June 12, 2020
By Brendan Connellan, San Francisco, former commodities trader on Wall Street, current playwright working on his first novel. Originally published on Medium:
It’s been coming. For the five years I have lived here, people have shaken their heads and wondered how long San Francisco could keep getting away with it. We’ve all stepped in human feces and kicked syringes to the curb. It bonds us. We’ve all had to step to the side as a crazy meth head lurched towards us with intent. But, hey, stock prices kept going up and the sun continued to set over the Pacific Ocean and it’s been beautiful enough to somehow make the deal worthwhile. It’s a trade-off, we told ourselves. But then the glass shattered. It’s over.San Francisco is a city built upon lies, mostly told by the dwellers to themselves. It presents itself to the world as a progressive city, whatever that means at that particular moment to that particular person. The notion of “values” is tossed about like a feather in the wind, even though everybody means something different by it. It’s certainly comforting. It tells itself that it’s nothing like those cities in Texas and Florida and the whole wild world is the better for it. “I’m special, so special,” just as the Pretenders used to sing.To be clear, there is much that is fantastic about living in San Francisco — I like strong winds and I don’t like high temperatures — but it’s a slippery concoction, a three-card monte trick that flips your eye to the wrong hand. It worked until it didn’t work.Which is where we are right now. It’s suddenly no longer quite so easy to fool the dupes. We have the virus with us and it’s showing no sign of upping and leaving. It has changed everything. There has been a sudden but seemingly permanent change to the way that working is viewed. The concept of an office building has been thrown out the window. I hesitate to use the word “disrupted” but, for once, it might actually apply.Now that Facebook has given its imprimatur to its staff to work from anywhere, albeit at a cut rate, the gates have been flung open. The golden handcuffs have been snapped. This was the tape that San Francisco had long been using to glue its finances together but it’s been ripped away and the wound beneath is red and raw.The charms of Menlo Park and even of SOMA only go so far. Remove the necessity to live in an insanely overpriced box amidst a towering pile of take-out cartons and stained sweat pants and everybody turns into Wile E Coyote. Cloud of dust. I’m out. See ya.Once somebody clears the fence, they don’t come back. Ever. How many young tech workers have vaulted to the freedom? Pick a number. 20k? 40k? But no city can afford to give up its supply of 30-year-olds. Yes, they can be annoying. Yes the backwards baseball cap and bro this and bro that isn’t all that endearing. But they pay a lot of taxes and they eat from food trucks and go to gyms and they’re too young to suck up much in the way of health services.So there’s that. Call them useful idiots, call them whatever you like, you’re going to start missing them when they’re no longer clogging up your fields and hills, chugging Millers Lite from a solo cup.
Then there’s the homeless thing. I use the word “thing” because nobody seems to have made any headway in addressing the issue in the past decade despite billions being spent and everybody agreeing that it’s a “problem.”........MUCH MORE
And from Wolf Richter, May 31:
San Francisco, Epitome of the “Everything Bubble,” Faces Fiscal Chaos. Boom-and-Bust, Always. Now is the Bust
“I’ve stopped defining worst-case scenarios because they keep getting worse every week”: San Francisco’s controller.
The lockdowns have created a fiscal nightmare for states and cities. But few major cities have gotten slammed as hard as San Francisco, whose single most important industry – tourism, including travel for leisure, conventions, and business – has essentially shut down and whose tech and unicorn startup sector has been laying off people in large numbers — a trend that started last year.....MUCH MORE
Uber, one of the largest employers in San Francisco, has been laying off people starting in 2019. Numerous startups have shut down or trimmed down before the lockdowns happened. Charles Schwab has been shedding staff in the City for a while and last November announced that it would move its headquarters to Texas. Macy’s announced at the beginning of February that it would shut down its tech center, the headquarters of macys.com, and lay off 1,080 people who’d been engaged for years making its ecommerce business a success. So the writing was on the wall.
Then in February, tourism plunged as travelers from China disappeared and as conventions were cancelled. The city is aggressive in extracting money from tourists at every twist and turn, including hotel taxes and rental car taxes. Since the lockdowns and travel restrictions came into effect in mid-March, tourism has practically died. The hotel industry alone employed about 25,000 people in the City.
The lockdown has pushed the unemployment rate to 12% when the household survey data was taken in mid-April, the worst level in recorded history, and much higher by now.
San Francisco, a city of about 883,000 people, has a gigantic budget of $12.2 billion in the fiscal year that is now ending, up a gigantic 11% from a year earlier, and up a gigantic 85% from ten years ago (2009/2010). San Francisco has been swimming in money. It was a boom town with booming business, booming tourism, booming population, booming jobs, booming home prices, booming homeless crisis, booming everything....
That does seem to be a large budget and I'm curious if, because the city and county of San Francisco are politically merged entities, if that budget is for both city and county as well.
But not curious enough to look it up. It's a large number either way.
Here's the essence of the problem in a one-line intro to a 2014 post:
San Francisco Real Estate As A Leading Indicator Of the World Economy
S.F. and the Valley are dependent on the world shoveling a lot of money Bay-way....
