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Saving San Francisco’s Downtown Will Fail Without This One Missing Detail
Did you ever imagine that the term “doom spiral” would become part of our lexicon? If you live in San Francisco, you’ve heard it, right along with open-air drug dealing, the theft of catalytic converters, small business break-ins, fentanyl death rates, and police response times.
We all know the reason for this sudden fixation: the plight of San Francisco’s once bustling downtown. From Fox News and CNN to the New York Times, San Francisco’s deserted office buildings, filthy, needle- and feces-filled streets, and unhoused thousands are the topic of almost weekly dissertations of dismay, disgust, and disaffection.
Whatever the media source, the conclusions are always the same. The pandemic drained the city of office workers, whose absence undercut the profits of large and small businesses, creating a cascade of closures and bankruptcies. The result is a glut of abandoned business spaces that might never be filled again. Toss in the fear of crime and the city’s mind-numbing misery of the mentally ill and drug-addled tent dwellers and the end of San Francisco sounds near.
But lost in the media equation is a telling and contradictory detail.
Many of the city’s 30-plus neighborhoods are not only surviving, they’re thriving. Indeed, the…
