I don't know about "verge of collapse", but the city needs to take a long hard look at itself and ask "why do people live in cities", and one reason, other than work, which, no two ways about it, is moving out of the city in various fashions for various reasons (I'm looking at you, prop-C and stripe); one reason people want to live in a city is for the nightlife, where it's a city's density and not the suburbs that's necessary to support it in any meaningful fashion. Why does San Jose not have the same
vibrant nightlife? Why does San Francisco make this giant sucking sound for all culture in the bay area? (That's no longer as true as it once was; so much has been pushed into Easy Bay simply due to housing prices in the city.) It's a large collection of suburbia and not actually a city.
This past week, San Francisco took steps to utterly destroy the nightlife scene, by sending subpoenas to all the after-hours venues to cease and desist. Like the Prohibition, this only serves to drive the scene (further) underground, causing it to be more dangerous because the parties aren't going to stop happening, they're going to happen further out from the heart of the city, into being less regulated, and further away from the hospitals which will result in deaths from that whole fentanyl thing.
Without the party scene (which rivals major cities of the world under the metric "can I party from Thursday til Tuesday"), both above and below ground, there's little reason for young adults who enjoy that sort of thing to live in this tiny city now that work remote is viable in many industries.
The industry forced to be in-person is healthcare, and UCSF is a major medical institution in the US and the world, with a major infectious disease center that played an important role in the recent pandemic, so the city has that going for it, but it's only the frontlines of that industry that need to be in the city. Much of that industry is administrators and patient navigators and all that kind of stuff, which happens on the phone, but with VOIP and the Internet, can go fully remote. Genentech (and co), the other major part of that industry, are in South San Francisco, which is technically a different city, despite its name, and far away enough from San Francisco proper that you need a car to get there (or work at Genentech and take their buses).
