San Francisco now at 35% office vacancy rate, highest ever recorded: data

I love SF but it's as bad as PDX these days. Both cities are falling apart in weird ways. You'll be in a restaurant and a deranged homeless fentanyl addict will walk in and start screaming at a waiter for food. Most of the customers pretend like it's not happening and some act like they're proud of it or snicker. The staff has to bribe junkies with food to get them to leave. Weirdos snatch stuff off of shelves in the grocery stores. The alarms go off and no one does anything. People in self checkout look scared. It's surreal.

Remote work is only part of the story. Having lived there for close to a decade, my take is that there is an accountability vacuum and rampant corruption among city leadership.<p>For example, the 10-B program has turned the SFPD into a legalized quasi-mafia. The only way to protect your business in SF is to hire off-duty cops at their overtime wage plus a 15% admin fee. The city has no hope of recovery while things like this continue to be tolerated.

San Francisco overbuilt in high-rise office buildings. There&#x27;s no good reason to concentrate workers that much. Work from home works in tech.<p>AI, reasonably enough, doesn&#x27;t need that many people. That&#x27;s kind of the point.<p>Are residential prices, both buy and rent, dropping yet?

I&#x27;m on the hunt for office space in the city, scoping out deals and such. The real numbers, according to folks I&#x27;ve spoken with on the ground, are much higher. Many units simply aren&#x27;t listed or are in a &quot;limbo&quot; state.<p>In a number of buildings vacancy rate is 70%+.<p>I&#x27;ve been asking shop and restaurant owners how their business is doing during lunch - down 70%-80%.<p>Buildings that were originally built at 70&#x2F;sqft are now selling at 40 or less. For real estate investors, this can be realized to a loss of 30-40%.<p>From what I can tell, many companies that remain in SF aren&#x27;t renting in FiDi but are choosing to rent out entire buildings in Hayes and the Mission.<p>It&#x27;s bleak, and FWIW, having just gone through YC, there aren&#x27;t going to be too many AI companies to &quot;save the day.&quot;<p>On the flip side, the city does seem cleaner and occasionally more vibrant. Market street is cleaner now than it was during the summer (might just be the rainy weather). The open air drug market has seemingly moved onto a side street and the &quot;we robbed a walgreens&quot; shops near the bart stations in the mission have also been cleaned out, for the most part.

Reading these comments is absolutely wild. I am living the exact opposite experience in Fort Worth, the fastest growing big city in the US. More than 60% of our net increase per year is from California. My son tells me more than half of some of his classes are people recently relocated from CA. Office space remains well filled even with remote work and they cannot seem to improve the roads or build new schools fast enough. About every 3-4 years it seems like they are constructing a new enormous high school here. Residential real estate was soaring here until they started building the dozens and dozens of giant apartment complexes.

Sounds like a good opportunity to rezone and modify some buildings to residential.

A friend is constantly bugging me about moving to SF. I understand it is tech central but the PR of the city is just really not great currently.

News like this remind me of the song &quot;Why&quot; by Chat Pile[1], which is almost always gives me a frisson. It&#x27;s a damn shame how slow the bureaucratic cogs turn, all the while real people are suffering.<p>---<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genius.com&#x2F;Chat-pile-why-lyrics" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;genius.com&#x2F;Chat-pile-why-lyrics</a>

It’s a scary place unlike Mumbai and Lima. SF is in the US a developed country Unlike Mumbai and other cities mentioned. For another, I was peeing my pants when I Witnessed the brutality of some homeless junkies In the streets. I recommend everyone to visit SF, trip advisor Does not have sections about what really happens in Restaurants. Imagine going to eat breakfast at a place Highly recommended by trip advisor. Entering Sitting and ordering breakfast, then realising The place is filled with homeless people Who occupy seats. This is fine had it not been For the stench of urine smell and the fear that Someone might have a gun and simply spray his Bullets

There is also fairly steady migration out of the city [0]. Looks to be related to COVID policy although there is a longer term trend.<p>If 10% of the population has left, there is a bias towards office workers leaving because they&#x27;d probably tend to have more money, WFH policies and people were building based on population increases ... 35% vacancy rate sounds pretty reasonable.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;san-francisco-population-and-migration" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sf.gov&#x2F;data&#x2F;san-francisco-population-and-migration</a>

Rookie numbers; we need those rates higher.

It has been years since I looked at their data. The blame is not entirely San Frans. It is in majority the California government&#x27;s policies which are crushing the city. though don&#x27;t think san fran municipal politicians are angels, they have some serious things to resolve as well.<p>I look at the politics and California fell into a Coleman Young trap. You as a politician see a problem like homelessness and you want to help but you don&#x27;t see the big picture of the consequences of certain policies. Which often are counter intuitive, but politicians never actually build &#x27;tests&#x27; to verify their decisions are actually helping as opposed to harming.<p>San Fran is 100% going to end up like Detroit.<p>To prevent this decline is basically impossible. Looking at California, their next election is in 2026, Gavin Newsom is out but he will be replaced by someone who will never in a million years make the decisions which must be made. They are ideologically opposed to them and therefore the collapse is certain.<p>Nor does anyone of that ideology want to ever hear what the fixes are, so how do you enact positive improvement? you don&#x27;t. You watch the city collapse and maybe decades later someone will be able to solve the problems.<p>What a terrible situation to watch the collapse happen and the humanity consequences. These homeless are your fellow human beings but you just step over them.

And this right here is why you keep hearing RTO pushes from C-Levels and corporate boards.<p>Those folks all have investments in commercial real estate that they would like to not become worthless. What&#x27;s wasting your employee&#x27;s life time on a commute compared to that?

Poop coverage is good, though.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openthebooks.com&#x2F;daily-mail-online-interactive-map-reveals-the-staggering-number-of-human-waste-on-san-franciscos-streets&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.openthebooks.com&#x2F;daily-mail-online-interactive-m...</a>