocked for doing so.
There was always going to be an economic hit with locking down, if you were being mocked by anyone I’m sure it wasn’t for predicting that.
Pffft…
Clearly everything is fine in San Francisco.
What do we know about this “Michelle” woman anyway.
She’s obviously a far-right nut job.
I mean, she doesn’t even have her gender pronouns in her Twitter description for christ’s sake!
Dead giveaway – Trump Scuuuuuuuum.
Johnny ?!
Good impression eh?
Well we know her name and I don’t see PARODY anywhere in her profile so to be fair that puts her account two notches above those usually quoted here!
Afraid it was sarcasm.
But, yeah going in the stuff that here sometimes, it hard to tell ;)
The last 2 years have shown that the model of having everyone centralized in a city center isn’t needed, a great opportunity to completely change our approach to work and commuting, I’m sure local business has done a fine trade during this, but sure it’ll all go back to normal probably
I think we’ll see a hybrid approach as the new normal as all sides in the office dynamic benefit in a move away from the old model of forcing everyone together in the same place five days a week.
It may well be that this still leads to enough footfall to minimise the impact on businesses like shops/eateries but I doubt that will prove to be the case.
You might see more people make use of some services mind, for example if someone is only in the office twice a week they might be more likely to eat out both days ?
Run everything into the dirt, then offer a solution. Hegelian dialect. We’ve still 8 dystopic years to go before they install their new dystopian paradigm.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/shopping-i-cant-really-remember-what-that-is-or-how-differently-well-live-in-2030/
Daisy is looking forward to never having to experience human contact again. Nasty dirty humans with their viruses and bugs, ugh.
In your head
In your head
Zombie
Zombie
Zombie- heh heh heh
(written from the office)
In your head
In your head
man-date
man-date
man-date
(written from my Chinese phone on site)
If you’re looking for a man date, try grindr.
Mandates are your thing hun..
lol, he’s forgotten to count in the fact that people are filthy animals ” they use my living room when I’m not there ” hahaha
“San Francisco has been for most of its 150-year existence both a refuge and an anomaly. Soon it will be neither…”
So wrote Rebecca Solnit in the excellent and prescient Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism over twenty years ago.
It’s worth remembering that wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.
Haven’t read the book but very much agree with your closing paragraph.
Michelle slowly coming to the realisation that she isn’t the only person who has been working from home for the past 2 years
There’s something very cynical about this retro-romanticizing of all of the associated businesses that went along with office work that Michelle mentions that generally provided jobs that were 1) terribly paid and 2) don’t provide health insurance or any proper benefits, that makes me think Michelle isn’t being as honourable as she thinks she is here.
Covid exposed a long presumed (on employees behalves) reality of much office work, namely that a lot of people don’t need to be in the office as much as they were, or, at all in some cases. Allowing people to wfh if they so choose is better for the environment, better for peoples own physical and mental health, and better for the city’s built environment since the space can be optimized. Getting teary-eyed about ‘after work drinks’ doesn’t really counter any of that in a meaningful way. Of course there will be some small businesses that lose out, but change in cities happens. And acting like you’re upset about the service staff that you probably never cared about before strikes me as being a little…….something.
The idea that is being presented is that any small bit of life that was left in these places has been extinguished
They can be repurposed. Happens in cities all the time. They were an inefficient use of space in the first place, now maybe the quality of the urban space in these areas can be changed and improved with some effective planning.
You sound like the perfect mindless drone they want to inhabit the smart cities of the future.
I think that’s a bit presumptuous of you tbh. My position on it is that office workers are being held as if they are mindless drones in places where they don’t need to be. There’s a far more harmonious possibility for these spaces if they were reclaimed in a way that would be more democratic in its use of the downtown space, for instance housing, or public buildings. Corporations have grabbed hold of many cities downtown spaces and this is an opportunity to seize back those spaces from them, while also giving workers more control over how they live their lives. Surprised that you’d be opposed to that but then again you don’t seem like the most imaginative lol.
lol, ha ha.
Yeah I’m sure those corporations are just going to hand them back to ‘the people’. Bless
Mmmm I’m talking about proactive zoning changes not expecting a corporate giveaway. Jeez you gals are dull.